Tonight, at the Microsoft office (see this announcement for more details: http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-NET-User-Group/events/21982451/?a=cr1p_grp&rv=cr1p ) I’m going to be talking about what it is really like to build a full service application using Microsoft’s Windows Azure Cloud Computing Platform.
For those that don’t know what I’m going to talk about, here is a prelude.
First, I’m going to go through about 10 slides talking briefly about what is azure. That is, Azure is basically a family of hosted services that Microsoft provides in the cloud. I’m going to talk about:
Then, I’m going to got through and actually show all the things I do on a daily basis while I’m doing my development work. That includes using their development environment (called the dev fabric) as well as how I deploy and test. The product I developed can be found at http://connectionroad.com if you are interested. It’s basically Microsoft SyncToy to Cloud Storage.
Bring your questions! This could be very fun.
OK, I think this is the longest post title I’ve ever made, but if you understand it, you’ll know why it needs to be so long. I discovered this totally by accident. I would never ever have pressed F11 (step into) from a client side proxy and expect to get into anything but a bunch of ugly machine generated proxy code (especially with Azure). To my total surprise, I landed right inside my WCF service as if I had started the Windows Azure Developer fabric in debug mode and set a break point.
So, I’ll step through the process an show screen shots on the outside chance I was dreaming and can’t reproduce it. If I can, now I will have proof so I can do it again. Sorry for the work in progress code you will see. The point here is really the debugger and not the code I’m showing so try and ignore that.
OK, here we go.
Let’s assume you have a completely configured azure web role that is hosting a simple WCF service. When you start that web role and point at the service, you’ll get something like this: (just a note that I started the app fabric by deploying directly from Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 with the start/run. I am using a debug profile but am NOT running in debug mode. If I do run the app fabric in debug mode, this does not work.
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