Console App to Interact with Azure Blobs

Azure blobs can be interacted with through Visual Studio. Here we will go through an example of interacting with a blob in a C# console app.

First, create a new console app:

This will create:

We will add 2 NuGet packages:

• WindowsAzure.Storage
• Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Configuration Manager

And:

In the app.settings, add the key below, with the value of your storage account:

<appSettings>
   <add key="StorageConnectionString" value="yourconnection" /> 
</appSettings>

To get the value, go to your storage account in Azure and add the connection string information, for example:

Now in the code, add the directives:

using Microsoft.WindowsAzure;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Blob;

And add the code:

[sourcecode langauage=”csharp”] using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

using Microsoft.WindowsAzure;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Blob;

namespace Carl.AzureBlob
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
try
{
CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(
Microsoft.Azure.CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("StorageConnectionString"));

CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient();
CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference("newcontainerthroughcode");

Console.WriteLine("Creating new container");
container.CreateIfNotExists();
Console.WriteLine("Complete");
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
}
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
[/sourcecode]

This produces:

And the container is created in the portal:

From here, you can perform several different blob operations, including:

• Upload a blob to a container
• Listing blobs in containers
• Downloading blobs
• Deleting blobs
• Write to an append blob such as a log