Reduce the trail-deploy-test time with Windows Azure Web Sites and Visual Studio Online

Visual Studio Online

Not long ago Visual Studio Online went GA. What is not so widely mentioned is the hidden gem – preview version of the actual Visual Studio IDE! Yes, this thing that we use to develop code has now gone online as preview (check the Preview Features page on the Windows Azure Portal).

- What can we do now?
- Live, real-time changes to a Windows Azure Web Site!
- Really !? How?

First you need to create new VSO account, if you don’t already have one (please waste no time but get yours here!). Then you need to link it to your Azure subscription! Unfortunately (or should I use “ironically”?) account linking (and creating from within the Azure management portal) is not available for an MSDN benefit account, as per FAQ here.

Link an existing VSO account

Once you get (or if you already have) a VSO account, you can link it to your Azure subscription. Just sign-in to the Azure Management portal with the same Microsoft Account (Live ID) used to create VSO account. There you shall be able to see the Visual Studio Online in left hand navigation bar. Click on it. A page will appear asking you to create new or link existing VSO account. Pick up the name of your VSO account and link it!

 

Enable VSO for an Azure Web Site

You have to enable VSO for each Azure Web Site you want to edit. This can be achieved by navigating to the target Azure Web Site inside the Azure Management Portal. Then go to Configure. Scroll down and find “Edit Site in Visual Studio Online” and switch this setting to ON. Wait for the operation to complete!

Edit the Web Site in VSO

Once the Edit in VSO is enabled for you web site, navigate to the dashboard for this Web Site in Windows Azure Management Portal. A new link will appear in the right hand set of links “Edit this Web Site”:

The VSO IDE is protected with your deployment credentials (if you don’t know what is your deployment credentials, please take a few minutes to read through this article).

And there you go – your Web Site, your IDE, your Browser! What? You said that I forgot to deploy my site first? Well. Visual Studio Online is Visual Studio Online. So you can do “File –> New” and it works! Oh, yes it works:

Every change you make here is immediately (in real-time) reflected to the site! This is ultimate, the fastest way to troubleshoot issues with your JavaScript / CSS / HTML (Views). And, if you were doing PHP/Node.js – just edit your files on the fly and see changes in real-time! No need to re-deploy, re-package. No need to even have IDE installed on your machine – just a modern Browser! You can edit your site even from your tablet!

Where is the catch?

Oh, catch? What do you mean by “Where is the catch”? The source control? There is integrated GIT support! You can either link your web-site to a Git (GitHub / VSO project with GIT-based Source Control), or just do work with local GIT repository. The choice is really yours! And now you have fully integrated source control over your changes!

Running Java Jetty server on Azure with AzureRunMe

The AzureRunMe project exists for a while. There are a lot of commercial projects (Java, Python, and others) running on Azure using it. The most common scenario for running Java on Azure uses Apache Tomcat server. Let's see how can we use Jetty to run our Java application in a Cloud Service.

Frist we will need a Visual Studio. Yep … there are still options for our deployment (such as size of the Virtual Machine to name one) which require recompilation of the whole package and are not just configuration options. But, you can use the free Express version (I think you will need both for Web and for Windows Desktop versions). And yes, it is absolutely free and you can use it to build your AzureRunMe package for Azure deployment. Along with Visual Studio, you have to also install the latest version (or the latest supported by the AzureRunMe project) of Windows Azure SDK for .NET.

Then get the latest version of AzureRunMe from GirHub. Please go through the Readme to get to know the AzreRunMe project overall.

Next is to get the JRE for Windows ZIP package. If you don't have it already on your computer, you have to download it from Oracle's site (no direct link supported because Oracle wants you to accept license agreement first). I got the Server JRE version. Have the ZIP handy.

Now let's get Jetty. The version I got is 9.0.5.

Now get hands dirty.

Create a folder structure similar to the following one:

As per AzureRunMe requirements – my application is prepared to run from a single folder. I have java-1.7, jetty-9.0.5 and runme.bat into that folder. To prepare my application for AzureRunMe I create two zip files:

• java-1.7.zip – the Java folder as is
• jetty-9.0.5.zip – contains both runme.bat + jetty-9.0.5 folder

I also have put a WAR file of my application into jetty's webapps folder. It will later be automatically deployed by the Jetty engine itself. I then upload these two separate ZIP files into a blob container of my choice (for the example I named it deploy). Content of the runme.bat file is as simple as that:

@echo off
REM Starting Jetty with depolyed app
cd jetty-9.0.5
..\java-1.7\jre\bin\java -jar start.jar jetty.port=8080

It just starts the jetty server.

Now let's jump to Visual Studio to create the package. Once you've installed Visual Studio and downloaded the latest version of AzureRunMe, you have to open the AzureRunme.sln file (Visual Studio Solution file). Usually just double click on that file and it will automatically open with Visual Studio. There are very few configuration settings you need to set before you create your package. Right click on the WorkerRole item which is under AzureRunMe:

This will open the Properties pages:

In the first page we configure the number of Virtual Machines we want running for us, and their size. One more option to configure – Diagnostics Connection String. Here just replace YOURACCOUNTNAME and YOURACCOUNTKEY with respective values for Azure Storage Account credentials.

Now move to the Settings tab:

Here we have to set few more things:

• Packages: the most important one. This is semicolon (;) separated list of packages to deploy. Packages are downloaded and unzipped in the order of appearance in the list. I have set two packages (zip files that I have created earlier): deploy/java-1.7.zip;deploy/jetty-9.0.5.zip
• Commands: this again a semicolon (;) separated list of batch files or single commands to execute when everything is ready. In my case this is the runme.bat file, which was in jetty-9.0.5.zip package.
• Update storage credentials to 3 different places.

For more information and description of each setting, please refer to AzureRunMe project's documentation.

Final step. Right click on AzureRunMe item with the cloud icon and select "Create Package":

If everything is fine you shall get a nice set of files which you shall use to deploy your jetty server in Azure:

You can refer to the online documentation here, if you have doubts on how to deploy your cloud service package.

MSXML6 as Prerequisite for most of installations

I hate MSXML 6 !
Why
When I run setup of some "Visual Studio 2005" family softwares I got the error "MSXML6 could not be install, setup cannot continue". Then, when I go to Control panel I see "MSXML6 Parser". If I try to UNINSTALL it says "This action can be ... only for installed components" ... What the ?
Then a veeeryyyy useful post comes to be the only one that helped:
Aaron Stebner's WebLog.
For fast issue - first try: setup.exe /NO_BSLN_CHECK
It works on almost every Visual Studio family products, but unfortunately it does not work on SQL Server family products ...
So another workaround should be found for the SQL Family.