I am developing an Azure application, part of which involves users browsing an online filesystem. TO do this, I am trying to use the Windows Azure drive, but I can't figure out how to access it from client side, or how to make it accessible on the server side.
At the moment, I only know how to make the drive:
CloudStorageAccount devStorage = CloudStorageAccount.DevelopmentStorageAccount;
CloudBlobClient client = devStorage.CreateCloudBlobClient();
CloudBlobContainer container = new CloudBlobContainer("teacher", client);
CloudDrive.InitializeCache(localCache.RootPath,
localCache.MaximumSizeInMegabytes);
CloudDrive drive = new CloudDrive(container.GetPageBlobReference("drive1").Uri, devStorage.Credentials);
drive.Create(50);
I am using C# as my development language.
All help is greatly appreciated!
I'm not sure I understand your question properly, but it sounds like you want multiple client applications - presumably on machines that are not on Azure - to access your Azure drive?
Unfortunately, Azure drives can only be accessed from Azure web/worker or VM role instances.
There are couple of things you need to understand with Windows Azure Cloud Drive:
Cloud drives are actual Page Blobs which are stored on Windows Azure Blob storage and mount as a drive (you will get a drive letter depend on your machine drive statistics) in a machine where you can provide Windows Azure Run time environment.
Programmatic it is very easy to mount a cloud drive in your code as you showed in your example however one thing is missed that is to be sure to have Windows Azure RunTime environment where this code can run.
I have written a utility to mount azure drive within Windows Azure VM (Web, Worker or VM Role) located here:
http://mountvhdazurevm.codeplex.com/
You can run above tool directly in Windows Azure VM and can also this the exact same code in your Compute Emulator (Windows Azure Development Fabric) so the bottom line is as long as you can provide Windows Azure Runtime environment, you can mount a Page blob VHD drive.
I have seen several cases where someone asked me to mount a Windows Azure Page Blob as drive in local machine (client and server, anywhere) and the actual hurdle was to bring Windows Azure Run time in local environment because it is not available. In some cases a few person went ahead and tries to use Windows Azure SDK to have Windows Azure runtime made
available in their desktop, created a dummy web role and then mount the VHD which was mounted in local machine and a drive letter was made available as well. I am not sure about such kind of solution because this is not Windows Azure compute emulator is designed.
Hope this description provide you some guideline.
I've written a WebDAV Server which runs on an Azure Website which will allow clients, including Windows Explorer and Office to connect to Azure Storage. It uses a combination of Table and Blob Storage to store the file structure and files. I've tested it with Windows Explorer and Word 2013. Although this isn't a clouddrive solution it's still using Azure Storage as a backend and it's accessible from WebDAV clients. You might find it useful..
https://github.com/ichivers/AzureDAV
One additional point to the existing answers. You can always download the blob backing your Cloud Drive and mount it on a local system. The blob is really just a VHD. However, the download time isn't going to trivial unless the drive is small.
Erick
