Question

I am developing an azure application. There are only worker roles and each will call an external executable. Everything is working fine if I use the emulator. I only change the storageAccount to run an actual deployment. But it seems that the external program is not starting. By just changing the storage account, will I see the same behavior from the deployment? Do I need to make additional changes? I can confirm that worker roles can access the storage account and read/write queues. The only problem is calling the executable as an external process. Do I need to change any paths? Besides that is there a way to see the errors while workers running as if they were running in the Emulated environment? I was getting “file not found” exceptions I do something wrong about the paths. May be the problem is similar but I cannot monitor the worker roles in the actual deployment.

Answer 1

You need to make sure your executables are either included in your deployment package (e.g. setting ‘Copy to Output Directory’ to ‘Copy Always’ or ‘Copy if newer’) or copying them from blob storage on startup. The first option is easier for getting started, but not as efficient because the deployment package increases in size, and you can’t update the executables without re-deploying.

For monitoring: You can monitor trace logs – just be sure to crank up the polling and transfer times (and be sure to crank them back down for production, otherwise you’ll be burning cpu and transactions for diagnostics). Then use a tool like Cerebrata’s Diagnostic Manager to observe your trace logs. You can also enable IntelliTrace if you have VS2010 Ultimate.

I posted another StackOverflow answer here that goes into more detail about running executables in a Windows Azure instance.