Azure Cloud on Ulitzer

As mentioned in my previous blog post, you don't get full designer support on SQL Azure within SQL Server Management Studio. In addition, you don't get designer support for LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework, either. So what do you do if you want to take advantage of these awesome object mapping tools but the designers don't work directly against the cloud?

Conveniently enough, if you follow the tips in the previous blog post, you would have already created a local copy of your SQL Azure database. The "trick" (not really a trick at all, just not immediately obvious) is to point your EF or LINQ to SQL Visual Studio projects at your local database. This will give these mappers the schema and relationship information they need in order to create the appropriate conceptual<->relational mappings.

For LINQ to SQL, all you need to do is replace the connection string that it adds to your app.Config file with the connection string supplied by the sql.azure.com portal. Remember to include your password in this connection string because the portal copies a version of this string to your clipboard with the password of myPassword. At this point you should also be thinking to yourself, "Wow, I just put a cleartext password in a .config file. It's a really good thing that this code isn't going to sit on someone's desktop and will be protected in the cloud."

With Entity Framework, the connection string is a little more complicated. There's some entity stuff in there that points to the various model definition files in the project and then there's an embedded connection string. Replace the embedded connection string (take care to maintain the escaping of nested quotes, etc) with the one the SQL Azure portal supplied and change the password to reflect the right password.

At this point you should have been able to generate a model from your local database and then change the connection string so that the actual data comes from the cloud database. It might seem a little inconvenient but it isn't really all that bad. It just adds a few extra steps to your SDLC when you need to change the schema of a live application.

The feeling I got when I ran my first LINQ to Entities query against a cloud-based SQL Server database was overwhelming. Sure I love new technology as much as the next guy, but the possibilities that are being opened for developers by Windows Azure and cloud computing in general are so numerous it's hard to contain myself.

This is a damn good time to be a developer.