I created an asp.net mvc project in VS. I created an azure cloud service. Within the VS solution I added an azure project to enable me to publish to my cloud service. The cloud service has a web role and it’s published to a production environment. When I publish the project, I have my domain .cloudapp.net and I can then view my published project from a browser.
Job done. All good so far.
What I’m unclear on (and this is partly because my azure and asp.net mvc knowledge is limited) is where the project files actually reside (and the file/folder structure) and how to access them? I know they are on an IIS server somewhere but that’s about it.
With ‘traditional’ websites you have a webserver, a wwwroot folder and you stick your web pages etc into them and can see/access them through ftp etc.
Apart from wanting to know the answer to the above question I actually want to farm out the web ui (view) part to a web developer whilst I concentrate on the back end stuff. He doesn’t have visual studio so I’m unclear on how to best approach this?
I’ve noticed on the windows azure publish summary within my solution that you can enable remote desktop and enable web deploy which I suspect may be of help to me but as the solution is all working fine at the moment and I’m demoing it to a client tomorrow I’m a bit reluctant to make any last minute changes..as I’m sure we’ve all suffered the consequences of that before.
What I’m unclear on is where the project files actually reside
(and the file/folder structure) and how to access them?
As you have mentioned, these files reside on the server itself. If you connect to your server via Remote Desktop, you can see the files under D:\sitesroot folder (actual name of the folder can be found by launching IIS Manager on that server).
Having said that, it is not recommended to make changes to the files directly on the server. This is because if your server goes bad for any reason, Microsoft will provision a new server for you and it takes the code from the package file when you last deployed your application. This the changes you have made on that server will be lost.
Regarding your other question about having somebody focus on front-end development, I'm pretty sure you don't want him to working on production server directly. I'm assuming you have a centralized code repository somewhere where everybody checks in their code and then you build stuff and then deploy it.
Related
I'm new to web development so please be kind. Anyway, I'm writing a web page in visual web developer 2012 and have hit a roadblock. I've got lots more experience with writing console applications. When writing one of those and you build the application, the bin folder is populated with the files that are required to run the application, most notable the .exe . But when I build the page all I get is .cshtml files, which when opened all it does is open the code in my web browser. I tried to get an answer on another web site but all that i got was "open it up on a web server". That doesn't make any sense to me. Please help.....
You open the project locally on your workstation, as you would any other project. But when you're ready to publish the project you would send it to a web server.
Visual Web Developer (being akin to Visual Studio, no?) should have a small built-in web server of some sort which it uses when you execute your project in debug mode. (There are more details than that, but that statement alone should be true enough to get you debugging.) That's fine for ongoing development work, but not for the resulting production application.
Analogous to installing a console application on a target workstation, you would need to publish your web application to a web server. This server may coincidentally by the same workstation on which you develop the code, but that's not a requirement.
A "web server" in this case can be one of many things. Your computer (running IIS, most likely), a server hosted somewhere, a service in the cloud, etc. And "publishing" could mean any number of things as well. Uploading the files, using built-in publishing tools in the IDE, even just committing the files to source control and allowing an automated publish service to fetch them (I do this a lot in Azure web sites).
Ultimately, the way you execute a web application that's been published isn't by double-clicking on a file anywhere. The .cshtml files, as well as any other needed files (binaries, config files, images, style sheets, etc.) are stored on a web server somewhere and you would "run" the application by making a request to that web server, which takes the form of browsing to a URL in your web browser.
I have been trying to get Umbraco working in a web role environment (web services) in Azure, but the site errors when you try and access it, saying that config/trees.config is not accessible.
These are the steps i carried out:
Create a new empty MVC4 project in Visual Studio 2013
Install Umbraco v7.1.8 from nuget
Run up and configure using a new azure SQL database.
Added in the umbraco folders to the solution.
Added an azure web services project to the solution.
Added the existing MVC umbraco project to the azure role profiles.
Published to Azure staging area.
The site starts up with the usual 'Looks like there is still work to do' screen in the full Azure emulator in visual studio with multiple role instances. However fails to run up when hosted in Azure.
I am currently assuming that the issue is that the site root does not have write access when hosted in Azure, so the IIS worker process cannot write to the trees.config file.
I found an article where you can add a 'startup.bat' file, with the following:
echo "starting startup task" >> log.txt
%windir%\system32\Icacls.exe .. \* /T /grant "Network Service":(F) > log.txt
But this stops the role instances for starting up at all in both the emulator and when hosting in azure.
Any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated
I would suggest using a VM instead of a web role for hosting Umbraco in Azure, particularly since Umbraco is needing local write access to persist.
Web roles expect your application to be stateless, meaning no writing or persisting anything to the actual file system. This guarantee allows Azure to make certain assumptions so that it can load balance and scale the application correctly (it basically saves a master copy and then re-deploys it fresh as it scales up or makes updates, etc. This works great for web apps that were created with this in mind, but if not, then a VMs allows you to scale UP without worrying about your app needing to work a certain way to properly scale OUT under a load balancer (which is what web roles are made to help you do).
So, basically I would suggest installing to a Virtual Machine. It's still in the cloud, and you get all the cloud benefits of on-demand scaling of the infrastructure. In addition, I would expect Virtual Machines to be a supported install of Umbraco, where a web role install would not. Hope that helps!
I'm trying to deploy one of the default template apps that VS2012 generates for MVC4 to a production server (not on Azure).
It turns out that I'm not smart enough to figure out how to get Web Deploy working. After spending an hour on diagnosing different 404s, 403s, and 401s, I am ready to either ditch Web Deploy altogether, or start my project using PHP instead.
Can I just copy and paste my files and put them somewhere?
I'm fine with manually updating the database schema.
Anything else that needs to be updated?
You can publish directly to "File System" via "Publish" menu in VS (choose folder on production server). Then create WebApp on IIS with this folder (on the server) choose ApplicationPool 4.0 open port for your application if needed and start it.
What in the world makes you even think you need to use web deploy? You do realize that the web publishing wizard has several options to choose from, including FTP, file system, etc... I don't see how you could miss these.
I have to create sort of a .PST file based Web Mail.
I need to read all MailItems, Folders, Contacts and everything i can from PST files given by the user.
I am currently using DCOM interop to create a Application and use Session to add my file's stores.
My problem is that i can't even instantiate the Outlook.Application, the code simply doesn't run.
If i change to Visual Studio Development Web Server everything works as perfectly as expected, but if i change to local IIS Web Server.. nothing happens =/
What i did so far:
Set username and pass to impersonate on web.config
Set username and pass to inpersonate on my WebSite from iis -> Authentication -> ASP.NET impersonation
Added permissions to Everyone, Network Service, IIS_IUSRS, my user account in temp asp files, web site file and pst files i'm trying to read
Unfortunately I've already implemented all I need using TDD, so it would not be a good idea to change the way i'm doing this, like moving to NMapi or something.
Thanks in advance
EDIT:
As i've mentioned before, i I cannot use another library (and that one seems to work, but it's pretty expensive).
I only need this to run on a local server. It is a Web application, but for localhost ONLY.
It is not a good idea to use Outlook on the server side, as is described in detail here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757
Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support,
Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended,
non-interactive client application or component (including ASP,
ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable
behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.
Maybe have a look at http://www.independentsoft.de/pst/
I've a site that I'd like to publish to a co-located live server. I'm finding this simple task quite hard.
My problems begin with the Web Deploy tool (1.1) giving me a 401 Unauthorized as the adminstrator because port :8172 comes up in the errors and this port is blocked - but the documentation says "The default ListenURL is http://+:80/MsDeployAgentService"!
I'm loathe to open another port and I've little patience these days so I thought bu66er it, I'll create a Web Deploy package and import it into IIS on the server over RDP.
I notice first that Visual Studio doesn't use a dialog box to gather settings, or use my Publish profiles but seems to use a tab in the project properties, although I think these are ignored when importing the package anyway?
I'm now sitting in the import wizard with Application Path and Connection String. I've cleared the conn string as I think this is for some ASP stuff I don't use but when I enter nothing in the Application Path, the wizard barks at me saying that basically I'm a weirdo because most people publish to folders beneath the root site.
Now, I want my site to be site.com/Home/About and not site.com/subfolder/Home/About and I think being an MVC routed site that a subfolder will introduce other headaches. Should I go ahead and use the root?
Finally, I also want to publish a web service to www.site.com/services/soap which I think IIS can handle.
While typing this question, Amazon have delivered my IIS 7 Resource Kit, and I've been scouring the internet but actually I'm getting more confused.
Comment here seems to show consensus opinion that Publish isn't for production sites and that real men roll their own.
ASP.NET website 'Publish' vs Web Deployment Project
...I guess this was pre- Web Deployment Tool era?
I'm going to experiment on a spare box for now but any assistance is welcome.
Luke
UPDATE
The site was imported (to the root) manually with Web Deploy and it worked. If you get the error "There is a duplicate 'system.web.extensions/scripting/scriptResourceHandler' " its because your app pool is 4.0 and should be 2.0.
If you are using VS 2010, may I recommend Scott Hanselman's Web Debloyment Made Awesome?
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WebDeploymentMadeAwesomeIfYoureUsingXCopyYoureDoingItWrong.aspx
Even if you are using VS2008, there are nice concepts there that will probably help.
I've experienced the same frustration and trouble with this as well. Coming from a Java web background where we can package everything as a single WAR and toss it on the server, the deployment process with ASP.NET seems archaic.
I currently have a python script that uses FTP to transfer the needed files to my test instance on the remote server. I have another python script that transfers those files to my live site. These scripts are smart enough to take care of differences between some of the configuration files etc..
I've found it much easier than trying to setup permissions or using the Microsoft deploy tools.
Hi you can use filezilla software to upload