Azure WebRole not starting after update 1.7

Question

I recently tried updating my WebRole from Azure SDK v1.6 to v1.7. It seems to be working fine. I can create and run a role in my devfabric just fine. When I try to deploy an updated project to a real cloud, the instances never start. They just sit in a busy state. Interestingly, they do not perform the typical “recycling cycle”, they just sit on the “busy” forever.

When I enter instances with RDP, I see the following error in the event logs:

The application '/' belonging to the site '1' has an invalid set of AppPoolId 'DefaultAppPool'. Therefore, the application will be ignored.

Followed by:

Site 1 has been disabled because the root application defined for the site is not valid. See the previous event log message for information about the root application.

IIS Manager confirms that there is no AppPool named "DefaultAppPool". There are also no typical AppPools with GUIDs for names created by Azure. Not surprisingly, none of my sites exist.

So how do I solve this?

Answer 1

I had the same problem after upgrading to version 1.1, but when I looked at the Windows Azure logs in Azure VM, I noticed the following exception:

An unhandled exception occurred. Type: System.ArgumentException Process ID: 2340 Process Name: DiagnosticsAgent Thread ID: 1 AppDomain Unhandled Exception for role Backend_IN_0 Exception: Endpoint http://xxxx.blob.core.windows.net/ is not a secure connection. 

So, I changed the Diagnostics connection string to use https instead of http and voilá, which solved my problem.

Hope this works for you, I pulled my hair out for two days.