Azure

You may get the following error when deploying your web application from Visual Studio to Windows Azure using WebDeploy: Remote agent could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target computer. An unsupported response was received. The response header 'MSDeploy.Response' was '' but 'v1' was expected. The request was aborted: The request was canceled. COM object that has been separated from its underlying RCW cannot be used.

I found very good blog post by Andy Cross’ Blog where he describes how to deploy multiple web sites in a single Windows Azure web role. I like the idea but there are some things that should be understood and done differently if you plan to use same web role for totally different web applications that you want to run on your Windows Azure instance. In this posting I will show you how to deploy independent web applications to Windows Azure instance using single web role.

When running some of your Windows Azure applications when storage emulator is not configured you may get the following error: "Windows Azure Tools: Failed to initialize Windows Azure storage emulator. Unable to start Development Storage. Failed to start Storage Emulator: the SQL Server instance ‘localhost\SQLExpress’ could not be found. Please configure the SQL Server instance for Storage Emulator using the ‘DSInit’ utility in the Windows Azure SDK.". Here’s how to solve this problem.

In my last posting about AppFabric Labs Access Control Service I described how to get your ASP.NET MVC application to work with ACS. In this posting I will dig deeper into tokens and claims and provide you with some helper methods that you may find useful when authenticating users using AppFabric ACS. Also I will explain you little dirty secret of Windows Live ID. (more…)

I had Windows Azure training this week and I tried out how easy or hard it is to get Access Control Service to work with my ASP.NET MVC 3 application. It is easy now but it was not very easy to get there. In this posting I will describe you what I did to get ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to work with Access Control Service (ACS). I will show you also some code you may find useful.

I created web.config transform that changes NHibernate configuration for Windows Azure projects. When building publishing package I get the following warning: "No element in the source document matches '/configuration/hibernate-configuration'" and transformed configuration doesn’t contain expected changes. In this posting I will show you how to solve this problem. (more…)

My previous posting about Windows Azure introduced how to access web role instances using Remote Desktop. In this posting I will show you how your web applications are stored in virtual server where instance is running and how to debug and redeploy your applications quickly. (more…)

My last posting about cloud covered new features of Windows Azure. One of the new features available is Remote Desktop access to Windows Azure role instances. In this posting I will show you how to get connected to Windows Azure web role using Remote Desktop.

Currently it is not possible to make changes to web.config file that is hosted on Windows Azure. If you want to change web.config you have to deploy your application again. If you want to be able to modify configuration you must use web role settings. In this blog post I will show you how to write configuration wrapper class that detects runtime environment and reads settings based on this knowledge.

My last posting described how to read and write files located in Windows Azure cloud storage. In this posting I will show you how to do almost same thing using PHP. We will use Windows Azure SDK for PHP. The purpose of this example is to show you how simple it is to use Windows Azure storage services in your PHP applications.