I have been using Azure Data Factory now for quite a while. When I first saw it, it was difficult to maintain and code. The best I could say about it at that point was that it “has promise”. Well I am happy to report that using it today is definitely a whole load easier. This post is a very quick look at how designing your ADF flows has become clean and intuitive. I am particularly pleased to see the addition of a VS plugin. In order to use Visual Studio you will currently need VS2013 and the Azure SDK for .Net 2.7. Once installed you will be able to create ADF solutions
Creating an empty solution
Now you can go ahead and create your entities.
Linked Services
Tables
Pipelines
Now the thing about the pipeline is that it is by far the most complicated entity in ADF. What I really like is that the ADF team have given us a head start in getting the syntax right by creating placeholders for us. Below I have added a Hive pipeline to my project.
Summary
Azure Data Factory is a great PaaS offering and now that you can design your solutions in Visual Studio I think the take up of it will increase dramatically.
Talking About Data 