My previous post showed how to create a simple asp.net application that runs on the local development fabric. This post, as promised, will follow up and show how to move your application into the azure services cloud.
The first think you need to do is go into the azure services developer portal and create a new project.
Select the 'New Project' link, and you will be taken to the new project page. Note that you will have to have claimed your token(s) to be able to select the items on the following page:
Click on the 'Hosted Services' item, and you will be taken to a page that allows you to create a new project:
Next will take you to a form that allows you to specify the name of the service, but is really just the DNS name that will be assigned to the web app when in production:
When that is complete, you will be taken back to the main page which will have changed its look to be as follows:
What this is showing is that for the project that we just created, we have two places to run it, a staging environment, and a production environment. This is actually quite nice to have as it will allow you to upload and test prior to going live.
So, we have a place in the cloud for our app. Now how do we get it into the cloud? Click on deploy underneath the staging graphic, and you will see a form as follows, that allows you to specify your two service configuration files that you used in visual studio (but after publishing them from vs.net):
The files I specified were a result of publishing from vs.net using the 'Publish' menu item. This will create these packages, open the azure portal, and open an explorer folder where the files are located.
When pressing the deploy button, you will be presented with a dialog telling you the files are being copied:
And when the copy is complete, you will be taken back to the main page where you will be show that your package is deploying:
Upon completion of the deployment you will be presented with options for managing your staging environment. At this point, we want to press the run button to start the application (this will spin for a few minutes):
When that is complete, you'll see something like this:
You can now run the app by clicking on the given link:
Voila!
Notice also that you now have the option to move the solution to deployment, where it can be accessed with a production URL. We'll pass on the option for now.
Right now this app is not very useful as it has no ability to store data, either files or in a database. My next post should be on starting to use the data storage facilities of azure to enable these features.