As Satya presented on 3/27, we're not uniquely focused on Windows, but on all devices. If you are building internal mobile (Phone/Tablet)  business apps for any device, using any set of technologies and tools, we’re interested in talking with you.

If this matches your development please fill out a quick questionnaire and we will contact you to schedule a phone call.

Click here to start the questionnaire

Thank you!

My goal is to chat with this set of developers to better understand their world and to evaluate whether we should be pursuing various ideas.  The technologies they are using or the devices they are targeting don’t matter, just that they are building internal apps for the company’s employees.

If you are building internal business apps, I’d like to ask for 30 minutes of your time for a discussion over the phone.  Please send me an email at "jnak" @ Microsoft.com.  Your time would be greatly appreciated and hopefully it’ll result in us building products to support you better.

If this isn’t you and you know someone who would be appropriate, please forward this along.

Thanks so much!

To watch the recording, go to https://player.microsoftpdc.com/session click on “Guide”, my session is at 1130 on Thursday.

As part of the session I was able to show some of the cool new features we have coming in our next release (coming sometime in November or December of 2010) and I’m following up with a series of blog posts.

The first in this series is showing the rapid developer develop feature.

As part of developing a web site that runs on Windows Azure, it is really common for the developer not only to iterate on F5 but also to iterate in the cloud.

Today, iterating on the cloud requires a full redeployment which can be a lengthy operation.  We set out to make this scenario better.

I’ll start with a Cloud Service that has a single Web role and I’ll just use the default ASP.NET template.

To enable rapid developer deploy, right click on the Cloud Service node in Solution Explorer, select publish and on the publish dialog, enable remote desktop (post coming soon) and select the checkbox to “Enable Web Deploy”:

Once the deployment has completed, view the web page in IE:

and you’ll see the standard ASP.NET template.  Since at the time of this writing, this is not live, you’ll see that I’m showing this in one of our test clusters, cloudapp-preview.net.

From here, I can go back and make any changes I want to my web site. In this case, I’ll just update the text on that main page.

Hit “save” and right click on the WebRole1 project this time and select publish.

This will bring up a dialog where the settings to deploy to the web role are already setup.  Make sure you fill out the username/pass at the bottom of the dialog.

Note: The settings for this profile are saved to the project folder, in my sample they are saved in a file called WebRole1.Publish.xml.  The tools created this file on your behalf.

After the web deploy publish completes – really in the matter of seconds (depends on the extent of the changes and payload of course) – I can go back to IE, refresh the browser and…

The changes were deployed to the Windows Azure.  Yes, in the matter of seconds.  As someone that iterates a lot on the cloud, I’m really happy we have this feature coming in v1.3.

What’s Going On?

The checkbox on the cloud service deploy dialog sets up MS deploy on the web role instance which we then use the standard VS tools for MS deploy to deploy to that instance. 

We need to have Remote Desktop enabled, not because it uses remote desktop but because it needs a user account.  This requirement is likely to be removed over time.

Why Developer Deploy?

The reason why this is supported only for a single instance developer scenario is because we’re only modifying the instance, we’re not modifying the package that Windows Azure will use to create new instances.

Additionally, because Windows Azure instances are stateless (to support scale out) an OS update or other management operation can result in that instance being replaced by a different instance which means that the changes you made through web deploy will be lost.

As you can imagine, those behaviors are not acceptable for production but are totally fine for the developer scenario.

We’ll eventually get a full story around this but didn’t want to wait to solve the developer case first.

Finally

This will be coming between now and the end of the year (2010) – let me know what you think.

Building, Deploying, and Managing Windows Azure Applications

In order to take full advantage of Windows Azure and SQL Azure, you need to know more than just how to write the code. You need to know how to incorporate your application in a team environment, deploy, monitor, manage and retrieve diagnostic information back from the cloud. In this session, you will learn everything you need to know to be successful with a project that utilizes Windows Azure and SQL Azure including setting up your development environment, automating build, unit test and deployments to different deployment environments from staging to production, and managing credentials and user roles using the Windows Azure Portal.

I’ll frame the talk a little differently.  My talk has 3 sections, Setting up the cloud, Deploying to the cloud and Viewing into the cloud and I’ll be covering a mix of what’s there today and some cool new features we have coming sometime before the end of the year.

What’s unique about this PDC is that all of the sessions will be broadcast live online at: https://player.microsoftpdc.com/ so if you couldn’t make it live, I hope that you can watch online and twitter along @jnakashima.

I’m pretty jazzed, looking forward to seeing you there – live or online.

I showed the new features in our latest June 2010 release of the Windows Azure Tools.

I am also scheming on how I’ll get my revenge on a future episode of Cloud Cover, feel free to send me some ideas :)

In a nutshell, if you see these exceptions:

and the client, this will appear as the standard “Not Found” CommunicationException when looking through an IntelliTrace log downloaded from the Cloud then you are running into the issue.

Kyle goes over 3 options, the least impactful is to simply add the following line to the modules to exclude: *System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.*

Let’s talk about the underlying issue and when you might see this in your own code.

The issue is that IntelliTrace itself has a bug where methods that have a boolean out parameter in an assembly that is marked as SecurityTransparent will fail when IntelliTrace collection is set to “high” which is the default in the Cloud IntelliTrace scenario.

You will see this in your own code if you have a method whose signature includes a boolean out parameter and you have set your assembly security to SecurityTransparent.

For example:

protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    bool val = true;
    DummyBoolOut(out val);

    Label1.Text = "Clicked the button";
}

private void DummyBoolOut(out bool retBool)
{
    retBool = false;
}

and in the assembly level attributes:

[assembly: System.Security.SecurityTransparent()]

When I run this on Windows Azure, I get a VerficiationException on the call to DummyBoolOut().

You can continue to use IntelliTrace but would need to exclude your module (i.e. assembly) from being instrumented and you would do so by clicking on the IntelliTrace settings on the Windows Azure deploy dialog:

And adding your assembly to the module exclusion list.

On the download page select the language you want to install if it isn’t set to the right default:

A couple of notes:

• In order for the Windows Azure Tools to show up as localized in Visual Studio, the Visual Studio language has to match.
• The localization of the Windows Azure Platform, Developer Portal and SDK is still in the works.  Stay tuned.

It is our first cut at this feature and we've been iterating fairly quickly on the Windows Azure Tools so I'm excited about having this feature not only for what it delivers today but also because it lays the foundation for the future.  In this post, I'll go over what you can and can’t do with the Windows Azure Storage browser and how added some features to hopefully make it easier for you to handle navigating through large data sets.

Connecting to a Storage Account

The development storage node is always available under the Windows Azure Storage node and when opened will also start up the development storage if it isn’t already running.

To add a storage account in the cloud, right click on the Windows Azure Storage node and select “Add New Account…”

This will pop up a dialog that allows you to enter your storage account credentials:

This corresponds to the account name and key that you set up on the Windows Azure Developer Portal, for example:

In this case “serverexplorer” is the account name and you can use either the primary or secondary access keys as the account key.

That said, one of our design principles is not to ask the user to enter the same information more than once.  So if you’ve entered storage connection strings in your cloud service, specifically if you've added connection strings as configuration settings in the roles of your Cloud Service, we find those and show them in the combo box.  If you select one, we'll fill out the name and key so that you don't have to re-enter that same information.

Once you hit ok that new storage account will be shown in the Server Explorer:

Browsing Blob Storage

To browse blobs, you can open up the storage account and then open up the “Blobs” node to see a list of the containers in that storage account.

By double clicking on a container, you can see all of the blobs that are in that container. 

One of the things we did to help you to handle large data sets, we get the blob list 200 at a time.  As the blob list is downloading, you can click to pause or resume the download.

If you click to pause, it gives you the ability to download a blob, see blob properties (right click on a row and select “Properties”) or enter a filter by blob prefix.

Filtering by blob prefix occurs on the server side so only the filtered list is returned and shown.

Our thought is that by supporting both filtering and pause/resume, you will be able to use the Windows Azure Storage browser with containers that contain a large number of blobs.

We also support downloading blobs by double clicking on them.  This will add a line item into the Windows Azure Activity Log window in Visual Studio which we use to track long running processes that relate to our Windows Azure Tools.

After downloading is complete, the blob will be opened in Visual Studio if the file type is supported.

One of the hard cuts for this release was the edit/write support.  We really hoped to add the ability to delete blobs and containers because viewing and deleting really covers the core developer scenario.  Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for a future release to add that in... but again, I'm excited about the foundation that this feature provides and it's integration into Visual Studio makes it really convenient.

Browsing Table Storage

Browsing Table Storage works in a very similar way. 

When you open up a table, we download 200 rows at a time and allow you to pause/resume.  If you pause you can filter using a WCF Data Services $filter query option.

What you can put in the text box to filter is anything you would put after ‘$filter=’ in a WCF Data Services.  For example, “Address gt ‘989 Redmond Way, Redmond WA’”

Having a table viewer right in Visual Studio now allows you to view Windows Azure Diagnostic trace messages without having to leave Visual Studio.

Similar to the blob storage viewer, we also had to cut the edit/write capabilities for table storage. 

Finally

We are really dying to get the edit/write capability and Queue capability into the product.  Hopefully we’ll be able to schedule it soon!

We the Windows Azure Storage browser for you so let me know what you like, don’t like and what features you want to see next!

Here are some of the key takeaways and links from the session:

Lots of New Tools

The June 2010 release of the Windows Azure Tools has now includes:

• Support for .NET 4
• Deploy from Visual Studio
• IntelliTrace debugging in the cloud
• Windows Azure Storage and Compute integration in the Server Explorer
• Windows Azure Activity Log window in VS to watch long running operations

Getting Started

The Web Platform Installer automates a number of the steps to install Windows Azure or to install IIS prior to installing the Windows Azure Tools for VS 2010.

Get the patches - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cc974146.aspx

Samples

https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples

ASP.NET Web Roles vs ASP.NET Web Applications

The 3 differences are:

• References to the Windows Azure specific assemblies: Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime, and Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient
• Bootstrap code in the WebRole.cs/vb file that starts the DiagnosticMonitor as well as defines a default behavior of recycling the role when a configuration setting change occurs.
• The addition of a trace listener in the web.config file: Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener.

NerdDinner

The NerdDinner sample code can be found at: https://nerddinner.codeplex.com/

ASP.NET Provider scripts for SQL Azure

To use the ASP.NET providers with SQL Azure, you can use these scripts: https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/2006191 to setup the database.

Using IntelliTrace

Using IntelliTrace to debug services / applications that are running in the Cloud

IntelliTrace support requires .NET 4, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and the cloud service has to be deployed with IntelliTrace enabled. If you are using a 32-Bit OS, you need this patch/QFE.

To enable IntelliTrace, right click on the cloud service project and select “Publish”.

At the bottom of our publish dialog, click to select “Enable IntelliTrace for .NET 4 roles”.

You can also configure IntelliTrace for the cloud settings (these are separate from the settings in Tools | Options which are used for the debug (F5) scenario which we currently do not support with Cloud Services/Development Fabric.  

A couple of notes about IntelliTrace settings. 

We default to high mode which is different from the F5 IntelliTrace settings in Visual Studio.  The reason is that F5 IntelliTrace includes both debugger and IntelliTrace data while in the cloud, you are only able to get back IntelliTrace data.

Additionally, we exclude Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll as we found that the slow down caused by IntelliTrace instrumenting resulted in time outs to storage.  You may find you will want to remove the storage client assembly from the exclusion list.

To reset the IntelliTrace settings back to the default, you can delete “collectionplan.xml” from %AppData%\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Cloud Tools

Click “OK” to package up everything you need to IntelliTrace the web and worker host processes in the cloud and start the deployment process.

Note: There is a current limitation that child processes cannot be IntelliTrace debugged.

The deployment process is completely asynchronous so you can continue to work while you wait for deployment the to complete and you can track the progress through the Windows Azure Activity Log tool window.

After the deployment has completed, open up the Windows Azure Compute node in Server Explorer to browse hosted services deployed to Windows Azure.

You can add a hosted service by right clicking on the Windows Azure Compute node and selecting “Add Slot…”

This will bring up a dialog you can use to choose a slot or add/manage your credentials.

The Server Explorer will show you which Hosted Services have IntelliTrace enabled.  They are the ones that have “(IntelliTrace)” beside the slot name.

Expand open the nodes and navigate to an instance, you can get the IntelliTrace logs for that instance by right clicking on the instance node and selected “View IntelliTrace Logs”.

Note: When a role process exits, it automatically gets restarted by the fabric, which causes the cycling role state behavior that some of you are familiar with.  When IntelliTrace is enabled, when a role process exits, it is not restarted and it is put into the “Unresponsive” state instead.  This allows you to get the IntelliTrace logs for the failure.

Similar to how you can track the progress of deployment from the Windows Azure Activity Log, you can also track the the download of the IntelliTrace logs asynchronously.

You’ll then see the IntelliTrace files open in Visual Studio. 

You can now browse the Exception Data on the summary page or put Visual Studio into debug mode by clicking and exception and clicking the “Start Debugging” button or by double clicking on one of the threads in the thread list.

Being in debug mode will bring up the IntelliTrace tools window which will show you all of the IntelliTrace events.  You can filter between different categories and “Switch to Calls View” which will show you the call stack that you can drill in and out of various methods.

You can also open up your source code and right click on a line and select “Search for this line in IntelliTrace”.

When the search is complete, you can click on the navigation buttons at the top of the file to select one of the instances in which this code was called and use the historical debugging buttons on the left to debug forward and backward through the code looking at the call stack and locals as step through the control flow.

Debugging Common Issues Using IntelliTrace

Missing an Assembly in the Service Package:

This is by far one of the most common "works on the devfabric, fails in the cloud" issues. View the IntelliTrace log and look for FileNotFoundExceptions in the exception list or IntelliTrace events.

In the IntelliTrace events window:

Using an incorrect Windows Azure storage connection string:

This one is a little tougher as there isn’t a top level exception you can look at.  Search for the methods in IntelliTrace where you use connection strings and see the input and return values.  For example the CloudStorageAccount and DiagnosticMonitor calls.

Missing a CRT library in the Cloud:

For the scenario where you are calling into a native dll but did not xcopy deploy the CRT along with his Service Package, an exception will surface in the IntelliTrace summary naming the native dll that could not be loaded.

Using a 32 Bit Native Library in the Cloud:

This issue is very similar to the missing CRT example above, in this scenario you’ve been successfully developing with a 32 bit machine and but get a failure in the cloud when the 32 bit dll is loaded in a 64 bit process.

With IntelliTrace, an exception showing which native library failed to load is surfaced in the IntelliTrace summary screen.

In the case where the loading of the assembly is triggered by a method call that is outside of the startup code, you can double click the exception to get to the line of their code that made the call to native that loaded up the dll.

Using code that requires admin access:

If you are running into this issue, you should be testing against the Development Fabric before deploying to the cloud.  That said, our support data shows that this is one of the issues you run into.

I tried to do a registry write to HKLM, which fails in the following way:

An exception is shown in the IntelliTrace summary and when double clicked, will navigate to the line of code that is causing the exception.

Using an ASP.NET provider with the default SQL Server connection string in the cloud:

In this scenario, you are using the ASP.NET providers, the default MVC and ASP.NET Web Application templates both use these. In the devfabric, they work fine as they use SQL Express under the hood by default. When you deploy to the cloud, they no longer work. (An exception web page is shown after a wait)

In opening the IntelliTrace summary, you will see the exception "Unable to connect to SQL Server database" with a stack trace that points to one of the providers, in my example, it was the SqlMembershipProvider.

Using a Diagnostics connection string with a connection string that uses HTTP endpoints:

In this scenario, you’ve deployed to the cloud but forgot to change your Windows Azure storage connection strings. If you incorrectly select to use HTTP endpoints for the storage account and didn't try running your app with the new connection strings on the devfabric  before deploying, you can run into this problem.

When opening the IntelliTrace log, you will see an exception in the summary indicating that the endpoint is not a secure connection.

To sum up, I’m really excited about this feature, I hope it will really help a lot of people see into the cloud and diagnose issues saving both time and frustration.