Shiju Varghese's Blog

NPM - Package Manager for Node.js

In this post, I will demonstrate how to building  Node.js apps using Cloud9 IDE ad deploying Node.js apps to Windows Azure from the Cloud9 IDE.  Cloud9 IDE is a cross-platform, browser-based development environment for JavaScript and Node.js apps which is integrates with GitHub and BitBucket repository services. Cloud9 IDE is the most popular developer tool among the Node developers. Since Cloud9 IDE is working and running on the browser, developers can work from any OS platform. Using with Cloud IDE, you can build and deploy Node.js apps to Windows Azure. The Cloud9 IDE can access from http://c9.io/. Cloud9 IDE provides a free subscription as well as a paid subscription with more features.

I have upgraded my EFMVC app from ASP.NET MVC 3 to ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta. EFMVC is a demo web app initially built for demonstrating ASP.NET MVC and EF Code First. Now I am planning to add more features onto EFMVC and want to add cloud specific features with Windows Azure. You can expect more implementations in future releases.

Microsoft has announced the availability of ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta. You can get the all details on ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta at http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc4. The greatest new feature of ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta is the addition of ASP.NET Web API which lets the developers to build REST based services which can be easily consume from variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. These HTTP services are ideal for clients which are building by using Ajax and following a highly responsive UI.

Microsoft has reduced the price of SQL Azure storage which will greatly attract customers to migrating their apps to Windows Azure. The newly announced  price of SQL Azure decreases 48 percentages to 75 percentages of cost from the previous cost.

 The following are the few important steps and tips for migrating ASP.NET apps to Windows Azure.

In this post, I will demonstrate a Windows Azure app using Azure Queue, Azure Table and a ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Role application. This post is explaining few initial steps for building a demo Azure app where asynchronous commands (write operations that changes the data) put into Azure Queue and an Azure Work Role will persist the data into Azure Table from Queue messages for the read operations. The source code is available from http://azurehack.codeplex.com/ .The demo application will modify and add more functionality on later.

Windows Azure supports startup tasks that can be use to perform operations and install components before your Azure Role starts on Virtual Server. You can use to startup tasks to install other software, register COM components, setting registry keys, start another process, etc. This is very useful in many situations where you might want to running an initialization scripts, execute batch files and PowerShell scripts etc before your Role starts. In the past, I had used a startup task to install ASP.NET MVC 3 when ASP.NET MVC 3 web role was not supported. You can add startup tasks by editing the ServiceDefinition.csdef file. The below configuration in the Service Definition  file will add a startup task.