I saw an internal discussion that had some information I thought would be useful to share. It’s about how some of the methods in RoleEntryPoint get called.
In the case of a Worker Role, the RoleEntryPoint class is the class you derive to write your code. When you create a new Worker Role project in Visual Studio, you’ll see that the project contains one code file and in that code file there is a class called WorkerRole that derives from RoleEntryPoint.
Worker Role Call Order:
WaWorkerHost process is started.
For step 1 above, Windows Azure only loads one assembly and takes the first class that derives from RoleEntryPoint that it finds. Visual Studio knows which assembly implements RoleEntryPoint based on the reference to the project under the Roles node.
That reference is a project to project reference that is passed through to packaging. This puts a file called __entrypoint.txt in the Service Package than contains the name of the assembly that has a class that derives from RoleEntryPoint.
In the case of a Web role, a RoleEntryPoint derived class is actually not required. That said, in the Visual Studio web role templates, we add a file called WebRole.cs that includes an implementation of OnStart() specifically to add template code to show you how to startup the the Diagnostic Monitor and to show you how to hook into configuration setting changes. (i.e. when a new serviceconfiguration.cscfg file is uploaded to the cloud)
Web Role Call Order:
You can implement a RoleEntryPoint.Run() method in a WebRole, it’ll get called on a new foreground thread that executes in parallel with RoleEntryPoint.OnStart().
Thing is, if you exit from the RoleEntryPoint.Run() method, (the default implementation just waits on an infinite Thread.Sleep()) your role is going to recycle – so just be aware of that consequence, almost certainly not what you want in a web role (the role will be offline while it starts up again).
This weekend I had someone email me asking me to blog about where to find the usage info used for billing because they were having a hard time finding it and figured others were having difficulty as well.
Coincidentally, I saw an internal thread this morning where someone was asking the very same question so... Erik, I believe you are correct, a post will probably be helpful for folks.
To find your usage info, go to:
https://mocp.microsoftonline.com (From the Developer Portal, you can click on the "Billing" link in the upper right hand corner.
I'm going to walk through getting to the actual bill because I know some people get this far but get lost in some of these pages.
Choose your country / region and hit continue.
Then click “Sign in now” or “Sign in” and sign in.
Followed by “View my bills”, then click on “View Online Bill/Invoice”
From the “Online Bill” page you can select the Billing Period and click on one of the Usage Charge links in the middle of the page. This will bring you to a page similar to the following:
Essentially, everything you want to know about your bill will be there. Note that this doesn’t update in real time and that there is a lag.
Also note that you need to delete your deployment to stop the clock on compute hours.
[Update 2/11/2010 - The intent of this post was to help you get to the right place where you can explore around. If you are looking for more information on Data Transfer usage, SQL Azure and other usage charge pages, please see this post by Roger Jennings for more details.]
Hope this helps.
This post has 2 main parts. The first part is an update to a post I wrote back in February 2009 about using an existing ASP.NET Web Application as Web Role and rolls in information from this post and this post. The second part is about migrating an existing database running on SQL Express and ASP.NET providers to SQL Azure.
I’ll start with the NerdDinner sample, so make sure you have ASP.NET MVC installed. Although I used VS 2008 for the screen shots, this walkthrough is compatible with VS 2010.
I’ve opened the solution in Visual Studio and removed the test project to keep things simple.
The first thing I need to do is make this Web Application project a Web Role.
I can do that one of two ways:
1) Since I have the NerdDinner project open, I can add a Windows Azure Cloud Service to the solution.
Select “Windows Azure Cloud Service” and hit “OK”
Hit “OK” again, because we don’t need to add any Roles to this Cloud Service.
Right click on the “Roles” node in the Cloud Service project and select “Add | Web Role Project in solution…”
Select the NerdDinner project. Note that all of the Web Application projects in the solution will show up in this list.
2) The other option would have been to create a new Cloud Service project and add the NerdDinner project to it using Solution | Add | Existing Project… then following the step of Add | Web Role Project in solution…
We now have the following:
Before I get to what it will take to hit F5 and make the NerdDinner application run as a Web Role, let’s discuss the differences between a Web Role and an ASP.NET Web Application.
There are 4 differences and they are:
Additionally, today we only support targeting .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Stay tuned for .NET 4 support.
Except for #4, the other 3 differences aren’t strictly required.
Chances are, at a minimum you are going to want to reference Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime and Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, start the Diagnostic Monitor and add the trace listener so that you can write logs and gather other diagnostic information to diagnose issues or monitor the health of your application.
If you use Windows Azure Storage, you are going to want to use the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient library which provides a .NET interface to Windows Azure Storage.
For the sake of this article, I’m just going to make sure that System.Web.Mvc has Copy Local set to true.
Let’s try hitting F5 and seeing what we get.
The application runs… almost… if I click on “View Upcoming Dinners” I get an error.
The connectionstrings.config file that is referenced in the web.config is not being found.
<connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionStrings.config" />
I need to make sure that this file is added to the Service Package. I can do so by adding it to the NerdDinner project (right click on the NerdDinner project in Solution Explorer and select Add | Existing Item…)
Now set the Build Action to Content which should be done by default but I want to call it out as a way to ensure that given files in the project get added to the Service Package – you may a need to do this with some of your other files.
Now, I hit F5 again, and everything works. But will it work in the cloud?
The answer is no – NerdDinner has a NerdDinner.mdf file it uses for data and it makes use of ASP.NET providers – both of these rely on SQL Express, which I have on my local machine but are not available in the cloud VMs (even if it was, you would need to have a story that works across multiple instances).
I have a decision to make. I can use SQL Azure or I can rewrite the application to use Windows Azure Storage. Since it is easy to do a search for “NerdDinner Azure” and find examples of the latter I will do the former – the point of this article is also to primarily focus on using the an existing project in a Windows Azure Cloud Service.
In the real world, you’ll want to consider your data and compare the long term costs / effort / requirements to make the right decision.
The key app I need to migrate the data to SQL Azure is the SQL Server Management Studio R2 CTP that supports SQL Azure. Links are here. This post may also be helpful.
I also need to have a database setup on SQL Azure. Go to sql.azure.com and sign in. Create databases called NerdDinnerDB and aspprovidersdb.
Make sure to set your firewall settings such that you can the machine where your app is running in the development fabric has access. For example: this is not recommended, but makes development on multiple machines easy.
The steps to migrate the data are now:
Let’s start with NerdDinner.MDF.
Open SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2 and connect to .\SQLExpress.
Right click on Databases, and select “Attach…”
Click the Add… button and browse to the location of the NerdDinner.MDF file then click OK.
Now right click on the NerdDinner database that was just added, select Tasks | Generate Scripts…
This will bring you to the Generate and Publish Scripts wizard. Click Next twice (selecting the default of the whole database) then click Advanced on the “Set Scripting Options” page.
Scroll down to “Script for the database engine type” and select “SQL Azure Database”.
You also have an option to choose whether to script the schema only, the schema and data or the data only. For the purposes of this walkthrough, you can choose the schema only or the schema and data.
Finish the wizard saving the script to file then open the file in SSMS.
Now we want to connect to SQL Azure. Do so by right clicking the Connect button in Object Explorer and selecting “Database Engine”.
For server name put the name you got from the SQL Azure portal, including the full domain name. For example in the SQL Azure portal, the server name is listed as: zky996mdy7.database.windows.net
Correspondingly, enter this Server name in the Connect to Server dialog in SSMS:
The login is the Administrator username and the password setup in the SQL Azure portal. Note that @zky996mdy7 is appended to the username.
Click on Options >> select the “Connection Properties” tab and enter NerdDinnerDB for “Connect to database”.
This puts the SQL Azure database in the Object Explorer in SSMS.
Right click on the SQL Azure database and select “New Query”. This will open a SQL Query window.
Copy and paste in the database script the SQL Query window and hit Execute. In the bottom status area of SSMS you should see that the query executed successfull and that it was against your SQL Azure NerdDinnerDB database.
Now we need to setup the ASP Providers. This requires using provider scripts that we created for SQL Azure. See this post for the scripts and more info.
Download the scripts and extract.
Open the InstallCommon.SQL script in SSMS. Since we were last connected to the NerdDinnerDB and we now want to connect to the aspprovidersDB you created above in the SQL Azure portal, right click in the query window and select Connection | Disconnect.
Follow that by right clicking in the SQL Query window and selecting Connection | Connect, entering the aspprovidersDB as the database to connect to in the options.
Run the script, open InstallMembership.SQL and installprofile.SQL and run those scripts as well. Just be sure to always be running these scripts against aspprovidersdb.
Now we need to change the connection strings in the connectionstrings.config file we added to the NerdDinner project. There is a connection string for the NerdDinner database and a connection string for the ASP Providers.
Here’s an example to follow, replacing the server, user ID and Password appropriately.
<connectionStrings> <add name="ApplicationServices" connectionString="Server=tcp:zky996mdy7.database.windows.net;Database=aspprovidersdb;User ID=jnak;Password=<enter>;Trusted_Connection=False;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/> <add name="NerdDinnerConnectionString" connectionString="Server=tcp:zky996mdy7.database.windows.net;Database=NerdDinnerDB;User ID=jnak;Password=<enter>;Trusted_Connection=False;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/> </connectionStrings>
Delete the database files in App_Data and hit F5 to run this in the Development Fabric.
A couple things to test to ensure that both the providers and the nerddinner database are working correctly: Register for an account, host a dinner and view all upcoming dinners.
Now deploy this to the cloud -- Please see the Deploying a Cloud Service walkthrough if you need help.
What’s cool to consider here is we started with a single instance ASP.NET web application and turned it into a scalable cloud application that has the capability to be load balanced across any number of instances.
As I look back at this walkthrough, it’s actually quite long but over half is migrating the data to SQL Azure and there was a lot of screen shots. The key things I want you get out of this post are:
1) Add existing ASP.NET Web Applications to the same solution as a Cloud Service project and use Roles | Add | Web Role in project…
2) Understand the 4 differences between a Windows Azure Web Role project and a standard Web Application project
3) Figure out how you are going to handle your data, you have a few options notably Windows Azure Storage and SQL Azure. Don’t forget about your providers.
4) Walkthrough of migrating an existing database to SQL Azure.
Finally, whenever you are deploying the cloud, it is useful to look into the service package and make sure that everything you need is in the service package. See this post for more info – remember Windows Azure VMs only include the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 redistributable.
One of my tenets on this blog is to not do posts that simply point to someone else’s post. I’m breaking that tenant today because of something I just found out that I think is super important for all Windows Azure customers to be clear on and saw that Ryan Dunn had already posted about this.
Windows Azure compute time is calculated based on the time that you’ve deployed the app, not the time your app is in the running state.
For example, if you put your deployment in the stopped state, you will continue to be charged for Compute hours – the rate at which will correspond to the VM Size you have selected.
In order to not be charged Compute hours, you need to delete the deployment. This will look as follows:
Ryan goes on to show you how to use the powershell cmdlets to automate deleting your deployments, please check out his post.
We are working on making this more obvious on the developer portal.
I’m pleased to announce that the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 (direct link while the release propagates) has been released to coincide with the general availability of Windows Azure.
This release supports VS 2008 and the upcoming VS 2010 RC. For VS 2010 Beta 2 please use the November 2009 release.
New for version 1.1:
Updated and additional samples are available at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples
Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, configuring, debugging, running and packaging of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure.
The February 2010 release of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio support the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 RC.
We’re very excited about Visual Studio 2010! The RC, available soon, will support a broad ‘go-live’ license, increased performance and stability, and is an excellent vehicle for providing any remaining feedback prior to the final release build.
Additionally, because of the improvements in the Visual Studio 2010 RC, we’ve made a number of RC specific improvements to our tools:
If you are looking to download the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 -- please use the November 2009 release.
Learn more at http://windowsazure.com