A new book from Packt Enterprise, “Microsoft (News - Alert) Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration,” allows programmers to build effective applications with both platforms. The book was written by David Burela, an experienced .NET (News - Alert) developer.

“Integrating Silverlight and Windows Azure is always tough without proper guidance,” stated Packt. “This book provides a step by step tutorial that displays how to attain the required tool-set in order to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Azure.”

Based in Redmond, WA, Microsoft Silverlight is the software giant’s answer to Adobe’s (News - Alert) Flash, a tool for developing Web-based applications with rich multimedia content. Windows Azure is a cloud-based services operating system for hosting and developing its respective applications. Silverlight allows developers to integrate their applications with Windows Azure, the subject of the book.

“After reading the Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration book,” Packt’s press release said, “developers will learn the basics that make up the Azure platform and understand Azure storage. It will help them improve the development of business applications using various frameworks like WCF RIA Services. It also covers essential topics enabling readers to partition a relational database into shards in order to improve scalability and performance.”

The book can be purchased from Packt’s Web site. The e-book edition, available on a variety of formats including Amazon Kindle and PDF, sells for $30.59, while the print edition sells for $53.99. Customers can order both for $59.39.

The book covers Windows Azure, hosting Silverlight applications in Windows Azure, the use of Silverlight Queues in Azure, how to access Azure blob storage from Silverlight, how to store data in Azure Table Storage with Silverlight, relational data with SQL Azure and Entity Framework, RIA Services and SQL Azure, using OData with Silverlight, considerations for Web-based applications, authenticating applications and improving performance with Azure AppFabric caching.

Packt has also published books on Microsoft Exchange and the open source VOiP platform Asterisk.