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I am fairly new with MS Azure and developing remote apps.

Have read and viewed some learning stuff.

I use c# as my developing language, and as I have understood, its fairly simple to develop a windows application to run on an Azure server as remote app, which users anywhere on earth can run from their pc as if it was installed locally on their pc's. But in reality, it is more like, an RDP hiding behind the app.

The problem is that a database will be running on every users pc instead on the azure server. It is suppose to be like that by design, don't ask me why.

We tend to use "ms access" for the local DB, since everyone already have MS Office.

Anyway, back to the problem. What I am wondering is, how can I make my remote application on azure server communicate with the database installed locally on user(s) PC?

I have drawn a simple figure to explain what I mean.

http://snag.gy/ybyed.jpg

Mana
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2 Answers2

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Back in the days when people used Modems to connect their PC's to the tubes, this would be theoretically possible (although maybe not a good idea). Nowadays, very very few PC's are connected directly to Internet.

In an Office, a PC will be connected via the company intranet to an external gateway and the PC will not be visible to anyone outside that gateway. The same is true at home, where the gateway is the router.

It would be possible with a lot of work to allow external access (from Azure) to the individual PC, but it would not be easy to set up. Further, you would need to write a piece of software to run on the PC which will listen on the correct Port for calls from Azure, will then run the appropriate SQL queries, and return the data to Azure. You might as well install SQL Server full edition on each PC.

Even if you do that, no security professional is going to let you actually open up the ports and firewalls to the internet; it's a lot of work doing that and you might as well just install random viruses on the PC - you'll get to the same point but faster and with less wasted time.

TL;DR: Not easy without a significant investment, and your PC will probably get trashed if you do.

simon at rcl
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This is actually possible by the magic of RDP protocol :)

Azure RemoteApp supports redirection for Windows machines as documented here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/remoteapp-redirection/

So, once you create an Azure RemoteApp collection, you can download the PowerShell cmdlets, enter your subscription ID and then you can enable drive redirection. This results in the local disk being mapped on the remote machine. You can try it out and see if performance is good enough.

The other alternative is that the database lives in an Azure storage account, as documented here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/remoteapp-anyapp/ .

You should NEVER store data on the Azure RemoteApp local machine.

/cd

cdavid
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