We recently moved a web application into Windows Azure that was using session state. As it was running on a single webserver the session state was set to InProc but this is not useful when in a multi-server environment as the session is stored on the specific machine and is therefore not accessible to other machines. …

This week we had a very useful side effect of using the Window Azure Service bus. We have an Azure hosted website that connects to a CRM backend using the service bus in relay mode to communicate between the two systems. We had a test system that worked fine but when we moved to a Live system we had a configuration …

A new release of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is available here The release adds the following features: Profile applications running in Windows Azure. Create ASP.Net MVC3 Web Roles. Manage multiple service configurations in one cloud project. Improved validation of Windows Azure packages. The Windows …

When trying to access the Azure Storage SDK in a non-Azure application I kept getting the following error: “The type or namespace name 'WindowsAzure' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft' (are you missing an assembly reference?) “ References to Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime and …

Recently I was helping out at the Azure Bootcamp in London and during the labs a common theme kept occurring when the labs were deployed to a real Azure account. The roles failed to run and it appeared that the deployment was taking forever. This is something I experienced first hand when I was starting out with Azure. …

If you are an MSDN subscriber (Ultimate or Premium) you now get more Windows Azure resources. Professional subscribers are now also included in the promotion. See here for more details. If you have already taken up this offer and you are an MSDN Premium subscriber then you will automatically be upgraded to the MSDN …

Moving to Windows Azure is not as difficult as you might think. Using a basic MVC 2.0 web application created in Visual Studio 2010, the Azure tools within Visual Studio enable you to migrate the web side really easily. Load your MVC 2.0 application into Visual Studio and right click on the solution in Solution …

I suddenly started to get a CommunicationObjectFaultedException after I checked my azure code in to TFS I could get it working by editing the web.config file manually, but it didn’t seem to matter what I actually changed!! It was the act of editing the web.config file that made it writable and it could therefore be …

After updating the TFS 2010 client from Beta2 to RC on my SharePoint development machine I found that I couldn’t control IIS using IISRESET, with a message usually of the following format… Attempting stop… Stop attempt failed. The system cannot find the file specified. (214794202, 80070002) As anyone who does …

Working with SharePoint, sometimes you just have to install assemblies to the GAC. An example of this I have had to deal with recently was writing a webpart to access methods in the UserProfileManager class. Debugging GAC installed assemblies can be a bit frustrating, hopefully the following steps will make it alot …