@robdmoore

When you File -> New Project an ASP.NET application in Visual Studio and then F5 by default it will spin up IIS Express and navigate to the site for you.

IIS Express is pretty cool - it runs under your user account so no need to mess around with elevated privileges, it has most of the power of IIS (think web.config) and it “just works” out of the box without extra configuration needed across all dev machines :)

For projects that I work on every day though, I really dislike using IIS Express as a development server for the following reasons:

• It will randomly crash
• When it crashes I have to F5 or Ctrl+F5 in Visual Studio to restart it - I can’t just go to the last url it was deployed to (e.g. http://localhost:port/)
• If your code has an uncaught exception then a crash dialog pops up in your taskbar in a way that isn’t obvious and requires you to click a button until the code continues running (this can be very confusing)
• Setting up a custom domain is tricky to do, is a tedious manual process and can’t run on port 80 side-by-side with proper IIS
  • Using a custom domain is often essential too - think sharing cookies between domains or performing something like integrating with third parties where you need to provide a URL other than localhost

Part of the reason IIS Express exists is because setting up IIS with a site is not a trivial process. However, when you do eventually get it set up I usually find it works great from then on:

• It’s stable
• The URL is always available - you don’t have to use Visual Studio at all
• Uncaught exceptions behave as expected
• Custom domains are easy in both the IIS Manager GUI and via a variety of commandline options

In order to reduce the pain involved with setting up IIS I do two things:

• I modify my Visual Studio taskbar icon to always run as admin (necessary to open a project bound to IIS)
• I add a Developer Setup script to the project that developers must run once when they first clone the repository that sets up everything up for them in a matter of seconds (hopefully giving the same Open Solution -> F5 and start developinging experience)
  • I’ve added an example of such a script to a Gist - the script also includes setting up the hosts file and a SQL Express database
  • I can’t claim full credit for the script - it’s been a collaborative effort over a number of projects by all of the Readifarians I’ve worked with :D

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I recently worked on a Cordova project and one of the things we found is that it’s an absolute pain to set up a development environment since there is a whole bunch of tools that need to be downloaded and installed and configured in specific ways.

We ended up creating a page in our project’s OneNote notebook with developer setup instructions, but even though we were using Chocolatey it was still a tedious process with numerous console restarts to refresh environment variables (that had to be manually set).

In the process of writing a post on Cordova I wanted to check something and realised I had repaved my machine since the last time I installed the Android SDK / Cordova etc.

I consulted the OneNote page we had created and looked in despair at the instructions. What a PITA! So what did I do?

I spun up a Windows Azure VM and stumbled through creating a PowerShell script to automate the setup. Then I spun up a second VM to check that the script worked :). Then I deleted both of them - probably cost a few cents and the servers had a really fast download speed so the installations were really quick. God I love the cloud :D

I’ve uploaded it to a Gist. If you are setting up a PhoneGap/Cordova & Android development environment then I’m sure it will be useful to you.

Enjoy!

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tl;dr 99% of the time Worker Role is not the right solution. Read on for more info.

Worker Role Deployments

I quite often get asked by people about the best way to deploy Worker Roles because it is a pain - as an Azure Cloud Service the deployment time of a Worker Role is 8-15+ minutes. In the age of continuous delivery and short feedback loops this is unacceptable (as I have said all along).

On the surface though, Worker Roles are the most appropriate and robust way to deploy heavy background processing workloads in Azure. So what do we do?

Web Jobs

The advice I generally give people when deploying websites to Azure is to use Azure Web Sites unless there is something that requires them to use Web Roles (and use Virtual Machines as a last resort). That way you are left with the best possible development, deployment, debugging and support experience possible for your application.

Now that Web Jobs have been released for a while and have a level of maturity and stability I have been giving the same sort of advice when it comes to background processing: if you have a workload that can run on the Azure Web Sites platform (e.g. doesn’t need registry/COM+/GDI+/elevated privileges/custom software installed/mounted drives/Virtual Network/custom certificates etc.) and it doesn’t have intensive CPU or memory resource usage then use Web Jobs.

I should note that when deploying Web Jobs you can deploy them automatically using the WebJobsVs Visual Studio extension.

As a side note: some of my colleagues at Readify have recently started using Web Jobs as a platform for deploying Microservices in asynchronous messaging based systems. It’s actually quite a nice combination because you can put any configuration / management / monitoring information associated with the micro-service in the web site portion of the deployment and it’s intrinsically linked to the Web Job in both the source code and the deployment.

Worker Roles

If you are in a situation where you have an intense workload, you need to scale the workload independently  of your Web Sites instances or your workload isn’t supported by the Azure Web Sites platform (and thus can be run as a Web Job) then you need to start looking at Worker Roles or some other form of background processing.

Treat Worker Roles as infrastructure

One thing that I’ve been trying to push for a number of years now (particularly via my AzureWebFarm and AzureWebFarm.OctopusDeploy projects) is for people to think of Cloud Services deployments as infrastructure rather than applications.

With that mindset shift, Cloud Services becomes amazing rather than a deployment pain:

• Within 8-15+ minutes a number of customised, RDP-accessible, Virtual Machines are being provisioned for you on a static IP address and those machines can be scaled up or down at any time and they have health monitoring and diagnostics capabilities built-in as well as a powerful load balancer and ability to arbitrarily install software or perform configurations with elevated privileges!
• To reiterate: waiting 8-15+ minutes for a VM to be provisioned is amazing; waiting 8-15+ minutes for the latest version of your software application to be deployed is unacceptably slow!

By treating Cloud Services as stateless, scalable infrastructure you will rarely perform deployments and the deployment time is then a non-issue - you will only perform deployments when scaling up or rolling out infrastructure updates (which should be a rare event and if it rolls out seamlessly then it doesn’t matter how long it takes).

Advantages of Web/Worker Roles as infrastructure

• As above, slow deployments don’t matter since they are rare events that should be able to happen seamlessly without taking out the applications hosted on them.
• As above, you can use all of the capabilities available in Cloud Services.
• Your applications don’t have to have a separate Azure project in them making the Visual Studio solution simpler / load faster etc.
• Your applications don’t have any Azure-specific code in them (e.g. CloudConfiguationManager, RoleEnvironment, RoleEntryPoint, etc.) anymore
  • This makes your apps simpler and also means that you aren’t coding anything in them that indicates how/where they should be deployed - this is important and how it should be!
  • It also means you can deploy the same code on-premise and in Azure seamlessly and easily

How do I deploy a background processing workload to Worker Role as infrastructure?

So how does this work you might ask? Well, apart from rolling your own code in the Worker Role to detect, deploy and run your application(s) (say, from blob storage) you have two main options that I know of (both of which are open source projects I own along with Matt Davies):

• AzureWebFarm and its background worker functionality
  • This would see you deploying the background work as part of MSDeploying a web application and it works quite similar to (but admittedly probably less robust than) Web Jobs - this is suitable for light workloads
• AzureWebFarm.OctopusDeploy and using OctopusDeploy to deploy a Windows Service
  • In general I recommend using Topshelf to develop Windows Services because it allows a nicer development experience (single console app project that you can F5) and deployment experience (you pass an install argument to install it)
  • You should be able to deploy heavyweight workloads using this approach (just make sure your role size is suitable)

The thing to note about both of these approaches is that you are actually using Web Roles, not Worker Roles! This is fine because there isn’t actually any difference between them apart from the fact that Web Roles have IIS installed and configured. If you don’t want anyone to access the servers over HTTP because they are only used for background processing then simply don’t expose a public endpoint.

So, when should I actually use Worker Roles (aka you said they aren’t applicable 99% of the time - what about the other 1%)?

OK, so there is definitely some situations I can think of and have come across before occasionally that warrant the application actually being coded as a Worker Role - remember to be pragmmatic and use the right tool for the job! Here are some examples (but it’s by no means exhaustive):

• You need the role to restart if there are any uncaught exceptions
• You need the ability to control the server as part of the processing - e.g. request the server start / stop
• You want to connect to internal endpoints in a cloud service deployment or do other complex things that require you to use RoleEnvironment
• There isn’t really an application-component (or it’s tiny) - e.g. you need to install a custom application when the role starts up and then you invoke that application in some way

What about Virtual Machines?

Sometimes Cloud Services aren’t going to work either - in a scenario where you need persistent storage and can’t code your background processing code to be stateless via RoleEntryPoint then you might need to consider standing up one or more Virtual Machines. If you can avoid this at all then I highly recommend it since you then need to maintain the VMs rather than using a managed service.

Other workloads

This post is targeted at the types of background processing workloads you would likely deploy to a Worker Role. There are other background processing technologies in Azure that I have deliberately not covered in this post such as Hadoop.

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I’ve blogged previously about using GitHubFlowVersion for versioning and how I created a TeamCity meta-runner for it.

A lot has happened since then in that space and that has been nicely summarised by my friend Jake Ginnivan. tl;dr GitHubFlow version has been merged with the GitFlowVersion project to form GitVersion.

This project is totally awesome and I highly recommend that you use it. In short:

GitVersion uses your git repository branching conventions to determine the current Semantic Version of your application. It supports GitFlow and the much simpler GitHubFlow.

I’ve gone ahead and developed a much more comprehensive TeamCity meta-runner for GitVersion and I’ve submitted it to the TeamCity meta-runner PowerPack. This meta-runner allows you to use GitVersion without needing to install any binaries on your build server or your source repository - it automatically downloads it from Chocolatey :)

Happy building!

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I’d like to announce that today I’ve released v1.0.0 of the ReliableDbProvider library. It’s been kicking around for a while, has a reasonable number of downloads on NuGet and has just received a number of bug fixes from the community so I feel it’s ready for the 1.0.0 badge :).

ReliableDbProvider is a library that allows you to unobtrusively handle transient errors when connecting to Azure SQL Database when using ADO.NET, Linq 2 Sql, EntityFramework < 6 (EF6 has similar functionality in-built) or any library that uses ADO.NET (e.g. Massive).

Check it out on GitHub.

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