A client is looking into redeveloping their classic asp website to MVC4 and hosting on Azure.
The problem is that they have a massive suite of classic asp reports that they would like to keep using. They will want to continue adding and amending the classic asp scripts more or less like they do at the moment – which is via ftp.
I know that classic asp can be enabled within Azure. My issue is how in a multi-instance environment can a classic asp developer (with no .NET or Azure knowledge) upload new scripts to Azure without having to upload the whole Azure application. Could he possible upload to blob storage and I could pull the new scripts in to local storage? If that’s possible can those scripts be made web accessible?
Many Thanks,
Neil
It is fairly easy achievable, but requires a little extra work on your (the MVC/Azure dev) side.
First is to upload all classic ASP files in a blob container. There are various free and paid tools which can help you with that. Next, you can let your classic ASP devs edit the files and upload to the blob itself.
Next comes the hard-core work from your side. You can extend the RoleEntryPoint class and add your implementation as part of your project. In that class, you have a Run method, which shall never exit, thus the
while(true)loop.Within that infinite loop, you can decide to sleep for like 1, or 5, or 10 minutes. Next on each iteration, you can check for new versions of the ASP files in the blob and download if any.
You will have to find the appropriate place where to download the files to, because your RoleEntryPoint implementation will live not in the IIS process that runs your website, but in a separate WaIISHost.exe process.
There are various methods on how to determine the site root.
I highly suggest this approach, rather then the one with a VM(IaaS).