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Estimation tool written on MS Azure cloud platform

Submitted by Admin on Wed, 03/02/2010 - 22:47
We are converting our internal project estimation model spreadsheet into an application running on the latest cloud platform - Microsoft Azure. We hope to explore how this brand new technology works so we can help our customers use it. In the process we aim to refine our internal estimation tools and potentially allow our customers to access those very same best practice tools for their own use.
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Comments

Azure set up

Submitted by iain.mackenzie on Fri, 08/01/2010 - 08:41.
We have set up the Azure accounts using our MSDN subscription and made a test "Hello World" deployment.

Blobs

Submitted by iain.mackenzie on Tue, 12/01/2010 - 08:46.
We're looking at using the Azure BLOB support for storing the revision history of estimates. The only thing I see so far is that it can be quite time consuming to initially create a container or BLOB. One would definitely want this in its own thread. The next step is to work out how the SQL Azure storage works so that we can store the reference & login data in tables. I’m accessing our SQL server instance in the cloud using the standard Management Studio tool. This is really new stuff! It’s only possible to do this with the SQL Server 2008 R2 November Community Technology Preview (CTP).

Not as easy

Submitted by iain.mackenzie on Tue, 12/01/2010 - 09:13.
Not as easy as one might think. All the wizards for creating users, schemas, tables etc don’t work yet against Azure. The only thing that seems to work is the direct T-SQL interface. Hence, it’s a bit like a graphical SQL+ tool.

Table access

Submitted by iain.mackenzie on Wed, 13/01/2010 - 09:15.
I’m now able to access the SQL Azure tables from my test application in Visual studio. There are some restrictions but SQL Azure looks a good option if one was building a database application from scratch. I’ve been investigating a few issues around SQL Azure. One interesting issue is that it’s not possible to use the select into clause, which makes the writing of table value functions tricky. I have found a work around however, using clustered indexes.

UI design

Submitted by iain.mackenzie on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 09:23.
We're using the jqGrid control from trirand.net to create the main estimation grid. This control is based on jQuery and allows hierarchies which is nice - we're using it to collect tasks together - e.g. design and development tasks - under a single parent task. The rest of the tabbed UI will use the Microsoft Ajax Control Toolkit. The Tab Container looks promising so far. If all works according to my plan, there should be 3 aspx pages, with the last page having 5 tab panes (Estimate, Timeline, Summary, Control and Instructions). I currently have four of the five tabs created and a jqGrid table within one of the tabs.

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