title: SQL Azure File Storage
body: <p>I have recently started looking into using Azure but I'm having some issues getting my head around file storage. From what I've read images need to be stored as blobs and there's no way to store them directly on the file system. Unfortunately this will require a lot of modifications to our CMS which gets all its files from the file system.</p>
  
  <p>When retrieving images to display on a page what is the best practice? I have played around with a few tutorials and have created a simple application which stores images and then allows you to retrieve them to display in the browser (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/Azue7StepsBlob.aspx) however this retrieves an image when a button is pressed, writing out the blob stream using Image.FromStream. If you have an page with say 100 images that would require 100 separate calls to the database, is this the correct way to store and retrieve files or am I completely missing something? Any help is greatly appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Pat</p>