Thursday, October 21, 2010

Creating a Windows Azure Appfabric Labs Account

1) Go to Windows AppFabric Labs Portal Web page and sign into Portal using your Live ID (sign up for a Live ID Account if you dont already have one first, this can be done on the same page)

https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/

2) The first time you sign in you will be asked to create a Project. On the My Projects Page click create a project link. This takes you to the Sign Up page, enter a project name and click OK. You will then be taken to your new Project page, which lists your Project Id, subscription Id which will be 0 since the Labs Portal is FREE to use.

3) Next create a service namespace under your new Project. You will need to create namespaces for your app's, more than one app can have the same namespace. Use Projects to group together common namespaces. On your Project page click Add Service Namespace link, it is on the bottom right of your project page.



On the Create New Service Namespace page enter a name and then click Validate Name, your name has to be validated to ensure it is globally unique. In the select a region section you have only 1 choice - USA. Next Click Create to create the new namespace.


You will then be taken back to Your Project page, at the bottom of this page you will see your new service namespace added to the project.


In the next blog I will go through how to run the Echo code sample C# version , which can be found in the AppFabricSamples\ServiceBus\Getting Started folder of the WinAzureAppFabricSDKSamplesV1C# download. The samples are configured to run using Windows Azure AppFabric Web Portal (subscription accounts) and NOT for the FREE Windows AppFabric Labs Portal . In order to successfully run Echo, using the FREE Labs Portal, you'll need to do some configuration work in your own environment and in the Access Control Service section of your Windows AppFabric Labs Portal Account.