There's a plethora of development tools and frameworks available today. But Microsoft Azure provides a scalable and manageable platform for customers to easily deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot their cloud-based applications. Its seamless integration and inherent support for open source software make it an obvious choice for building cloud-based applications and services.This book will take you through a full application development architecture. You'll start by creating, customizing, and extending HTTP-based web APIs and move on to host your web API with ASP.NET. Then, using a range of different features, you'll learn how to connect your applications with Microsoft Azure Service Bus. You'll learn more advanced topics such as creating Hybrid Services, Azure Storage data services, and the Entity Framework; you'll learn to create and manipulate data services, too. Finally, you'll leverage the full power of SQL database administration in Azure and gain more insights into managing your data.