Can I use Dreamweaver to build an HTML based site and then upload this site to the Azure platform via ftp, more specifically will Windows Azure recognise the default page for my website without explicitly having to reference it in the URL?
Azure PaaS (either Cloud Services or Web Sites), no.
Azure IaaS, yes... with a bunch of initial setup.
You could spin up an Azure VM and host a plain HTML web site from within IIS there. You would need to configure the IIS web site (e.g. start page) and set up the FTP server when you first provision the server.
My gut feeling is that Windows Azure is not a very economical hosting model for a project of this kind though.
Related
Currently, my visual studio solution has 3 projects:
MVC project - to be deployed at say www.something.com
Web Api - to be deployed at api.something.com
SPA application - to be deployed at app.something.com
Will I be able to host all of these just through VSO source control? I am not sure if azure would be able to host the applications at respective sub-domains without explicitly defining them?
Can anybody please clarify? And what would be the best approach?
if you host your application on Azure App service, there is continues deployment service. You can have your code next to your site (Local Git https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-publish-source-control/) or you can have your code in supported repository e.g github/bitbucket etc ..
And Azure App Service supports virtual directly, you can have multiple apps in the same site. see detail answer from here Publish Multiple Projects to Different Locations on Azure Website
I have an Azure Website developed for which I would like to reduce the initial loading time. On a regular ASP.NET site I would configure the Application Initialization IIS module, but with Azure Websites direct IIS configuration is not possible.
The website is running in reserved mode if that makes any difference.
Actually, Application Initialization module is installed by default for Azure Web Apps. You can directly configure it from either your web.config file or through apphost.config XDT. Just stick something like below in a web.config in the root of your web app.
<system.webServer>
<applicationInitialization
doAppInitAfterRestart="true"
skipManagedModules="true">
<add initializationPage="/default.aspx" hostName="myhost"/>
</applicationInitialization>
</system.webServer>
Application Initialization is not supported with Windows Azure Websites. because it is a native module and Windows Azure Websites does not allow configuring native modules via web.config.
Alsom the content for Windows Azure Websites are physically located at a centralized location and from there they loaded and executed to webservers. While shared instance gets a slice of host VM, versus reserved instance get a full host VM to run your web applications, in both cases the website application is coming from same centralized located so it does not matter if you have reserve instance to get Application Initialization working.
Application Initialization is necessary for your application and your websites is running in reserve mode, you can use Azure VM or Windows Azure Web Role to have it working.
Currently there's "Always On" setting for Azure Websites which does pretty much the same thing.
I am new to windows azure plateform i want to ask a very basic question. I am doing a project on windows azure and due to some concurrency problems i want also my Browser GUI to be in the cloud which will call the web services which are also deployed in the cloud.
Just need to ask that is it possible that i will also put my GUI in the cloud and i have some URL which i will hit so that my GUI will appear in the users browser...
I want my architecture some what like that
Sorry for the drawing but i am in very hurry
Your web browser would be on the user's desktop, and make a HTTP request to a web application/site that is hosted in Windows Azure. For instance, an ASP.NET MVC web site that makes a service call to a WCF service, that then retrieves data from a SQL Azure database. One way to do this would be to create a single hosted service that contains:
Web Role (to host your ASP.NET site)
WCF Web Role (to host your WCF service)
SQL Azure (for your database)
I think the web GUI you mentioned would be like an agent, it will connect to the real websit and render the content for you. If this is true I would like to say in theroy it's possible, but in practice it will be very difficult, since what you want to do is a web based web browser. You might need to handle HTML, CSS and JS, etc.. But if it's just a web ui that render your data from your service that is fine. So back to your question, when you said the "browser gui", if it's a desktop application, you cannot run it on the cloud; if it's a website then yes you can and your proposal looks fine.
Hope my feedback helps.
This question has probably less to do with actual programming and more to do with environment setup.
I'm developing an application for a Windows CE device, which will use a service hosted in Microsoft Azure. Obviously, this is all under development, and the service itself has not yet been uploaded to Azure. So I'm using the emulators provided by MS to deploy the service locally. Also, I don't think uploading the service to Azure just to debug it is a good idea, as that could net us a bill for Azure we don't yet want to pay.
Also, please note, I'm using VS2008 for the Windows CE project and VS2010 for the Azure project (thank you MS for dropping support for mobile devices -_-).
The problem is, the service seems to be accessible only via 127.0.0.1 or localhost, and if I physically connect a Windows CE device or use an emulated one, it becomes a new entity on the network, and cannot access that service any more.
How can I debug my Window CE application and have it see the service, whilst still being able to debug the service itself?
You are correct, the development fabric (the compute emulator that allows you to build an azure application and debug it locally) is only meant for local development. There are some hacks that allow you to get around that, but I wouldn't recommend it.
My recommendation would be to spin up the service in a more traditional hosting environment, at least in these early stages. You can define it as a web app just as you always would have, and get it functioning. Then, when you know its mostly complete, create a cloud service project and do an add existing to bring your web app into the cloud service solution. Once in, its a simple matter to add the web app as a web role.
From there, you can complete testing of the service in both the local and hosted azure environments as needed. This allows you to minimize your development costs while still leveraging the power of the cloud. As an upside, you also have done most of the basic work to ensure your service is compatible with multiple deployment scenarios giving you a greater degree of choice for its final production state.
OK, I don't know if this was intentional, or if I found one of the mentioned hacks, but I saw that IIS hosts the Azure site I created on port 5100, and the binding for this site is *, so it accepts all connections.
Using this I could access the service from my emulator, and I could still debug all Azure related stuff.
does somebody know how it is possible to change the document root for windows azure web application to a sub folder?
Thx
Not right now with the default web roles.
You can:
Implement your own web host (hosting IIS core or any web server in web role)
Wait a bit till Azure starts supporting more flexibility out-of-the box (I think this was announced at the last PDC).