Want to support my.fancy.app.can.serve.up.anything.mybrand.com in your Windows Azure application? Just use wildcard CNAMEs and a little code glue!
I was meeting with a small company today that has developed a SaaS solution around task and project management. It’s a very cool application, and as is the fashion these days, uses subdomains to determine the end user’s company as requests come to the browser. So, if I were to sign up for the application, my home url would be http://adamhoffman.getdonedone.com, whereas if you signed up (and had the unlikely name of Bill Ion), your home page would be http://billion.getdonedone.com. This is handled in ASP.NET application code on their Win2K8 servers hosted at Rackspace. The question quickly became «hey, we can do something similar in Azure, right?»
The answer is yes, and no, and yes. Let me explain.