I have been working with Azure Storage Tables for many years now. During this time, I have learned many good practices and have also experienced many bad practices. So, over the past few months, I decided to write a document so I can share my experience with others. I call this document Jeffrey Richter’s Guide to Working with Azure Storage Tables via C# and other .NET Languages. You can download my guide from the Wintellect website and you can learn more about Azure Tables by watching my video on the WintellectNOW website. My Guide has been reviewed and is endorsed by Microsoft’s own Azure Storage team. The guide has several purposes:
- Help developers improve their mental model with respect to Azure Tables
- Discuss the good and bad parts of Microsoft’s .NET Azure Storage client library
- Show good patterns and practices related to Azure Tables
Introduce my own (free) .NET Azure Storage client library which increases programmer productivity. The library offers many features to assist developers working with Azure Storage. For example, it offers blob logging features and a periodic elector which uses blob leases to elect a single VM to perform a periodic task (like backup storage data or to produce a weekly report). For tables, it offers many features including backup/restore, optimistic concurrency, easy filter construction, simple segmented result processing, property replacer/changer, pattern for extensible entity schemas, collection to/from property serializer.
I hope users of Azure Storage find my Guide and its accompanying class library useful.