RickAndMSFT on Azure & MVC

Seeding and Debugging Entity Framework (EF) DBs

2013-02-13T00:45:30Z

In Tom Dykstra’s terrific ASP.NET MVC EF tutorial, the following code is used to seed the student table. var students = new List < Student > { new Student { FirstMidName = "Carson" , LastName = "Alexander" , EnrollmentDate = DateTime .Parse( "2005-09-01" ) }, new Student { FirstMidName = "Meredith" , LastName = "Alonso" , EnrollmentDate = DateTime .Parse( "2002-09-01" ) }, new Student { FirstMidName = "Arturo" , LastName...(read more)

Optimal Azure Restarts

2012-12-22T04:55:40Z

Restarts for Web Roles Updated 17 Jan 2013: Tracing in OnStop is not supported. An often neglected consideration in Windows Azure is how to handle restarts. It’s important to handle restarts correctly, so you don’t lose data or corrupt your persisted data, and so you can quickly shutdown, restart, and efficiently handle new requests. Windows Azure Cloud Service applications are restarted approximately twice per month for operating system updates. (For more information on OS updates, see...(read more)

Top Azure Tips and Best Practices

2012-12-20T20:56:08Z

Tom Dykstra and I have just published an Azure multi-tier tutorial with the complete source. It has many valuable programming tips and best practices you can’t find anywhere else. Learn how to use Windows Azure Storage tables, queues, and blobs in a multi-tier application that has ASP.NET MVC 4 and ASP.NET Web API on the front end. My favorite sections include: Web sites versus web role in a cloud service. How to design tables for efficient queries using the new Windows Azure Storage Client Library...(read more)

Debugging Azure HTTP 500 Errors

2012-11-06T23:25:26Z

By default, Windows Azure Cloud Services Web Role applications, running in Windows Azure or the compute emulator, have the HTTP Errors <httpErrors> element of the ApplicationHost.config file set to not display detailed error information. What surprised me is that under the compute emulator, IIS-Express doesn’t use the C:\Users\<user>\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config file, it uses a an ApplicationHost.config file pointed to by the %APPCMD% environment variable....(read more)

Debugging HTTP 500 - Internal server error with the Windows Azure SDK

2012-10-26T00:25:57Z

Update November 2012 – See my new blog entry Debugging Azure HTTP 500 Errors . This blog no longer applies to Azure. Using the current Azure SDK and Visual Studio 2012, you may get a HTTP 500 internal error if there is something wrong with your Web.config file. OK, something went wrong, but what? I actually hit this error last year and blogged the solution – but a lot of changes have taken place with the Azure SDK since then, and last years solution no longer works. By default, the ApplicationHost...(read more)

Azure Table Storage

2012-09-21T01:11:00Z

This Azure Table Storage tutorial/sample/walkthrough will get you using Azure Table Storage from ASP.NET MVC in 15 minutes. Tom Dykstra (of MVC/EF fame ) and I are working on an Azure email service sample application. All the code was written by Tom. Our first step was creating a Azure Table Storage account to contain the email distribution lists. This post contains the essential steps to get Azure Table Storage working with an ASP.NET application. You must first have an Azure account –...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC 4 Mobile Caching Bug Fixed

2012-09-18T00:27:01Z

31 October 2012 Update: The ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update includes the Fixed DisplayModes NuGet package in the new project templates. You will still need to apply the Fixed DisplayModes NuGet package to projects created before you install the ASP.NET Fall 2012 Update . The RC and RTM versions of ASP.NET MVC 4 had a bug in the view caching mechanism that resulted in mobile views (and other views specified by inserting a new DefaultDisplayMode ) returning the wrong view. Initially...(read more)

Adding Web Optimization to a Web Pages Site

2012-08-16T01:56:07Z

Adding bundling and minification (B/M) in a Web Pages site follows the same formula ASP.NET MVC and Web Forms use: Declare and register bundles. Consume bundles from within your views. This blog entry describes the basics of using B/M in a Web Page site. For an overview and more details on B/M, see my tutorial Bundling and Minification . You can read about B/M for ASP.NET MVC here and for Web Forms here . To get started, we’ll create a new Web Pages site. Open the _AppStart.cshtml file. Replace...(read more)

InitializeSimpleMembership Attribute and SimpleMembership Exceptions

2012-08-15T16:44:00Z

The InitializeSimpleMembership Attribute ensures that before any membership (login/register) related functionality is run, that the membership database has been created. If the database is not yet created, the code will automatically create one. If the simple membership initialization fails, the Web Application can continue to run requests that don’t require membership. Simple membership initialization failure can occur for the following reasons. The most common reason is the connection string to...(read more)

Adding Bundling and Minification to Web Forms

2012-08-14T22:21:00Z

My B/M tutorial provides a good introduction to benefits of Bundling and Minification. You should read it to become familiar with the bundling and minification. This blog will focus on using B/M with Web Forms, my B/M tutorial focused on ASP.NET MVC. Create a new ASP.NET Web Forms application which targets the .Net 4.5 framework. Run the application launch the IE F-12 developer tools. Select the Script tab, then use the assets button to view the JavaScript files. You can select one of...(read more)