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Last modified on November 28, 2011 19:57
The Windows Azure Platform promises to radically reduce the costs and risks of managing the IT infrastructure that supports your application. Hardware, networking, foundational software, staffing, security, availability, capacity, redundancy... these become Microsoft’s problems, not yours.
That’s a fair exchange, but why pay more than you have to?
DevForce promises to save you money in three areas...
- Development
- Demands a multi-tier architecture. DevForce provides you with a powerful platform for writing cross-client and multi-tier .NET applications. You write and test your application in the local development environment familiar to you today … with no Azure costs. Save thousands of dollars and avoid debugging in the cloud.
- Operations
- With DevForce technologies – client-side caching, client-side LINQ, offline operation, and local storage – you will reduce your consumption of the number of Azure virtual machine (VM) instances, VM “size”, volume of data transfers, and storage… all factors in the calculation of your Azure cost.
- Maintenance
- Application development is iterative. Your application will evolve. DevForce is built for iterative development; we minimize the friction of database schema and conceptual model changes. Also, the range and flexibility of testing options means you can ensure high quality “for free” in your development environment and pay a lower tax when the time comes to test in the cloud.
Whitepaper
Prism Explorer demo
Watch as Ward and Kim re-deploy our Prism Explorer sample application to Azure, although Prism Explorer was not designed for Azure. They’ll walk you through the four essential steps to getting it there:
- Run on the local "Developer Fabric", talking to local SQL Server.
- Run on the "Dev Fabric" but now with SQL Azure data.
- Run with both the app and the data in Azure in a staging area.
- Swap the working Azure app from stage to production.
It's easy and the finished product illustrates many of the DevForce features you'll find in your application.
Notably, DevForce addresses concerns that aren’t addressed by Prism and Microsoft’s Composite Application Guidance.
- Occasional connectivity - DevForce supports disconnected functionality and saves the cache to isolated storage.
- Data Access/Synchronization - Use the DevForce EntityManager with a Repository Pattern to manage n-tier data access.
- Asynchronous communication - DevForce handle the details of using multiple threads and merging the results into the UI.
- Application performance - The DevForce client-side cache saves trips to the server and makes your application incredibly responsive.