Quick Pre-Requisites Install for Windows Azure

Jim Nakashima over at Cloudy in Seattle has a great post outlining steps to quickly install Windows Azure Tools and SKD Pre-Reqs.

Check it out @ Cloudy in Seattle.  This is a great timesaver if you’re building your own deveopment environment or just installing on a clean box.

Creating your First Azure Service – Azure Quickstart

In this first part of our Azure Quickstart series, we’ll build a simple Hello Cloud service.  This service will display “Hello Cloud” to anyone browsing to our page.  

To start, run Visual Studio as an administrator.

File –> New Project

We’ll begin by selecting the File –> New Project menu item in Visual Studio 2008. 

Once the New Project dialog box is brought up, select the Cloud Service Project Type on the left hand side of the dialog.  On the right hand side of the dialog, choose Web Cloud Service. 

We’ll name the project “HelloCloud” and click the OK button to create the project.

Newly Created Azure Solution

When the solution loads, two projects are created as within it.  The HelloCloud_WebRole is a standard ASP.NET project.  It is where we will be building our website.  The HelloCloud project is a Cloud Service project.  This project references the HelloCould_WebRole project and also contains a configuration file for our solution. 

Creating the Default Page

Creating our Default page will be minimal.  We will add a label to the page, which will display our Hello Cloud text.

Add the following code inside the form tag.

<div>
    <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="Hello Cloud" />
</div>

Testing the Page

Press the F5 key to start the application in Debug mode.  The ASP.NET project will compile as normal.  However, since there is a Cloud Service project in the solution, it will use the development fabric to load the application.  Finally, the page will load and display our “Hello Cloud” message.

If you look at the task bar, you will notice a new icon.  This icon is for the development fabric, which simulates the Azure runtime environment.  It is used for building and testing Azure services locally on your machine.

Wrap-up

In this post, we looked at building a simple service.   In later installments, we’ll cover debugging and logging, deployment, and the Azure dashboard.

Latest Azure SDK, Tools for Visual Studio & Training Kit

The latest version of the Azure Training Kit was just released.  It includes:

• 11 hands-on labs
• 18 demo scripts
• 9 presentations (including speaker notes)

The latest Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio & SDK is the March 2009 CTP Release.

Azure CTP install minimum requirements

The following are the absolute minimum software requirements to install the Azure CTP bits.  Without them, the bits won’t install.

• Windows Vista w/ SP 1
• Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Web Developer w/ SP 1
• .NET 3.5  Framework w/SP 1 (should be included with the Visual Studio SP1 install)

Once you have these installed, you should have no problems installing the bits.

Windows Azure Invite

I just received my invite to the Windows Azure CTP.

During the CTP, I get the following:

• Total compute usage: 2000 VM hours (83.3 days running 24/7)
• Cloud storage capacity: 50GB
• Total storage bandwidth: 20GB/day

I plan to start messing around with this over the weekend. I’ll post my experience & thoughts then.

Creating A Development Environment Using Virtual PC – The Final Steps

The last two posts covered Building a VPC Environment and Running it for the First Time.  Today we’re going to put the final touches on our VPC and make it worthy of any development enviornment.

First, we’ll starty by creating a new differencing disk – name it AzureBase.vhd.  Base it off of the XXX_Base.vhd disk image we created on Day 2.

Bring up the Virtual PC Dashboard and point the Azure VMC to use the newly created differencing disk.

Next we need to install our Azure software.

• Install Azure SDK
• Install Toolkit
• Install Training Kit

Mark the AzureBase.vhd disk image read-only.

Create a differencing disk – name it AzureDev.vhd.  Base it off of the AzureBase.vhs disk image.

Bring up the Virtual PC Dashboard and re-Point the Azure VMC to use the newly created differencing disk.

You now have a stable development environment. 

Why did we go through all this trouble to create a development environment?  When the next Azure Beta comes out, you can start at the 2nd disk image and have a full working environment up and running rather quickly.

What about the 3rd differencing disk…that seems kind of pointless.  Well, If you make any changes that break your environment, you only need to recreate the 3rd virtual disk to be back in business.  You could use the Undo feature and work of off the 2nd disk, but then you would lose any progress when you undo the changes.  Plus the differencing disk seems to work slightly faster than using Undo disks.  

Creating a Development Environment using Virtual PC – First Time Running the Image

Yesterday, I walked thorugh setting up an OS on a Virtual Machine.  Today, we’re going to go over giving your image some substance as well as performance tuning it.  

Running your Virtual Image for the First Time

Running your new image for the first time will require several additional steps to complete the setup process.

First, check your internet connectivity by browsing to your favorite search engine.  If it doesn’t connect, you’ll need to modify the settings to use Shared Networking (NAT).  This can be done through the VPC interface by selecting your Virtual Machine, clicking Settings, then selecting Networking.

Second, install the Virtual Machine Add-Ons.  Select Install or Update Virtual Machine Addons under the Actions menu.  This will install the VMC Addons, which will greatly improve performance and add some nice touches.  

Further optimizations can be accomplished by following the steps outlined at Andrew Connell’s Site. While these steps are laid out for Windows XP, you can find almost all of the items mentioned with minimal digging in Vista.

Next, install any critical OS updates.  These might be downloading automatically in the background through Windows Update.  However, you may need to verify your copy of Windows is genuine first.

Vista does not install IIS by default, so you will need to set it up.  Follow the steps at Chris Fulstow’s blog to install IIS and configure ASP.NET to run on Vista.

Install VS 2008 or Visual Web Developer onto the image.

Install Office 2007 and any other software you want on the image.

Finally, install service pack 1 for both Visual Studio & .NET 3.5 framework.

Disk Cleanup

Cleaning up your disk will save some space when we compact it. The following are some locations that can have files removed.

• Run Disk cleanup on the C: drive
• Delete any photos, music, video files that may have been installed to your documents folder, including shared documents
• Remove games and any other non-critical OS components you will not need
• Clean out temp folders

Defragment the Disk

Use the Windows defrag utility to defragment the virtual hard disk. This can take over an hour so you don’t need to be constantly monitoring the process.

DisKeeper makes a great tool for defrargging disks. I’ve used it for a few years and highly recommend it.

PreCompact & Compacting the Disk

Merrick Chaffer has an excellent blog post detailing some ways to improve VPC performance.  We’re specifically interested in the Running Precomact and Compacting the .vhd file sections.

Final Steps for the Main Image

Mark the XXX_Base.vhd hard disk image Read-Only. This will prevent any accidental changes to the image. Once we create differencing disks based on this image, any changes to our base image will render our new child images useless. 

Wrap-up

Tomorrow we’ll get into creating differencing disks, installing Azure, and finalizing our development environment.

Creating a Development Environment using Virtual PC

When I previously worked for Source Code Technologies, I learned to love Virtual PC images as my development environment.  The next few posts will layout exactly how I built my Windows Azure development environment using Virtual PC.  In these posts, I assume that you know some Virtual PC basics; however, I will try and walk through in as much detail as possible.

Download & Install VirtualPC 2007

Get the latest build from Microsoft at the Virtual PC download page.

 

Virtual PC can be a resource hog. Here are some recommendations for running Virtual PC (VPC).

• Run it on a different hard disk than the one your Host OS is running on, preferably an external Hard Drive.
• Dedicate at least 1GB of memory to the Virtual image, preferably 2GB.  However, make sure to leave enough memory for the Host OS.
• Defrag the hard disk where Virtual PC is installed.

Create a New Virtual Machine / Hard Disk

Start Virtual PC.  Select File -> New Virtual Machine Wizard.  Click Next twice. 

 On the Virtual Machine Name and Location screen, browse to the location where you will be saving your virtual machine.  Name the Virtual Machine (VM) something descriptive.  Since I’m creating a development environment for Windows Azure, I named my VM Azure Dev Environment.  Click Next when you’re happy with the name of your VM.  

Select the OS you will be installing.  In this case, select Windows Vista.  Click Next. 

 Select Adjusting the RAM and adjust to a comfortable level (1024MB if you have 2GB installed on your machine or higher if you have more RAM installed).  Click Next. 

 Select the A New Virtual Hard Disk option. Browse to the location that your Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) will be saved. Name the Virtual Hard Disk XXX_Base.vhd, replacing XXX with the OS that you will be installing.  I will be installing Vista Business, so my VHD is named VistaBusiness_Base.vhd.  Using this naming convention will allow you to keep better track of as your virtual images library grows.  Click Next and then Finished. 

 Your first Virtual Machine image has now been created.  Like any new computer, the virtual hard disk is empty and only contains a basic version of DOS.  We now need to install the Operating System.

Installing the OS

I installed Vista Business Edition for my development environment.  However, Windows Server 2008 will also work with the Azure SDK.  I originally installed Vista Ultimate but encountered problems installing SP1.  Since SP1 is required, I couldn’t install the Azure SDK.  I would be careful if you’re going to install Ultimate since there seems to be issues installing SP1.

 Select CD -> Capture ISO Image from the menu.  Browse to the location of the ISO image containing your Operating System and select it.  Select Action -> Ctl+Alt+Delete from the menu to reset the instance.  The VPC instance should now reboot loading from the ISO and starting the OS installation process.  From this point, follow all of the prompts to install the OS.

Wrap up

This entire exercise shoud take 1-2 hours at most.  Tomorrow I’ll look at steps to take when running the Virtual Image for the first time.