Question

We have WCF services deployed in azure cloud and runnig. We have some changes in some dlls and want to update in VM but dont want to go through regular deployment/redeployment process.

We are thinking of manually coping dlls to approot and siteroot folders. Will it work?
Will it pick up new dlls when VM restart anytime in future?

Answer 1

To answer your questions

• Will manually copying dlls to approot and sitesroot folders work: Yes (make sure you do this on each instance if you have multiple instances running)
• Will these dlls survive a reboot: Yes (see Reboot Role Instance: … Any data that is written to the local disk is persisted across reboots. …)

But I would suggest to only do this if you’re planning to test some things while developing your service.

Do NOT plan to use this for production deployments, because if something goes wrong with your instance, the Fabric Controller might decide to destroy that instance and deploy a new one (same could apply for Windows Updates). This new instance would go back to the initial state of your deployment (the content of the cspkg you deployed).

To make your development deployments even easier you could also activate WebDeploy on your Web Role to deploy from Visual Studio: Enabling Web Deploy for Windows Azure Web Roles with Visual Studio (again, do not use this for real deployments, this is only for when you’re testing out some things).

Note: Web Deploy will not work with multiple instances.