I've been working more on the demos for VSLive Las Vegas and, one thing I wanted was a good, simple class for interfacing with Azure Table Storage (ATS) and, ultimately, all of the Azure tools. Mike Amundsen had a good start with a tool he built but it didn't do some of the things I was looking for so I started modifying it. Many of the changes I made were to make it easier for teaching with but one of the major changes I wanted to make was to be able to handle bulk commands.

"How hard can this be", I asked myself. If you look at the format that ATS wants, you have to provide the PartitionKey and RowKey in the XML block of data. So, I figured, just pull out those two values and you can easily do bulk POST/PUT/MERGE/DELETE.  True, ATS uses name spaces but I'm already working with those to pull data out of the returned XML when I get a list of tables. So, I took the set of data I had used with Mike's console app and formatted it to XML. Copied and pasted it into an XML block that had the appropriate schemas defined and got something like this:

http://finseldemos.table.core.windows.net/" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

  website
  04AF565A-157E-4679-BE90-C15AED3D01DF
  Happy Blues
  HappyBlues.ReluctantDBA.com
  W1


  CalendarEntry
  1
  New Years Day
 
   2008-01-01T00:00:00"
 
 
  W1

I got this by creating an XML document in VS2005 and pasting in my XML data, never noticing the subtle error. At first I thought the problem was within my code because this:

XmlDocument xdoc = new XmlDocument();
xdoc.LoadXml(docData );
//Instantiate an XmlNamespaceManager object.
System.Xml.XmlNamespaceManager xmlnsManager = new System.Xml.XmlNamespaceManager(xdoc.NameTable);

//Add the namespaces used in books.xml to the XmlNamespaceManager.
xmlnsManager.AddNamespace("d", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices");
xmlnsManager.AddNamespace("m", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata");
XmlNodeList nodes = xdoc.SelectNodes("//m:properties", xmlnsManager);

created this:

http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata">http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices">websitehttp://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices">04AF565A-157E-4679-BE90-C15AED3D01DFhttp://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices">Happy Blueshttp://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices">HappyBlues.ReluctantDBA.comhttp://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices">W1

Which, as you can see, added the namespaces to each element. And it was throwing errors when presented to ATS. So, I stripped out the namespaces using string.Replace and still got the error. But only on the CalendarEntry partition keys. The website was fine. So I dug deeper and found the problem was that every date had an extraneous double quote after it:

   2008-01-01T00:00:00"
 

I have no idea why. But I fixed it and the tool handles bulk commands. Except that pasting the entire set of calendar data takes too long and causes it to time out, so tomorrow I'll create a Worker Role to process bulk uploads. And, probably early next week,  I'll be releasing code, not just snippets.

That's enough for today. But check out the on-line version at http://cloudquotes.cloudapp.net/AzureLookup.aspx