So one of the cool things you can do in Windows Azure storage is just enter the URL of a public Blob in your browser and retrieve it via an HTTP GET. This makes sense as in REST, a GET and a URI will return the data at the URI. In the case of an Azure Blob this means the bytes stored returned with the appropriate content type in the header.

You can also do thinks like retrieve a list of the Blobs in a given container like this:

It would be nice to be able to do the same with Azure Table storage. A quick glance at the SDK leads one to think it’s as simple as

http://myaccount.table.core.windows.net/Tables

But this will fail on both the Cloud Storage and Local Storage. This is because

“The request must include the Authorization header and the Date header, as specified in Authentication Schemes.”

So that sounds simple enough- I just cracked open Fiddler thinking I’d just punch in the headers. But, these headers are actually fairly complex. Well, ms-x-Date is simple enough, but, the Authentication headers involve both canonicalization and signing of the request.

I’d love to give you a simple solution so you can just browse tables, but, I haven’t got one. I hope that at least this saves you from spending too much time trying.