The Windows Azure SDK’s pretty good, but implementation decisions in sections of it can make extending or monitoring what it’s up to tricky. Recently I wanted just to track the number of reads and writes that were taking place on a set of tables per request to identify opportunities for caching.

Given I was using a repository pattern, I was able to proxy the CloudTable object upon which queries are executed. While the proxy doesn’t inherit from CloudTable (not least because it’s sealed), with only a couple of lines replaced all code that called methods upon an instance of CloudTable were quickly calling the equivalent methods on my proxy. It’s not perfect, but now that it’s in place I can do a number of fun things like track table storage operation counts, or implement access control per table.

To save anyone else having to write it, it’s presented below: