Configuring default page for azure service

Been playing around with Azure for a week or so now and I'm starting to get my head round it, to be honest it ain't that difficult. @RichGee & I are going to be deploying RESTful services into the cloud for our shiney ninja project and whilst we are spiking these out I wanted to be able to set the default page, you know something like 'default.html'.

Now this was easy when hosting a service in IIS, all you had to do was specify the default document types:

But in azure there isn't any visible way to access IIS from the management tools, you only have access to the 'Hosted Services' console:

I suppose you could remote onto the virtual box and set it up in IIS, but that feels overly complicated.

There must be any easier way?

There is if you are using asp.net, the element in the web.config. This allows you specify the default document at design time and will be injected into IIS when the web service\site is installed into IIS by azure:

More info can be found in MSDN here.

Comments

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 ...

Managing themes in WPF

Having just published Simple.Wpf.Terminal as a nuget package I wanted the ability to skin the user control - the more flexibility in the way it looks the more likely it will be used by other devs :) Before getting into the detail, lets look at the solution working in the test harness for my WPF F# REPL Engine , shown below are four different themes applied dynamically at run-time - no recompilation required to change the theme: Previously in larger WPF apps I've relied upon third-party control vendors like Telerik to provide theming support. Typically they provide good solutions to the problem with multiple themes supported as standard, and when you're already using their third party controls the use of their themes makes sense. But when you're developing a small UI component you don't want to add (& support) such a large footprint just to add themes to your niche control. A theme is a collection of Styles grouped into a ResourceDictionary in WPF. A ...

Awkward Coder

Search This Blog