The fun of a building a new web site with Azure

The lead developer of the Bleenq product started programming at age 7 on a Zenith Odyssey. He's worked on dozens of commercial, customer facing web applications. As we began development, the choice was made to adopt Microsoft's MVC 3 framework atop Microsoft's Azure Platform. Trading off ... deep quality for rapid development, the Microsoft ASP.NET Membership Provider chosen to handle authentication (but will be extended with an STS to provide for SAML authentication of the product suite). We are keen on the upcoming 1.5 release of thinktecture's Starter STS with Azure support.

But as we move forward, we've run into a slight hiccup. It's rather convenient to leverage Entity Framework to back the models for MVC, but Azure Tables doesn't work with EF, so far as we can tell. We did intend to use WCF ODATA Services, which Tables provides via their RESTful API, but a Linq to Tables capability would be useful (rather than going to a Azure SQL Data Services). Any suggestions would be appreciated.

The Bleenq Team

Launching soon

Bleenq is a unique, useful, and rather frenetic new sort of tool. Launching in February, 2011, to become moderately successful and generate small amount of revenue via advertisements which will be funneled into the education funds for the two children of the developer / geek behind it.