Deploying Windows Azure Toolkit For Windows 8 Notification Service to the Cloud

If you have installed the Window Azure Toolkit For Windows 8 you may want to deploy it to a real live environment so that you can try out the notification service and start wiring useful Windows 8 applications. I assumed this was going to be a quick task, but it took me a little longer than expected. Firstly when you try and deploy the web application and service to Windows Azure it won’t just deploy out of the box. You need to sort out the certificates for SSL, Out of the box the certificates come as a cer file and Windows Azure only accepts pfx file so you will need to convert the file.  I set up the certificate and deployed to Azure but when I connected my windows 8 application to register for notifications I kept getting errors connecting to my registration service. After a number of attempts to connect I determined that it was an issue with the certificates. The Windows 8 application has an appmanifest file which contains the certificate information. I set this up as I thought was correct but I still could not get the application to talk to my Azure service. Running in the debugger didn’t seem to give me any error diagnostics. Eventually I found this article which provided me with a bit more detail as to what was required (I was doing most of what was suggested). A number of additional issues arose which slowed me down a bit further.

1. When creating a new certificate I needed to run the command prompt as administrator. On my computer my user account is not an administrator so when I created a new certificate. In order to export the certificate I needed to run the certmgr as administrator.

2. Selecting the certificate in Visual Studio to assign to the endpoint was also an issue as it is deployed as administrator so it didn’t seem to appear in the list. I found the certificate and then copied its thumbprint (converted it to uppercase letters) and pasted it into the thumbprint field in the certificate in the role properties.

The Azure application was then deployed to Azure and the new certificate added to the Windows 8 client as per the instructions in the article above.

You should now be able to login, upload images and send notifications.

Now that’s working I can start to build a proper notification service.