Bret Stateham's Blog

Windows Azure Cloud Services have some fantastic diagnostics capabilities that leverage those provided by Windows and the .NET Framework.

If you are creating a Web Role, and would like to be able to easily view trace information in the Compute Emulator during debug sessions on the local machine, you may find that the trace entries don’t appear by default. 

To fix the problem, you simply need to add an entry to your web.config inside the web project.

<configuration>
  <system.diagnostics>
    <trace>
      <listeners>

        <add type="Microsoft.ServiceHosting.Tools.DevelopmentFabric.Runtime.DevelopmentFabricTraceListener, Microsoft.ServiceHosting.Tools.DevelopmentFabric.Runtime, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
             name="DevFabricListener">
          <filter type="" />
        </add>

      </listeners>
    </trace>
  </system.diagnostics>
</configuration>

I’m really looking forward to my session tonight at the Inland Empire .NET User Group.  I’ll be talking about Windows Azure, and showing how to get started developing applications for the platform.  Whether you’re new to Azure, or even if you have been developing against it for a while, you are likely to learn something new here, or at least gain some perspective.

In another shocking advancement, I once again am posting my slides and demos BEFORE the event.  You can grab them here (10.6MB Download).

I just put the new November 10, 2011 (SDK v1.6) update of the Azure SDK tools down on my box and was attempting to walkthrough creating an Azure service by hand (not using Visual Studio).  I tried to run a very simple service using a ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file that looked like this:

When I did so I got a number of errors about missing settings:

<path>\ServiceConfiguration.cscfg: Error CloudService103 : The service configuration file does not provide a value for setting ‘?IsSimulationEnvironment?’ for role ‘HelloAzureSDK.Web’

<path>\ServiceConfiguration.cscfg: Error CloudService103 : The service configuration file does not provide a value for setting ‘?RoleHostDebugger?’ for role ‘HelloAzureSDK.Web’

<path>\ServiceConfiguration.cscfg: Error CloudService103 : The service configuration file does not provide a value for setting ‘?StartupTaskDebugger?’ for role ‘HelloAzureSDK.Web’

So it looks like it wants three configuration settings:

• ?IsSimulationEnvironment?
• ?RoleHostDebugger?
• ?StartupTaskDebugger?

I’ve poked around a bit in the docs, and done a few searches, but haven’t had any luck finding details on these items. They appear to be some settings used by the Compute Emulator DFUI.exe, but I haven’t dug much deeper into how they are used, or what appropriate values for them should be.  Regardless, I don’t think we need to define them.  

I looked at the new ServiceConfiguration.Local.cscfg file produced by the Azure project templates in Visual Studio, and didn’t see any of the settings mentioned in the errors message, however it does have a <ConfigurationSettings>…</ConfigurationSettings> element and my original configuration file didn’t. I tried just adding an empty <ConfigurationSettings /> element to my manually created ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file and it worked.