Azure Project - Need guidance

I am working on a small introductory Azure project where I need to distribute documents among the worker roles in a load 开发者_JAVA百科 balanced manner. I am a beginner in both ASP .NET and azure. I would like some ideas on how to do this with azure/resources that will help me do this.

I would put the documents into Azure blob storage an put a work item in a queue. The workers would pull an entry from the queue and delete it while they process the document. Just keep in mind that if a worker fails, you'll want some way to re-queue the work. You could do this by reknewing the lock on the queue item before deleting it, or by using another store, say a table entry that you can check perioically and use to requeue failed items.

I'd recommend that you start by reading up on Azure Queue Storage (Queue Services API). By inserting messages into a queue, worker roles can take work from that queue as they are able. The size of an entry on a queue is limited to 8KB, so I'd recommend that you put that actual document in SQL Azure (if your application is using it) or Azure BLOB Storage (Blob Storage API) and post a message on the queue that contains a reference to the stored document.

A good learning resource to start with is the Developing Application for the Cloud guide and a sample app from Microsoft patterns & practices.