Windows Azure Pack Management Portal User Interface Extensions Overview

Applies To: Windows Azure Pack

The Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server management portal for administrators and the management portal for tenants both have extensible user interfaces which can be used to display data and perform operations. This is usually in the format of a list of items, which can be “drilled-into” to show details of each item. A set of commands, such as deletion and creation, can be applied to each list item. The Windows Azure Pack Developers Kit provides a sample “Hello World” implementation of a custom resource provider that includes a sample management portal for administrators extension and a sample management portal for tenants extension. For more information, see Windows Azure Pack Developer Kit Samples.

Extensions are written using the following technologies, which the reader is assumed to be familiar with:

• JavaScript (including jQuery)

• HTML/CSS

• XML

• C#

• ASP.NET

• MVC Pattern (Specifically ASP.NET MVC 4)

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2012

Extension Structure

Each Extension comes in two parts: a client-side part (written using JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc.) and a server-side part, written using ASP.NET MVC in C#.

The client-side interacts with the user, displaying data and receiving commands. It sends and receives data from the server-side. The server-side exposes a set of Rest API endpoints that the client-side calls through the Service Management API layer. In this way, the server-side acts as a channel from the client-side through to the backend (Service Management API). This “man-in-the-middle” is required because of the security model of modern web browsers, which only allows AJAX calls back to the domain that the web site itself came from, in this case the management portal for administrators or the management portal for tenants.

See Also

Windows Azure Pack Management Portal User Interface Extensions