Reducing the size of an Azure Web Role deployment package

28th of October, 2014 / / 7 Comments

If you’ve been working with Azure Web Roles and deployed them to an Azure subscription, you likely have noticed the substantial size of a simple web role deployment package. Even with the vanilla ASP.NET sample website the deployment package seems to be quite bloated. This is not such a problem if you have decent upload bandwidth, but in Australia bandwidth is scarce like water in the desert so let’s see if we can compress this deployment package a little bit.… [Keep reading] “Reducing the size of an Azure Web Role deployment package”

Direct Access on Azure, Why? Can? How?

28th of October, 2014 / / 10 Comments

Direct Access on Azure?

A customer recently requested Kloud to assist them in implementing a Windows 2012 R2 server based Direct Access (DA) service, as their work force had recently moved to a Windows 8 client platform.  What did surprise me was that they requested it be one of the first solutions to be hosted on their Microsoft Azure service.

Direct Access, for those unfamiliar with the technology, is essentially an ‘always on’ VPN style connection that provides a user access to a corporate network from any basic Internet network connection without any user interaction. … [Keep reading] “Direct Access on Azure, Why? Can? How?”

How to find out if your Azure Subscription can use the Australian Regions

27th of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Today’s a great day to be looking to move services to the public cloud in Australia with Microsoft announcing the availability of their local Microsoft Azure Australian Geography.

… [Keep reading] “How to find out if your Azure Subscription can use the Australian Regions”

ASP.NET Web API Integration Testing with One Line of Code

26th of October, 2014 / / 13 Comments

A very popular post about integration testing ASP.NET Web API was published quite some time ago. However, since then, OWIN has been released. OWIN makes integration testing ASP.NET Web API much simpler. This post describes what is required to set an OWIN-based integration testing framework up.

This, believe it or not, only requires a single line of code with OWIN self-hosting! It assumes that your web API project is powered by ASP.NET Web API 2.2 with OWIN.… [Keep reading] “ASP.NET Web API Integration Testing with One Line of Code”

Logging with log4net and Azure Diagnostics on Web and Worker Roles

22nd of October, 2014 / / 11 Comments

Once you start publishing content to Azure Cloud Services it becomes increasingly critical to have insights into what is going on with your Web or Worker Roles without the need to manually connect to the hosts and inspect local logs.

Logging locally to file is an option but results in a couple of challenges: there is limited local persistent disk space on an Azure Role and local logging makes it hard to get an aggregated view of what’s happening across multiple Instances servicing a single Cloud Service.… [Keep reading] “Logging with log4net and Azure Diagnostics on Web and Worker Roles”

Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out

22nd of October, 2014 / / 3 Comments

There’s recently been some interest in the space of accelerating Office 365 SharePoint Online traffic for organisations and for good reason. All it takes is a CEO to send out an email to All Staff with a link to a movie hosted in SharePoint Online to create some interest in better ways to serve content internally. There are commercial solutions to this problem, but they are, well… commercial (read expensive). Now that the basic functionality has been proven using existing Windows Server components, what would it take to put into production?… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out”

Publishing to Azure Event Hubs using a .NET Micro Framework Device

21st of October, 2014 / / 6 Comments

In previous posts, Kloudies Matt Davies and Olaf Loogman have shown how we connect Arduino based devices to the Azure platform. Preferring the .NET Micro Framework (NETMF) platform myself, I thought it time to show how we can publish senor data to Azure Event Hubs using a NETMF connected device.

.NET Micro Framework

Like Arduino, the .NET Micro Framework is an open source platform that runs on small, microcontroller based devices or “things”as we call them now in the world of the Internet-of-Things (IoT).… [Keep reading] “Publishing to Azure Event Hubs using a .NET Micro Framework Device”

Fix: Azure Cloud Services Error: No deployments were found. Http Status Code: NotFound

21st of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

If you find yourself having to move existing .Net solutions to Microsoft Azure you may come across an initial deployment issue if you add a Cloud Service Project type to your existing application and then publish it to a new Azure Cloud Service using Visual Studio. It’s not immediately obvious what the source of the issue is so let’s take a look at how we can troubleshoot the source of the problem.

Visual Studio provides you with the vanilla error message “Error: No deployments were found.… [Keep reading] “Fix: Azure Cloud Services Error: No deployments were found. Http Status Code: NotFound”

Azure Table Storage little gem – InsertOrMerge

19th of October, 2014 / / No Comments

This blog describes the usage of the InsertOrMerge operation for Azure Table Storage.

Each entity in Table Storage is defined by the PartitionKey/RowKey combination. InsertOrMerge will insert the entity if it doesn’t exist and, if it exists, it would merge the properties of updated entity with the existing one. For more details, see the Azure Storage blog.

When comparing with the existing table schema, not all properties are required to be specified for this operation.… [Keep reading] “Azure Table Storage little gem – InsertOrMerge”

Manage Azure Resources Using Tags

14th of October, 2014 / / 4 Comments

A feature request for quite some time in the Microsoft Azure space has been the ability to group individual resources such as websites and databases so that they can be grouped and managed as part of a single solution or system. In this post we’ll take a look at what has been introduced so far through 2014 to meet these needs.

Say Hello to Azure Resource Manager

The first piece of the solution to these requests was the introduction of the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) way back at Build 2014 along with the new Azure Preview Portal which offers support for Resource Groups.… [Keep reading] “Manage Azure Resources Using Tags”