Skip to main content

Azure - what a disappointing developer experience...

Okay so I am new to Azure and it's way of thinking, but it seems certain developer tasks are just the biggest PITA I've experienced in a long time.

So I'm able to get a web stack up and running in Azure pretty quickly, I can follow what's going on and I'm starting to feel comfortable. I've got a wcf web api running smoothly and it's rendering via html & javascript using backbone.js (which is awesome!). I've even got an embedded RavenDB instance running as a the persistent storage for the back-end. All this was straight forward and an interesting experience, but then I tried to add some logging and this is where I'm starting to despair at the complexity and configuration required.

The first issue is really around the idea of logging & diagnostics not being configured by default when you create an Azure project - REALLY? I thought the idea of logging was pretty standard task for all most applications by default, I must be wrong.

Secondly and this is what really annoys me is when you've got the configuration wrong and it throws an exception like this - WTF!


I mean 'error' as the message in the exception is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. I've got any idea the issue is with trying to run this in the compute emulator and the fact there isn't a RoleEnvironment when used in the emulator.

I hope I've got the wrong end of the stick completely with this, otherwise this is a big dissappointment - reminds me of the nightmare you use to get with wcf xml configuration files.










Comments

  1. I see that you appear to be having difficulty with configuring the logging and diagnostics for you project. Did you get it resolved? If not you may find the "Windows Azure Diagnostics" entry in the Designing More Supportable Windows Azure Services section (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh771389.aspx#bkmk_DesignWinAzureSvcs ) of the "Troubleshooting Best Practices for Developing Windows Azure Applications" topic helpful.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Implementing a busy indicator using a visual overlay in MVVM

This is a technique we use at work to lock the UI whilst some long running process is happening - preventing the user clicking on stuff whilst it's retrieving or rendering data. Now we could have done this by launching a child dialog window but that feels rather out of date and clumsy, we wanted a more modern pattern similar to the way <div> overlays are done on the web. Imagine we have the following simple WPF app and when 'Click' is pressed a busy waiting overlay is shown for the duration entered into the text box. What I'm interested in here is not the actual UI element of the busy indicator but how I go about getting this to show & hide from when using MVVM. The actual UI elements are the standard Busy Indicator coming from the WPF Toolkit : The XAML behind this window is very simple, the important part is the ViewHost. As you can see the ViewHost uses a ContentPresenter element which is bound to the view model, IMainViewModel, it contains 3 child v...

Showing a message box from a ViewModel in MVVM

I was doing a code review with a client last week for a WPF app using MVVM and they asked ' How can I show a message from the ViewModel? '. What follows is how I would (and have) solved the problem in the past. When I hear the words ' show a message... ' I instantly think you mean show a transient modal message box that requires the user input before continuing ' with something else ' - once the user has interacted with the message box it will disappear. The following solution only applies to this scenario. The first solution is the easiest but is very wrong from a separation perspective. It violates the ideas behind the Model-View-Controller pattern because it places View concerns inside the ViewModel - the ViewModel now knows about the type of the View and specifically it knows how to show a message box window: The second approach addresses this concern by introducing the idea of messaging\events between the ViewModel and the View. In the example ...

WPF tips & tricks: Dispatcher thread performance

Not blogged for an age, and I received an email last week which provoked me back to life. It was a job spec for a WPF contract where they want help sorting out the performance of their app especially around grids and tabular data. I thought I'd shared some tips & tricks I've picked up along the way, these aren't probably going to solve any issues you might be having directly, but they might point you in the right direction when trying to find and resolve performance issues with a WPF app. First off, performance is something you shouldn't try and improve without evidence, and this means having evidence proving you've improved the performance - before & after metrics for example. Without this you're basically pissing into the wind, which can be fun from a developer point of view but bad for a project :) So, what do I mean by ' Dispatcher thread performance '? The 'dispatcher thread' or the 'UI thread' is probably the most ...