I discovered by accident this morning that someone has already considered the issue of "a file system in the cloud" and made this announcement a year ago:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2014/05/12/introducing-microsoft-azure-file-service.aspx I see there's a NuGet <http://www.nuget.org/packages/WindowsAzure.Storage> package for Azure Files but I haven't tried it. As a small technical exercise yesterday I created a class derived from System.IO.Stream which worked on openstack CloudFile objects. It completely works, but I stage the whole object in a MemoryStream for reading and writing, which is a clumsy hack, and there is an irritating delay as the object is initially loaded and on each flush/close. The Azure blob APIs support working with byte ranges, so you could potentially write a smarter more efficient stream, but it's not worth my effort. *Greg K*
