What you should know

- [Instructor] In this course we will cover storage for developers in Azure, specifically in Azure Storage account. So it will help if you've previously seen the Azure Portal and especially the Azure Portal subscription concept. So once you're logged into the Azure Portal with a subscription, the first element that we would typically navigate into is a resource group and within that resource group, we will create a storage account. I'll show you how to create a storage account and create your first resource group, but it would help if you talked to your subscription administrator or take a tour of the Azure Portal before you get started with this course.

We will use Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition. It is a free download, but it will help if you're familiar navigating through Visual Studio. And in particular, we will use the Visual Studio Test utility, so the built-in test runner and we'll of course use a Visual Studio solution. In the code itself, we are going to use the dotnet core 2 version of the runtime and that means that there will be some parts of the API that will be unavailable that you might expect if you're a Windows developer. Now, with dotnet core 2 and the library we're going to use for accessing Azure Storage, most of the calls will be over the network and so will require asynchronous calls.

We don't typically want to block the calling thread when we go out over the network, when we go out to the Cloud storage. And so we will use the Async keywords, Async and await keywords a lot. There is an online training course about the Async and await keywords, so feel free to study that one first and then revisit this course. In Visual Studio we'll use NuGet to add quite a few libraries, so MSTest should already be there if you create a test project the way I'll show you. I'll use the Nfluent checker just to make the language easier to read when we check the test outcomes.

And also we'll add, of course, the Azure Storage library from the online gallery.