Smart Contract Development with Solidity and Ethereum

Building Smart Contracts with the Azure Blockchain

Akhil Mittal

• Publisher: BPB Publications
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9789388511919
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming
• Index: Computer Science

Create, develop and deploy a Smart Contract with ease Key Features

• Familiarize yourself with Blockchain terminology and its concepts
• Understand and implement the Cryptography basic principles
• Understand the life cycle of an Ethereum Transaction
• Explore and work with Dapps on Ethereum
• A practical guide that will teach you to create and deploy Smart Contracts with Solidity
• 
  Description
  The book covers the fundamentals of Blockchain in detail and shows how to create a Smart Contract with ease. This book is both for novices and advanced readers who want to revisit the Smart Contract development process. The book starts by introduces Blockchain, its terminology, its workflow, and cryptographic principles. You will get familiar with the basics of Ethereum and some Distributed apps available on Ethereum. Furthermore, you will learn to set-up Ethereum Blockchain on Azure. Then you will learn how to create, develop, and deploy a smart contract on Ethereum. Towards the end, you will understand what Blockchain uses and advantages in the real-world scenario. What you will learn
  
• Get familiar with the basics of Blockchain and Bitcoin
• Setup a development environment for programming Smart Contracts
• Learn how to set up an Ethereum Blockchain on Azure
• Understand the basics of Solidity, an object-oriented programming language for writing smart contracts
• Learn how to test and deploy a smart contract
• 
  Who this book is for
  This book is for Developers, Architects, and Software/Technology Enthusiasts who are interested in Blockchain, Ethereum, and Smart Contracts. It is also for Developers who want to build a Blockchain-based DApps on Ethereum Network. It is for everyone who is learning Solidity and is looking to create and integrate Blockchain into their project. Table of Contents
  Section 1: What is Blockchain and how does it work?
  1. Blockchain – The Concept
  2. Blockchain – Cryptographic Principles Section 2: Ethereum and DAAPS
  1. Distributed Applications
  2. Setting up Ethereum Blockchain on Azure Section 3: Smart Contracts Development
  1. Setting up an Environment for Smart Contracts Development
  2. Programming Smart Contracts Section 4: Blockchain in Real World
  1. Blockchain-Offerings and Usages
  About the Author
  Akhil Mittal lives in Noida, India. He is two times Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) firstly awarded in 2016 continued in 2017 in Visual Studio and Technologies category, C# Corner MVP since 2013, Code Project MVP since 2014, a blogger, author and likes to write/read technical articles, blogs, and books. Akhil actively contributes his technical articles on CodeTeddy (www.codeteddy.com)He works as a Sr. Consultant with Magic EdTech (www.magicedtech.com) which is recognized as a global leader in delivering end to end learning solutions.He has an experience of more than 12 years in developing, designing, architecting enterprises level applications primarily in Microsoft Technologies. He has diverse experience in working on cutting edge technologies that include Microsoft Stack, AI, Machine Learning, Blockchain and Cloud computing. Akhil is an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) in Web Applications and Dot Net Framework.
  

Section - III

Smart Contracts Development

In the last section, we learned about setting up Ethereum blockchain on Microsoft Azure using a consortium leader. Time for some development now. Before we move on to smart contracts and their development, it’s essential to set up a development environment as a pre-requisite. This section will solely focus on setting up the development environment for smart contract development. In the next section, we’ll see what smart contracts are and how we can develop those.

Image credit: https://pixabay.com

Figure 3.0.1

Tools and development environment

We’ll use a list of tools to set up our development environment before we proceed with actual development. I’ll use a fresh window installation on Microsoft Azure. You can follow the steps to set up a VM on Azure in the last section before we start. We’ll install the Chrome browser on the new machine, followed by MetaMask that is the chrome plugin, which will help us in the authentication. Microsoft provides Visual Studio code, that is free, and we can use that as a development IDE for our smart contract’s development. We’ll install the NuGet Package Manager (NPM) and Chocolatey that is also a package manager, to get other tools and packages needed for development. We’ll use Git along with NPM and Windows build tools for building/compiling the code. We’ll use an in-memory test server known as Test RPC to test the application and lastly Truffle. We’ll explore more about Truffle when we start development.

CHAPTER 1

Setting up an Environment for Smart Contracts Development

Figure 3.1.1

Azure

Azure is a cloud platform from Microsoft and provides numerous resources in context on cloud computing. One of the resources is a virtual machine (VM), i.e., a fully functional machine of your choice with the choice of your configurations and operating system could be created within seconds with just a few clicks. You can access the machine remotely from anywhere with your secure credentials and do whatever you want, for example, hosting your website, developing applications, creating production or test environment for your software, and many more. Let’s see step by step how we can achieve that.

Structure

In this chapter we will discuss the following topics

• Virtual machine setup on Azure
• Getting the environment ready for smart contract development

Objectives

After studying this unit, you should be able to

• Setup a development environment for programming smart contracts.

Azure account setup

Follow the steps in the last section to set-up an Azure account if it is not already done.

Virtual machine setup on Azure

1. Once on the dashboard, click on the Virtual machines link on the dashboard, and a right panel would open where you see all your VM’s. Since we are creating new and we do not have existing ones, so it would be blank. Click on Create virtual machine:

   

   Figure 3.1.2
2. Once you click on Create virtual machine, you’ll get to see all the operating systems and solution templates that Azure provides to create a machine. You can choose to have Windows or Linux operating system based on requirements, but be careful about costs involved:

   

   Figure 3.1.3
3. Since this section is for learning how to create a virtual machine, I’ll choose the Windows Client machine with minimal machine configurations, and one can choose based on requirements and need. So, choose Windows Client as shown in the following screenshot:

   

   Figure 3.1.4
4. You’ll get the window of the license agreement and legal terms. Read that carefully and press the Create button:

   

   Figure 3.1.5
5. After clicking on Create, you’ll be asked to fill some basic requirements, as shown in the following screenshot. Give the name as per your choice; for example., I gave it AKHILPC, leave VM disk type as SSD, or choose as per your need. Provide a username and password you would need when you connect remotely with the machine. Keep the username and password safe and secure. Choose the subscription, if you have a paid one, choose that else choose the trial subscription that you got. You must provide a Resource group. You can create a new or use an existing one. The resource group gives you a logical separation for all your Azure resources. Since I have an existing resource group created, I am using that. Choose Location, click on confirmation checkbox and click OK:

   

   Figure 3.1.6
6. Once you click OK, you get to see the second section to choose the size of the machine where you see the list of RAMs, Hard disk size, SKU, and zones. Each configuration has a cost associated with it, so choose as per your need and budget. For training/tutorial purposes, I am choosing the first one that has the minimum cost as shown in the following screenshot:

   

   Figure 3.1.7
7. In the third s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Acknowledgement
• Preface
• Errata
• Table of Contents
• Section - I: What is Blockchain and How does it work?
• Section - II: Ethereum and DApps
• Section - III: Smart Contracts Development
• Section - IV: Blockchain in Real World