Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Understanding Web Roles and Web Configuration

A key concept in Windows Azure development is the role, which is typically a single component running in the Azure environment and built in managed code. Roles can be of two types: web roles and worker roles. A Web role is generally an ASP.NET Web application, like the case of our sample scenario. As you may remember from Figure 40.2, additional Web roles are available for WCF and FastCGI applications. You may instead think of worker roles as of services running behind the scenes, like in the case of Windows services, in the cloud. An Azure project can have multiple roles and multiple instances of one role; moreover, you can configure roles as required. When you create new Cloud projects, the new ...