Marc: My Words : Development

NerdDinner hosted on Windows Azure and SQL Azure

maholmes — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:48:45 GMT

I recently got my hands on a Windows Azure and SQL Azure token to try out a little cloud goodness.

The challenge I set myself was to host an ASP.NET MVC application (including data) in the cloud. Hopefully just an hour or so of fiddling about, but as I hadn't really used Azure before, it would also be a bit of a learning experience.

3 steps seemed to be in order:
    1) Create an MVC Application
    2) Move the application data from SQL Server -> SQL Azure
    3) Move the application hosting to Azure

It turns out that everything I needed to do this is already published but I wanted to pull the threads together. As a result, I haven’t gone into particular detail below – you can find everything you need in the Azure Training Kit.

Step 1 - Create an MVC Application

OK, I couldn't be bothered with that to be honest, so instead I downloaded the reference NerdDinner application from CodePlex - relatively trivial and already working.

Got that, unzipped and then a quick F5 in VS2008 proved that all was well with the app.

Step 2 - Move the application data from SQL Server -> SQL Azure

This is where a little bit of work starts. In principle this is a straightforward migration - script the database and run the script elsewhere - in practice we need to configure SQL Azure, connect to it and also check that the script will run (there are differences between SQL Server and SQL Azure in terms of supported capability).

So, assuming you've got a SQL Azure token, then you should activate the account and set-up a new database. I called mine NerdDinner. You also need to add firewall exceptions so that you can access the database from your dev machine.

I then generated the schemas and data from the original DB via VS.

In principle, you can then run this script into SQL Azure, but in practice, there are differences in the support for various bits of SQL Server functionality. Fortunately, there's a handy migration tool on CodePlex which can provide some validation.

Running the script into that tool confirmed it should be valid. So, then I used the SQL command line to run the script into the SQL Azure database.

(At this point I should also set up specific user roles for that DB of course).

You can then grab the connection string to the database from the SQL Azure dashboard and change the connection string config file (Connectionstrings.config) in the NerdDinner project. An F5 later, and the original NerdDinner app is now using the SQL Azure database instead.

This step was surprisingly painless, though depending on the complexity of your database YMMV. Oh, NerdDinner uses Linq-to-SQL, but I also did the same thing with Entity Framework and it worked fine for a trivial example.

Step 3 - Move the application hosting to Azure

Now, it would be wonderful if we could just move the Membership provider databases (et al) to SQL Azure too but we can't as there are certain functions not supported. Fortunately - again - the Azure Training Kit provides some code to enable a Membership provider using Azure Table storage.

At this point then, we need to create the Azure solution (so you need to have installed the VS Tools). This involves:

Creating a new 'Cloud Service' project - just use the ASP.NET Web Role. (There’s no default MVC option).
Deleting the default ASP.NET Web Role.
Adding the existing NerdDinner project to the solution.
Associating the NerdDinner project with the cloud service. (Right click Roles –> Associate With… and choose the NerdDinner MVC Project).

This is well documented in the Azure Training Kit.

Also covered in the kit is how to get the Membership provider working. Essentially, that involves:

Adding two projects that came with the Azure Toolkit to the solution.
Adding a reference to the membership provider from the....
Ensuring the storage service is running in the development fabric.
Amending the web.config file to take advantage of this provider.

Following this, hitting F5 will fire up the project inside the development fabric - using the new membership provider and still using SQL Azure for application data. There’ll be some messages about creating the storage tables as the solution builds and runs. (We could also remove the redundant membership connection string from ConnectionStrings.config in the MVC project).

So we’re done for tweaking config. At this point, we can move the application to Azure.

Again, presuming you have an account and it is activated, you're going to need a couple of things:

Hosting for the application – I’ve set-up a host called NerdDinnerService.
Storage for the application – mine is called NerdDinnerStorage.
An affinity group for these 2 services so they can interact.

Now, you can publish the NerdDinnerService project, and then upload the package and config file to Azure. We're not done yet though, as we need to tweak the config on the production cloud. If you've followed the instructions on setting up the membership provider, you'll have a config file with the following entries (for use in the development fabric):

So these entries need to be changed for production. Instructions are a bit vague on this, but here's what you need to do:

First of all, the “AccountName” is whatever you said when you set-up the storage service. If you can't remember, it's the first part of the service URLs you can see in the Azure dashboard for the storage service that read http://<AccountName>.table.core.windows.net
Then you need the shared key - you can see that on the storage service page too.
Then you need the URL for the TableStorageEndpoint. You should use https://table.core.windows.net (note the HTTPS which is required if you're NOT allowing Insecure Remote Endpoints as above).

Finish updating the config, save, wait for the package to sort itself out, then run it up and away you go.

You can see my effort at http://mmw.cloudapp.net. DON'T ENTER ANY REAL DATA INTO THE DATABASE (LIKE USERNAMES AND PASSWORDS). I'll take it down in a few days.

I’d like to say “It works on my machine” but then it’s not supposed to. So “It works on my cloud” instead.

A bunch of Expression/Silverlight Links

maholmes — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:03:42 GMT

I've got a bunch of 'ooh, that looks interesting' links in my reader from the past couple of months. So here they are:

Expression

Big list of example triggers, actions and behaviours for Blend 3 from Peter Blois
An 'explode' behaviour (also from Peter)
Loads of great Blend and Sketchflow stuff at Silverlight Buzz
Bill Reiss commenting on the impact that behaviours have for Silverlight game programming.
Awesome, awesome, awesome physics behaviours from Andy Beaulieu
And then Andy follows up with some "how to" on behaviours.
A 40-minute video from Jose on the power of states in Blend 3.
A game "star field" implementation.
Don Burnett talking about prototyping in Sketchflow.
Katrien's 3mins on Blend 3 series - great Sketchflow examples.
A tutorial on using Sketchflow Map.

Silverlight

Silverlight 3 Multi-touch: The Basics (from Tim - who still hasn't renamed his blog "Heueristics"...)
Animating when Data Changes - parts one and two from Josh Twist.
An out-of-browser install pattern (also from Tim).

Links cleared - hope they help.

Glimmer – Interactive jQuery Designer

maholmes — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:20:59 GMT

Cool – just saw that the availability of Glimmer has been announced. Glimmer is a WPF-based application designed to help with interactive scenarios for your web sites – think design-surface for jQuery. Probably handy in any case, but definitely handy...(read more)

Physics Helper for Silverlight, Blend and Farseer

maholmes — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:12:47 GMT

Wow! Can’t believe I only just discovered this yesterday: a codeplex project for assisting with the creation of physics based objects . More info on Andy Beaulieu’s blog here and here . Top job!...(read more)

Tesco, the Cloud and IE8

maholmes — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:27:28 GMT

No sooner have I finished banging on about IE8 than Tesco go ahead and release an accelerator to allow searching for groceries from IE . Cunningly, this accelerator takes advantage of the APIs that Tesco have released (some related posts there) and is...(read more)

Web Platform Installer 2.0

maholmes — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:53:45 GMT

Apart from the variety of product and feature announcements made at Mix ( don’t forget you can download the sessions here ), the “one product to rule them all” is the Web PI 2.0 (I hope that the codename for this project was Magnum…) It’s about this time...(read more)

Silverlight development for PHP with JCX Software

maholmes — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:07:30 GMT

If you’re a PHP developer, then JCX Software have updated their VS.PHP plug-in (2.7 Beta) for Visual Studio to provide support for Silverlight 3. Sweet. You can read about it here. And don’t forget, as mentioned in my Mix Day 1 recap that there is now...(read more)

Mix Day 1 Recap

maholmes — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:14:37 GMT

I had a bunch of stuff to do at the same time today – a variety of watching, listening, tweeting, responding, and editing for a recap event tomorrow. Sometimes 3 monitors is just not enough… There seemed to be so much awesome stuff to talk about. Here’s...(read more)

WCF REST Starter Kit

maholmes — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:42:03 GMT

Aaron at Pluralsight is all over this release of a starter kit for accessing REST APIs in an easier way. Essentially, it introduces a new class – HttpClient – that contains a bunch of methods suitable for talking to REST APIs. You can download the preview...(read more)

Mike Snow and Silverlight

maholmes — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:14:41 GMT

I’ve probably mentioned Mike Snow’s Blog before, but I’m allowed to mention it again! If you’re developing Silverlight then you really should be reading his stuff – it’s “Tip of the Day” style and they’re all worth reading: Yesterday, I was excited about...(read more)

Googleman

maholmes — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:14:40 GMT

Much as it pains me to mention the G word (Oh, get over yourself, I’m not that precious…) I thought this was pretty funny. If only all application launches and launchers could be as exciting. And with a gratuitous use of WPF, they can be! This is the...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1

maholmes — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:47:47 GMT

An exciting time for web development with .NET. In typical “epic blog post” style, ScottGu announces the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1 . Stephen Walther follows up which a long list of learning resources. Talking of which, now that there is availability...(read more)

XAML Guidelines

maholmes — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:00:09 GMT

Organising WPF projects is a black art, and when I’m coding some WPF (stop laughing) then I definitely spend quite a lot of time thinking about folder structure and fiddling around with the project files. You could argue that that’s a delaying tactic...(read more)

Around the Blogs

maholmes — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:22:39 GMT

I’m out of touch to the tune of a couple of hundred posts, so here’s a quick round-up of some interesting stuff: From the evangelists: @DeepFat has created a SQL Server Advent Calendar. Start here . I’m so out of touch with SQL. But this definitely helps....(read more)

Silverlight Toolkit – December 2008

maholmes — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:09:56 GMT

Jeff Wilcox has the news on the latest release of the toolkit which includes a bunch of controls and themes. You can grab the toolkit from CodePlex ....(read more)