Bringing Native C/C+ code up to the Cloud (Windows Azure)

If you have attended MIX 2009, you may already know that with Windows Azure Tools and SDK March 2009 CTP it is now possible to bring native C/C++ code onto the Azure Services cloud. If you are like me who was not at MIX 2009, you may find a compilation of links to interesting videos in this post. In addition, Cloud computing team has several posts on their blog that outlines this new CTP and answers basic questions around VS tools support for Azure services. Jim Nakashima has posted a detailed walkthrough for integrating native code into Web or Worker Roles. However at this point, you still have to use P/Invoke to integrate your native code with managed code that implements the rest of web and worker roles. But I think it should be possible to completely skip P/Invoke if you use Windows Web Services API and this is something I am planning to investigate in coming weeks.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 27, 2009
    Would be great! Do you have any news about this?

  • Anonymous
    October 02, 2009
    This is very good news.  Do you know if it is now possible to do managed to native interop on the cloud without P/Invoke. For instance, I want to have a Manged C++ wrapper around my unmanaged C++ or unmanaged C code.  It is very difficult to do with P/Invoke which is why I have chosen the managed wrapper approach.  Would it be possible to put something like this up on the cloud ? If so the applications could be tremendous.

  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2009
    To John,    I agree that using C++/CLI based wrapper would be a better than using P/Invoke. And I think it is possible, however I have not tried. It is a good question to ask on Windows Azure forum, http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsazure/threads.