ServiceConfiguration

Last week, spoke about ServiceDefinition file and now itz about ServiceConfiguration.csdef file. Letz ellaborate XML elements of this cloud configuration file.

The root element ServiceConfiguration has only one attribute, namely serviceName. The serviceName attribute is mandatory element in ServiceConfiguration file. If you omit this attribute, Visual Studio is going to complain about your XML during compilation. The name of the service must match the name of the service in the service definition.

ServiceConfiguration element can have only Role elements as children. Because the only role we have is ASP.NET Web role, we can see only one Role element. In case our project contained another role the Service Configuration file would reflect this fact.

Role element also has a single name attribute which is required. The name attribute represents the name of the service and must match the name of the service in the service definition defined in the WebRole element. The Role element can have three children elements: Instances, ConfigurationSettings and Certificates. In the attached snap, the number of cloud instance is makred as 1. Certificates are related to the security methodology followed in the related cloud app.

Looking at our ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file we can see that it contains ConfigurationSettings and Instances elements.

ServiceDefinition.csdef

Couple of weeks back, wrote abt hello world program. Letz open it. Under roles, therez a entry called HelloAzure_WebRole. On opening it, the configuration contains Instances section with count, vmsize. After updating the details,open ServiceDefinition.csdef file

The service model is determined by the settings listed in the ServiceDefinition.csdef file and configured in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file. The definition file is packaged with the role binaries when the application is prepared for deployment. The ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file is deployed with the package and is used by Windows Azure to determine how the application should run.

By defining settings in the ServiceDefinition.csdef file, you can define the roles and resources for an application. An application that runs as a hosted service in Windows Azure implements one or more instances of the available role types. Within Windows Azure, running instances of a role are replicated across multiple computers to implement all or part of the functionality of the hosted service.

In our cloud app, the instance count setup is get reflected in csdef file as attached.

Cloud trend in business

Cloud computing isn’t a technology, or even a set of technologies. It is a newly understood paradigm for approaching application delivery. This is why every vendor you can think of has been saying for the past two years that it has cloud products. Itz not invention; but discovery of 1970s time shares methodology with enrichment. We just didn’t put them in the wider context of the global communications network. Now we do.

We do anticipate ongoing centralization. For example, today’s ERP cloud will become tomorrow’s ERP-human resource management cloud, and the day after tomorrow’s corporate private cloud for general company use. The biggest share of dedicated private cloud budgets today comes from hardware investment as indicated in the graph.Nearly all organizations have hardware as part of their private cloud budget, closely followed by software products.

Organization and management become critical issues. And this need for staffing is an ongoing cost, not something you can write off after startup. Much of cloud spending is drawn—and will continue to be drawn—out of non-cloud budgets. This is a perfect example of how cloud computing functions as a framework for building corporate service strategies, rather than serving as a technology unto itself.

Get ready folks into cloud gear via Microsoft certification 70-583 of Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications.

Friendship

This week blog is not about tech cloud; but friendship cloud. When cloud merges, itz joy of rain. On friends merger, itz joy of true love.

After the last year successful get together (http://ganesansenthilvel.blogspot.com/2010/05/gettogether.html) of friends+families, professors, principal, we decided to have the family reunion for 2 days in well-planned manner. The highly expected enthusiastic days came on 2011-May 1st weekend. We had nice time at beach home with lots of fun, teasing, memories, etc. Every homemakers jumped to kitchen for true team food work. kids had undisturbed out door games, swimming, etc. with lot of free environment. Our friends recollected the old days incidents, which couldn't share for years; our ventilated session on Sat night at terrace.

No ego, no expectation, no politics, no vengeance - among true non-sinking friendship. When we played cricket with old stories, itz thrilling/interesting knowledge for our kids. We didn't miss each sec for the cherish moment. Awesome collabrative effort by every friend. Hats off to them!

As the outcome, all homemakers planned to gather in an year without hubbies! Kids wished to continue to have the meet annually. For our friends, back to history of college days! Net to net, itz one of lovely/remembering moment in our life records.

Closure quote is: Friendship is like money, easier made than kept. Count your age by friends.

HelloWorld

After last 3 weeks environment related settings, we are ready to make our hands dirty on creating Azure code. Isn’t it cool !!!

Since 1987 of my higher secondary computer lesson (proud to be earlier computer students in India), we used to learn the computer language using the famous ‘Hello World’ program right from quick basic, fortran, cobol, pascal, lisp, c, c++, vc++, java, c#, etc. Same old coding formulae/masala!

After the proper installations of VS2010, AzureSDK, IIS, etc. the hello azure application is created in few seconds with the built-in wizard navigation. Quite simple steps to create the first azure application with the above set up:

1. Launch Visual Studio 2010 as administrator.


2. Click File New Project, from the Visual C# installed Cloud templates.


3. Create Windows Azure Project with the solution name ‘HelloAzure’.


4. Thatz it; just click OK to launch a wizard.


5. From the wizard, add the ASP.NET Web Role in C# with ‘HelloAzure_WebRole’.


6. Run it (Ctrl+F5) and got the output ‘Hello Azure Application’.

Next week, I’ll talk about the interesting topic on Emulators in Azure development platform. Now, letz have a deep dive in the auto generated code piece (in the snap shot). Itz a simple web role (web application) and so 2 projects within the solution namely HelloAzure_WebRole and HelloAzure.

The first project HelloAzure_Webrole is quite simple like other ASP .NET application, comprises of site.master, global.asax, web.config, App_Data, Default.aspx, etc. One new entity is ‘WebRole.cs’ which is the entry point for Azure web role app as public class WebRole : RoleEntryPoint HelloAzure project is new concept. It contains three major components. A) HelloAzure_WebRole configuration, b) ServiceDefinition.csdef and c) ServiceConfiguration.cscfg They are the discussion points for next blog entry. Until then, happy cloud coding!

aspnet_regiis

After IIS setup, machine throws an error 0xc0000005. Haa, herez the solution.. aspnet_regiis tool.

If you install the .NET Framework on a system that has IIS already installed, IIS is automatically configured to handle requests to ASP.NET pages, and to redirect the execution to the ASP.NET runtime. However, it may happen that you installed the framework on a Windows system where IIS was not already present, and just later decided to add IIS. Registering ASP.NET on IIS is not just a matter of associating the various .aspx, .asmx, .axd, .ashx and the other ASP.NET extensions to the aspnet_isapi.dll ISAPI, more has to be done to create the ASP.NET account and to set it for ASP.NET requests, register the ISAPI itself and other stuff. Doing all this manually can be a difficult operation, and requires a good understanding of many details. Fortunately there is an utility, shipped with the .NET Framework but not documented, that can take care of these configuration chores for you. The utility is aspnet_regiis.exe, it is located under %WindowsDir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\vx.y.zzzz\ and you should call it with the -i parameter: aspnet_regiis.exe -i

The installation of .NET Framework and registration of the Framework in ISS needs some steps like script mapping: assotiation of different .NET specitical extensions. The installation can run without the step (switch -ir), but it has more sense to skip the steps only if a previous version of ASP.NET is already registered with IIS. Exactly this do aspnet_regiis.exe -iru. If no previous version of ASP.NET is registered with IIS, then aspnet_regiis.exe -iru do make all registrations in IIS and work like aspnet_regiis.exe -i. If do a previous version of ASP.NET is already registered in IS the aspnet_regiis.exe -iru work like aspnet_regiis.exe -ir. The usage of the -u parameter "uninstalls the version of ASP.NET that is associated with the ASP.NET IIS Registration tool from the computer. Existing script maps to this version of the ASP.NET ISAPI are automatically remapped to the most recent remaining ASP.NET ISAPI version installed."

Web server setup

IIS 7 is the Web server used in Windows 7. IIS 7 has a completely modular setup design that enables control over the footprint of a Web server. IIS can be easily configured via Start->Control Panel->Programs ->Programs and Features ->Turn Windows features on or off.

Next important step is to understand the significance of each IIS option. It helps us to configure IIS for Azure development platform.

FTP Publishing Service: Installs File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Service and FTP management console. Provides support for upload and download of files.

Web Server Management Tools: Installs Web server management console and tools. It contains IIS Management Console, IIS Management scripts Tools and Management Service

Application Development Features: Installs support for application development such as ASP.NET, Classic ASP, CGI, and ISAPI extensions.

Common HTTP Features: Installs support for static Web server content such as HTML & image files, custom errors, and redirection.

Health & Diagnostics: Enables you to monitor and manage server, site, and application health such as HTTP Logging, Request Monitor, Tracing, etc.

Performance Features: Static Content Compression and Dynamic Content Compression before returning it to a client.

Security: Enables additional security protocols to secure servers, sites, applications, vdirs, and files such as Windows Authentication, Client Certificate Mapping Authentication, etc.

For cloud app development, I enabled Web Management Tools->IIS Management Console and all Application Development & Common HTTP Features. Apart from these, Request Filtering and Windows Authentication of Security + Static Content Compression of Performance Features. My dev box setup is attached as the snapnshot.