Microsoft Windows Azure during 30 days FREE

Microsoft is offering Windows Azure platform 30 day free pass for anyone who want to try their Cloud environment. If you are Delphi or C++Builder developer and want to see how Windows Azure platform works, this is the chance. Delphi XE and C++Builder XE shipped a set of components to work with Windows Azure accounts. Windows Azure (not to be confused with SQL Azure) allows you to store and manage Blobs, Queues of messages, and Tables of data on the Azure cloud.

You just need to access this link, select the country and use the promo code MPR001 (valid for United States 🙂 ), and of course you have to use Delphi XE or C++Builder XE, download the trial is free and valid for 30 days as well.

The available Azure VCL components are:

• TAzureTableManagement – Window Azure Tables; these provide scalable structured storage. Think NOSQL type tables where each entry stored in a table can have a different set of properties made up of different types, such as string or int.
• TAzureQueueManagement – unlike blobs and tables, which are used to store data, queues serve another purpose, a persistent asynchronous messaging, where each message is up to 8kb long
• TAzureBlobManagement – Windows Azure Blob Storage; Blob storage is unstructured storage as it is used for storing large pieces of data such as images, video, documents, etc inside a defined container.

There is also a component called TAzureConnectionString, which takes into consideration information for connecting to your Windows Azure account. All these components use the Windows Azure REST API to manage the features that come with each of these services.

Azure components are useful for any developer who wants to make an application that manages a Windows Azure account. If used programmatically, the application itself could use information from the end-user’s Azure account.

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