Setting up your computer for Media Services development

This section contains general prerequisites for Media Services development using the Media Services SDK for .NET. It also shows developers how to create a Visual Studio application for Media Services SDK development.

Prerequisites

• A Media Services account in a new or existing Azure subscription. See the topic How to Create a Media Services Account.
• Operating Systems: Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, or Windows 8.
• .NET Framework 4.
• Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2012, or Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (Professional, Premium, Ultimate, or Express).
• Use the windowsazure.mediaservices Nuget package to install Azure SDK for .NET. The following section shows how to useNuget to install the Azure SDK.

To set up your Media Services account, use the Azure Management Portal (recommended). See the topic How to Create a Media Services Account. After creating your account in the Management Portal, you are ready to set up your computer for Media Services development.

Creating an Application in Visual Studio

This section shows you how to create a project in Visual Studio and set it up for Media Services development. In this case the project is a C# Windows console application, but the same setup steps shown here apply to other types of projects you can create for Media Services applications (for example, a Windows Forms application or an ASP.NET Web application).

1. Create a new C# Console Application in Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2012 or Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Enter theName, Location, and Solution name, and then click OK.
2. Make sure to set the target framework to .NET Framework 4. To do this, click the right mouse button on the Visual Studio project and select Properties. In the Application tab, set .NET Framework 4 for the target framework.
3. Add a reference to System.Configuration assembly. To add a reference to System.Configuration, in Solution Explorer, right-click the References node and select Add Reference.... In the Manage References dialog, selectSystem.Configuration and click OK.
4. Use the windowsazure.mediaservices Nuget package to add references to Azure SDK for .NET. (all other dependent assemblies will be installed as well).
   To add references using Nuget, do the following. In Visual Studio Main Menu, select TOOLS -> Library Package Manager-> Package Manager Console. In the console window type Install-Package windowsazure.mediaservices and press Enter.
5. Overwrite the existing using statements at the beginning of the Program.cs file with the following code.

   using System;
   using System.Linq;
   using System.Configuration;
   using System.IO;
   using System.Text;
   using System.Threading;
   using System.Threading.Tasks;
   using System.Collections.Generic;
   using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.MediaServices.Client;

At this point, you are ready to start developing a Media Services application.

Nearly everything you do in Media Services programming requires a reference to the server context object. The server context gives you programmatic access to all Media Services programming objects.

To get a reference to the server context, create a new instance of the context type as in the following code example. Pass your Media Services account name and account key (which you obtained during the account setup process) to the constructor.

// Create and cache the Media Services credentials in a static class variable.
_cachedCredentials = new MediaServicesCredentials(
                _mediaServicesAccountName,
                _mediaServicesAccountKey);

// Use the cached credentials to create CloudMediaContext.
_context = new CloudMediaContext(_cachedCredentials);

It is often useful to define a module-level variable of type CloudMediaContext to hold a reference to the server context. For more information, see Connecting to Media Services with the Media Services SDK for .NET.

The rest of the code examples in this topic use a variable called _context to refer to the server context.