While working with ASP.NET web sites/projects we normally keep our database connection string in Web.config. However, while working in Azure, it's a good idea to keep this configuration in the service configuration itself as it will be easier to change the connection string once you have deployed your azure service and this will prevent the need of redeployment.

Also, while working with Azure services it would be easier to keep database configuration in the service configuration file for the simple fact that you will not need to keep on changing the database server name or credentials whiles working locally and while deploying to azure.

Because, we can have different service configuration files for different environments such as local, cloud or even for test or staging, we can simply add a key in the service definition file (csdef) and have values for each environment in each of the service configuration file (cscfg).

This is much more helpful in cases where you are using membership provider for forms authentication, authorization and/or session management, such as using ASP.NET Universal Membership provider for SQL Azure as it requires you to have the connection string in the web.config file, by default it is named DefaultConnection.

To achieve this you can remove the section from web.config and add key for your database connection in your csdef file and values in cscfg. Then it is simply to add the section at run time to your web.config in the Application_Start event, whilst reading the values from the cscfg file.

So, first add a key in your csdef file and its setting in the cscfg file as below, for example:

Few days back I was thinking of creating an Image Gallery of the collection of photos I have. Although, there are multiple options available over the internet that you can download and get ready on the go; most of them involves saving the images on your own server. But what I was more concerned was to just have a display only image in my web site to showcase my photos to the word. And, I wanted to make use of one of my social network account – Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Flickr to host the images.

All the major social network sites provide API to get the photos from an album. First, I tried to make use of Facebook, but it’s access token gets expired in few hours and you need to get a new token. This normally involves a user to login to your application first, but I wanted a permanent access token or a way to refresh the access token without user’s intervention. I think it is possible to achieve it somehow, I tried my hand on Picasa (Google+) and it was much easier.

Using Picasa Web Albums Data API  , you can query any public album and get the photos. You need two things for this – Album Id and User Name. In case you need to show photos from one of your private albums, you need to authenticate yourself using the API with your Google account credentials.

Let’s go step by step and see how to achieve this. To achieve this I am using GoogleData API for .NET  and Galleriffic  jquery  plugin for the image library.

Step 1: Design your gallery.

First step is to create your image gallery base. I am using the Galleriffic jquery plugin and for this there should be few style sheet files (css) and javascript files need to be included in the project.

First, go to this link http://www.twospy.com/galleriffic/ and download the plugin from there. You should copy the css and js folders into your ASP.Net website/application project. Above link showcases 5 examples and I am using the second one (Thumbnail rollover effects and slideshow crossfades), as it is closest to the image gallery looks and feel I wanted.

CSS file used for example 2 is galleriffic-2.css. You can exclude other css files named such as galleriffic-1.css, galleriffic-3.css etc, but you will need other remaining css and image files.

After you are done with including css and js folders, next step is to include them in you page. In this example, I am using Default.aspx to be my image gallery page, but it can be anything for you such as Gallery.aspx. In the head tag include the following tags:

Next, include the following script in your page:

Next step is to have necessary div tags as detailed in the documentation for Galleriffic (http://www.twospy.com/galleriffic/). The galleriffic plugin shows each image’s thumbnail as a list item in an HTML unordered list (ul tag). As we will be getting our images at run time only via call to Picasa API we need to have the li items generated from within code. Therefore, I have added a div (divSlider) and marked it to runat=”server” so that I can assign a value to its innerHTML with constructed html.

Within you form tag in your aspx include following:

Next, we will make a call to Picasa API, get the images within a specific album and construct an unordered list html and assign this html to divSlider.

Step 2: Query the API