Mikael Sand - Trying to be different

I am amazed how easy it is to publish services to the cloud using Visual Studio. I am sure there will be some limitations concerning debugging and such but so far I find it really simple. What I did not find really simple was how to get the configuration settings, what to type and were to put them. So I thought I would do a post on it using my earlier adoption of the bare minimum.

In the walkthrough referred to in my earlier post, there is just a mention in point 10 about setting the values so that the service runs in the cloud. This is were I ran into trouble, so here goes.

• Of course you need an active Azure Invitation Code.
• Sign In to https://lx.azure.microsoft.com/fs
• You will be greeted with a start page showing you a project called PDC08 CTP. Click it.
• On the project start page click New Service.

• Choose Storage Account.

• Just type some name and description for the service. I choose BlobStorageSample. Click next.

• Now give the storage account a name. Be sure to choose something meaningful and “unsilly”. Logicamikesand is ok, strawberryman1968 is not.
• Make sure the account name is available.
• Affinity is not needed in order to make the sample work and can therefore be skipped.
• Click Create to create the account an receive the settings.

• I cannot give you my access keys, hope you understand that.
• No go back to Visual Studio and open the BlobStorageSample solution.
• Under the BlobStorageSample project open the ServiceConfiguration.csfg file.
• Edit the following xml

<!-- Only used when running from the cloud -->

<Setting name="AccountName" value="logicamikesand"/>
<Setting name="AccountSharedKey" value="NOTTHEREALKEYUf6eTqITo2hrP4TQodG1aMYuZurjVDswgnX9wYFOGAIWWmoU/sfiXe0Q4wrd3/l88yDAXhQDg=="/>
<Setting name="BlobStorageEndpoint" value="http://logicamikesand.blob.core.windows.net/"/>

Technorati-taggar: Azure

• Account name is the name you gave the storage account (the unsilly one remember).
• Use the primary access key for the “AccountSharedKey”-setting.
• The last setting is of course the end point for the blob storage defined in the last step.

Done! All you have to do now is to make sure the BlobStorage Sample is the StartUp project and hit F5 to start running the service in the cloud. Simple is it not?

This is in my view one of the cooler features of Azure. The simplicity in it’s deployment. Coming from BizTalk I know how difficult deployment can be and if I turn the clock back even further I remember the troubles I had with just deploying COM-components to a single web server, with heavy use of command-line and regsvr32. So this could be much harder.