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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.










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Comments

  1. Don Glover (AzureDocGuy) - MSFT9 March 2012 at 01:53

    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.

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