Last Friday at Conchango’s latest community day (something we have every 6 weeks where all of our 250 consultants down tools and get together back at base) I ran a cloud computing demo where I showed off some of the capabilities of SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). The demo used a .Net console application to create a new SSDS Authority (i.e. a data service hosted by Microsoft) and then fill it with some data. I then demoed Mike Amundsen’s fledgling SSDS Provisioning tool that is free to use at http://amundsen.com/examples/ssds/data-client/. It was all pretty simple but that’s kind of the point about SSDS – it really is very simple to start using this stuff.
There seemed to be genuine interest from my colleagues as the slide deck and demo, which was intended to run for about 15 minutes, took up our full hour slot due to questions and ensuing debate. I have uploaded the code to Codeplex hosted under a project called ACE Creator (the ACE is an acronym meaning Authority, Container, Entity – fundamental concepts of SSDS). You can see it here: http://www.codeplex.com/acecreator and the code is available for download. Here is the project description:
An adapted version of the sample code provided with the SSDS (beta) SDK. The samples provided with the SDK have seperate projects for creating authorities, containers and entities. ACE Creator amalgamates that code into a single project that creates an authority, a container and an entity for demo purposes.
ACE Creator also fixes some bugs that appear in the SDK code.
The code in this project was tested against the interim release of SSDS (beta) that was released on 24th July 2008.
You will need to sign-up to use the service by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/sql/dataservices/default.mspx
Here is the RSS feed that you can subscribe to to be informed of changes to the project: http://www.codeplex.com/acecreator/Project/ProjectRss.aspx. Oh and by the way, its a Visual Studio 2008 project. Here are some screenshots:
Prompting the user for the authority and container name
Viewing the created entity in a browser at http://demoauthority.data.beta.mssds.com/v1/container1/BookID
Hope that proves useful. Comments are welcome.
-Jamie