Building a Simple “About.me” Clone in Windows Azure

[UPDATE 2012-09-14] The app is no longer available, but the code can still be found at http://cdn.blog.smarx.com/files/aboutme_source.zip.

A few weeks ago, I built a sample app http://aboutme.cloudapp.net that I used as a demo in a talk for the Dr. Dobb’s “Programming for the Cloud: Getting Started” virtual event. That pre-recorded talk went live today, and I believe you can still watch the talk on-demand.

For regular readers of my blog, the talk is probably a bit basic, but the app is yet another example of that common pattern of a web role front-end serving up web pages and a worker role back-end doing asynchronous work. The full source code is linked from the bottom of the http://aboutme.cloudapp.net page, so feel free to check it out.

Note that this is pretty much the most obvious use case ever for the CDN, but I didn’t use it. That was to keep the example as simple as possible for people brand new to the platform.

I don’t promise to keep the app running for very long, so don’t get too attached to your sweet aboutme.cloudapp.net URL. (Mine’s http://aboutme.cloudapp.net/smarx.)