5 Tips for using Azure Web Jobs

1. Use public on the main program class.In order for web jobs to initialise correctly the main class that contains the web jobs needs to be made public. Once this has been added the individual jobs can then be read and should be visible in the output when running locally.

2. In order to store and view the invocation details for each web job you need to configure AzureWebJobsDashboard in the configure tab of the website you have deployed the web job to. Even if you have configured this in your app.config file.

If this is not configured in the website then you will receive the following error when you try and view the web jobs dashboard

3. Debug using Visual Studio. Once of the nice features of the web jobs SDK is the ability to run and debug the web job locally in Visual Studio. Following the Getting Started guide, you create a console application which you can debug in Visual Studio before deploying it to Azure

4. User TextWriter for debugging. The Azure Web Jobs SDK (see the logging section) provides a mechanism to log out information that can be viewed through the Azure Web jobs dashboard. By adding a TextWriter as an input parameter to your web job method, you can use WriteLine to then output information you wish to log.

5. Make your Blob Triggers more efficient by triggering them using BlobOutput. The mechanism that the BlobInput trigger uses has a 10-20 minute lag before the trigger can fire, but each time BlobOutput is used it triggers a rescan for Blob input.

“There is an optimization where any blob written via a [BlobOutput] (as opposed to being written by some external source) will optimistically check for any matching [BlobInputs],” See How does [BlobInput] work?. Storage Queues and Service Bus topics and Queues are generally processed within seconds so if you can use a queue to trigger a BlobOutput then use this to trigger any subsequent BlobInputs