Windows Azure on-premises development environment speed

Question

I started migrating my existing ASP.NET web application to Windows Azure and noticed that the development process is very slow. Every time I make changes to my code and want to view it, I have to redirect it efficiently to the local dev cloud (using Start debugging (F5) or Start without debugging (Ctrl-F5). The process itself takes over during which Visual Studio is completely unresponsive.

Am I doing something wrong or is it just developing for Azure?

My specifications:

• Visual Studio 2008 9.0.30729.1 SP
• 5 projects on .NET 3.5 SP1
• Azure SDK 1.1 (February 2010)
• Single instance of one web role
• AMD 64 dual-core processor with 8 GB RAM, 64-bit version of Windows 7, fully patched
• The main project itself is quite large (3k files, ~ 200k lines), but usually compiles in 10-15 seconds.

Answer 1

If your web role has limited functionality, you can simply configure the web project as an active project in your VS solution and run from there.

For example, my web role is not called in the table store, blob store, etc., it just calls some Azure logging and interacts with SQL Azure. So sometimes I just install the web project as a launch project in the VS debugger, not in Azure, and start from there. I wrote my logging calls correctly to check if Azure is available before they are written, so they are not executed in this situation.

Of course, if you do a lot with table storage, queues, blobs, etc., then this is not for you.

Answer 2

Usually in a development machine, we simply compile and run the solution. In the case of Azure development, there is an additional step when a specific project is deployed in Dev fabric, which involves copying the contents of a complete website to a dynamically created deployment folder. Since you have a large number of files, this will require that all of these files be copied to a new folder each time you press F5 or Ctrl-F5. This may cause a delay that you notice.

This scenario also emphasizes the inflexibility of deploying a solution over an application network. Each time you change any content (static or dynamic) on a website, the entire site must be packed and reloaded onto your production server.

Answer 3

In my case, when I changed the port from 80 to something else (at the endpoints), the speed returned to normal.

Answer 4

Microsoft Steve Marx has a message about launching a website from a mounted VM in Lazur. This can be a good development pattern, as you are simply updating the contents of the virtual machine stored in the blob repository instead of rearranging it to the fabric each time.