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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T14:26:59+00:00

We use Windows Azure Cloud services to host our application. One of the great

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We use Windows Azure Cloud services to host our application. One of the great features of Windows Azure is the Production/Staging model. You can have the clients of your application routed to your production server, while you can test your new code running on a staging server. For example, you can configure Azure to point a production server to http://www.coolapp.com while designating a staging server for the same app to something like this: http://7f8e9d5ba73a4f7ea9ebd65a02ee195d.cloudapp.net.

Physically both of these servers are publicly facing. If you were to know the cryptic URL of a staging server you would be able to browse to the app just as easily as you would browse to http://www.coolapp.com. However, the presence of a GUID in the URL makes it virtually impossible for someone to guess it, thus making the staging server “private”. This gives a nice mechanism to the developers of an application to deploy and test the new bits on a staging server before releasing them to public. Once they make sure that things look good, with a flip of a switch they swap the two servers, making staging server a production server and vice versa.

This model creates a small problem for us in relation to Facebook integration. To be able to integrate Facebook plugins you have to register your app with them. FB will then issue an AppId and an AppSecret keys. These keys are tied to the URL of your application. So in order for my app to work with FB plugins I need to obtain one set of keys that is tied to 7f8e9d5ba73a4f7ea9ebd65a02ee195d.cloudapp.net, and another set that is tied to http://www.coolapp.com.

When I read about Windows Azure, they really urge developers to treat staging vs. production servers as the same. The only difference between them should be the URL. In other words, Azure does not recommend basing your app logic on which server the code happens to be running on as Azure has no inherent knowledge of this. Staging vs. production is just a handy “abstraction” if you will. I guess you see the problem here. In our example above, I have to use one set of keys issued by FB versus another depending on which URL (production vs. staging) my app is running at. I assume I am not the first one running into this problem. What are the correct ways of handling this? One obvious way is to sniff the URL property of the Request object and branch my logic that way. However, intuition tells me this is a hack. Any other ideas?

Regards,

Archil

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  1. Editorial Team

    The mechanisms I know of are:

    • using “production” within a totally separate service account to “testing” – this leaves “staging” within the production service to be used as an area for “deployment candidates” and provides a separate clean testing domain with a non-changing URL for earlier “dev and test” work.
    • using different .cscfg files for staging and production – and being careful to update this .cscfg before you do any live switching.
    • sniffing the incoming URL – as you suggest

    Personally, I use the first of these techniques – its easy and it helps prevent nasty accidents

    As an aside, one of the techniques we’ve used for “removing” the Guid from staging is to CNAME the Guid with a really short TTL on the DNS – this allows us to quickly and automatically update the CNAME record for the staging server when we deploy.

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