Exploring worker roles

To begin with, we're going to create a boiler-plate worker role in Visual Studio, run it locally, then publish it, and run it on Azure. It's possible to create a cloud service in the portal, then publish a project to it or upload a package.

It's also possible to automatically provision a cloud service during the first publish from Visual Studio, which is the approach we'll take.

Creating a worker role

We'll create the role using the following procedure:

1. I've created a blank solution called AzureBakery.Production, which is the start of our production business unit solution for the worker role, production data model, WPF management application, and Web API service.

2. To create a worker role, right-click on the solution root in Visual Studio and go to Add | New Project, then select Windows Azure Cloud Service under the Cloud templates, choose Name, and click on OK:

   

3. Select Worker Role (notice that there is a template for a Worker Role with Service Bus Queue option, which is a...