Question

I have a website that a converted into a web application running ASP.NET webforms.

The conversion has gone OK and I can run it locally in the Azure emulator, making use of Azure compute and the Azure blob storage.

However, when I come to publish the application to Azure, it gets stuck on “waiting to initialize” constantly (for 3 hours). At this point, I can RDP into the instance but there are no logs in the error log.

IIS has been created, and the website sits in e:\ drive as expected. From the local RDP I cannot view the website (404) and in the Azure management portal it just sits at the initializing stage with an aborted time updating on each refresh.

How do I know what the issue is?

Answer 1

It usually happens with a bad web.config and/or missing dependencies.

Here is what you can do with it.

1. Go to properties of every reference in your project and set ‘copy local’ to true.
2. Double/triple check every config section in you web.config. Make sure you are pointing to right databases (if any).
3. Make sure any of your component is not making direct disk calls on Azure. There is a way to provision them in Azure, it is just that you have to take care of some extra plumbing in ‘local resources’ settings in your azure project properties.
4. If you are using SQL Azure, make sure your firewall on the database instance is setup to allow calls from your compute instance.

Hope this helps.