Debugging Azure
Folks, I've been running experiments for days now to get the hang of deploying and running WCF services and SQL databases in Azure. I have the database up and running fine. The service has a simple sanity check method that just returns a random number, and some other methods that return EF5 entities out of the Azure SQL database. All methods work perfectly in the Azure simulator, but when I deploy to Azure staging or production the simple method works but the database methods fail with a generic fault message with no diagnostic information. What tricks or techniques are available to debug what's happening on the Azure service side? Is anyone here using Azure for serious stuff? If so, your general advice would be welcome to help me get up-to-speed and save suffering. Thanks Greg P.S. I'm quite impressed with Azure generally and the nice management interface, but it sure is slow to deploy, and sometimes the first call to the service fails with no endpoint but a minute later it works, like it's waking up or something.
Re: Debugging Azure
I am hosting my SAAS app www.youreontime.com on Azure for the last couple of years, so someone is using it! I agree deployment is slow, it takes be 45-60 minutes to deploy. With the database error have you tried connecting directly to the SqlAzure database from your local machine to run the tests or are you connecting to a local database? There are some differences between SQLServer and SqlAzure that could catch you. On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:06 AM, Greg Keogh g...@mira.net wrote: Folks, I've been running experiments for days now to get the hang of deploying and running WCF services and SQL databases in Azure. I have the database up and running fine. The service has a simple sanity check method that just returns a random number, and some other methods that return EF5 entities out of the Azure SQL database. All methods work perfectly in the Azure simulator, but when I deploy to Azure staging or production the simple method works but the database methods fail with a generic fault message with no diagnostic information. What tricks or techniques are available to debug what's happening on the Azure service side? Is anyone here using Azure for serious stuff? If so, your general advice would be welcome to help me get up-to-speed and save suffering. Thanks Greg P.S. I'm quite impressed with Azure generally and the nice management interface, but it sure is slow to deploy, and sometimes the first call to the service fails with no endpoint but a minute later it works, like it's waking up or something.
Re: Debugging Azure
Hi Craig, All my tests connect to the SQL Azure DB. I'm using EF5 in a vanilla way, so that should keep me above sight of the differences in the real and Azure DBs. I am hitting some environmental difference in the production Azure environment, but WCF is hiding the error and reporting the generic failure exception, which it does by default. I remember years ago spending hours trying to get details errors back from WCF, but it never worked properly. I found it easier to run the server in the debugger and break on the problem, but I can't do that with the service in Azure. When I get home tonight I'll just keep web searching for advice on how to tackle this problem. Maybe there is Azure-side logging as well. Greg P.S. It will interesting to see how the Azure DB performs when I load it up with 150,000 rows in 20 tables. It's currently only got a dozen test rows.
