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I’m going thru the Azure Training kit and need to obtain a windows azure account and I am reaching out to see what is the best way to go.

As I understand it, options are:

· I’m aware of free 30 day (no credit card required) trial accounts (for example http://windowsazurepass.com/?campid=878F2064-1944-E011-98E3-001F29C8E9A8) .  I have signed up for this 2 weeks ago and got an email stating “You have been added to the waiting list for a Windows Azure platform 30 day pass.You will be notified if a pass becomes available.”

· http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/free-trial/  this page requires a credit card and gives you 90 days free with allocation limits.  Overages hit the credit card.    Since, I’m just playing, I’m obviously concerned with writing some dumb-ass code that results in surprise charges.

· MSDN subscribers have azure benefits included with their subscription (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/msdn-benefits/)  I’m sure we have a ton of MSDN subscriptions but I’m unsure if I can provision azure storage in association with what we have.

Are there other options that I’m not aware of?  Can you guys point me in the right direction? 

Its often handy see the sql that is generated by L2S statements in your project.    Last week I needed to capture the generated SQL, and paste it into SQL Management Studio to analyze the performance of the query.  L2S makes this easy to do via the DataContext Log Property.   

myDataContext.Log = new DebugTextWriter()


The DebugTextWriter Class is as follows":

class DebugTextWriter : System.IO.TextWriter 

{
   public override void Write(char[] buffer, int index, int count) {
       System.Diagnostics.Debug.Write(new String(buffer, index, count));
   }

   public override void Write(string value) {
       System.Diagnostics.Debug.Write(value);
   }

   public override Encoding Encoding {
       get { return System.Text.Encoding.Default; }
   }
}

I like to use Debugview to view system.diagnostics output 

(free download at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896647) 

We have developed a digital asset management (DAM) application.  The base architecture is as follows:

• The user interface is written with Silverlight 4
• Assets are stored in SQL Server using the FileStream data type.
• Communication between Silverlight and the mid tier is over WCF

Users want to be able to select a document inside our Silverlight application, choose edit, have the document fire up in the native application, and have any changes made reflected inside DAM.  Documents are not limited to any specific types and are predominantly adobe PSD and AI files and Office documents.   Users love the user interface and other system features, but they miss the feel of native editing that sharepoint provides. 

We are considering the following approach and seek opinions from the community on its feasibility.

1. A WebDAV enabled folder would set up in IIS.
2. The user selects a document in dam and chooses Edit.  This would invoke a wcf call.
3. The wcf service would:

• Create a subfolder in the WebDAV Main folder and secure it.
• Extract the document from the dam database and stores it in the newly created WebDav folder
• Send a response back to the client with the location of the extracted document

The Silverlight client  would then pop up a new browser window pointing at the document in WebDAV.

When the user saves the document it will be saved in the WebDAV folder.   A windows service will listen for file change notification events on the WebDAV folder tree.  When an event is raised, the service will cause the updated documents contents to replace the prior contents in the dam database.  The windows service will also clean any documents in the WebDAV tree that are older than x days.

Benefits:

1. We don't have to link to SharePoint.

2. All types of files are supported.

3. Security can be handled by dynamically creating user folders with appropriate permissions.

Potential Issues:

1. Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, and potentially other versions of Office open documents from WebDAV sites as Read-Only by default. This can be overridden with a registry setting, which could be pushed out by Group Policy.

2. WebDAV gives some people the "heeby jeebies". I have not had enough experience with it to know why.

Alternatives:

Instead of using WebDAV, host an instance of SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint server and use the appropriate API's to store and secure the document.  Our initial inclination toward WebDAV is to keep the footprint small.

In my last post Rendering Office Documents in Silverlight I described a situation in which a windows service needed to create XPS files from office documents.    We were using the PDFNET SDK from PDFTRON to accomplish this and they claimed this would work.  In fact it did work for excel, powerpoint and pdf files in my development and test environments.  It even worked in our QA environment for .doc and .docx files.   In our production environment i would see a winword.exe process in the task manager fire up and never go away whenever a word document was processed. The exact same code worked when run out of a console application instead of a service. 

Microsofts official word on the subject in Considerations for server-side Automation of Office was not encouraging. 

Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.

This problem plagued the project for several weeks.  We needed to implement a stop gap process in which a desktop was logged into and had the console application running.  Whenever the desktop got rebooted, someone needed to rdp into it and restart the console application.  This definitely was not going to cut it long term.

Fortunately the fix was as simple as creating a folder!  The trick that finally made this work was (major props to http://emalvass.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-use-office-2007-automation-in.html  for posting this.

• for x64 system is necessary to create the following folder:
  C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\Desktop
• for x86 system:
  C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Desktop

After creating this folder in the production environment things started working.  I went back to the QA environment where things were working all along and sure enough that folder was present.

We have recently released version 1.0 of our project and started to work on version 1.1.   We followed the TFS Rangers Branching Guidance and branched so that the development track is IIS virtual Directory was at ..\Dev\Main\MyFolder and the production track was at ..\Main\Myfolder.

When opening up my Visual Studio Solution in the Production folder, i was presented with the following dialog:

There are several web projects that would require altering IIS to point to the new location each time i would switch back and forth to different code branches.

IIS 7 has an appcmd utility that really solved this problem for me.  It is described at How to Back Up an IIS 7 Configuration.   

I set up my IIS to point to my main track and used appcmd to backup the configuration:

Appcmd add backup Main

Then I modified IIS to point to the dev track and backed that up:

Appcmd add backup Dev

I then created 2 BAT files (one named RestoreIISMain.bat and the other Named RestoreIISDev.bat:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe restore backup "Main"
pause

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe restore backup "Dev"
pause

Switching back and forth is now a single click operation.