Node.js/express blog on Azure in 5 minutes

Following up on the announcements and demos shown at today’s Learn Windows Azure event, I decided to put together a very quick demo that gets you going on Azure with a real app as fast as possible. 

I decided to modify express’ blog sample to use Azure storage, and also pre-configured all the service/role settings that Azure needs so you can get going as fast as possible.

Here is the 5-minute recipe:

1. Get your Windows Azure account
2. Get the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js
3. Get the sample source code from GitHub. If you are wondering where some of the static content in the sample came from, check out this getting started document.
4. Get the needed Node packages by running this inside the ExpressBlog\WebRole folder:
   

   npm install

5. You should now be able to launch the Windows Azure PowerShell for Node.js shortcut from your start menu. Make sure you run as Administrator. The rest of the steps here should be completed from that shell.
6. Download your Azure publish settings:
   

   Get-AzurePublishSettings

7. Import the settings:
   

   Import-AzurePublishSettings mine.publishsettings

8. Head to the Azure portal and create a storage account under your subscription. Make note of the account name and access key.
9. Modify the ExpressBlog\WebRole\Web.cloud.config file where indicated to include the storage settings.
10. You are now ready to publish. Anywhere inside the ExpressBlog folder, run the following, making sure you use a unique service name:
    

    Publish-AzureService -Name uniqueServiceName

You’re all done!

Unfortunately things don’t always go according to plan, so in case you get an Internal Server Error or anything else goes wrong after you deploy to the cloud, use this simple trick to debug.

1. Inside the Web.cloud.config file, enable logging:
   

   <iisnode loggingEnabled="true" />

2. Redeploy the service by simply typing:
   

   Publish-AzureService

3. Look at the Node.js log file for hints of what may be wrong at http://uniqueServiceName.cloudapp.net/server.js.logs/0.txt

RIA Services SP2 RTW released

We’re happy to announce the final release of WCF RIA Services V1 SP2:

• Silverlight 5 tools installer
• Standalone RIA SP2 installer 

In this release, we add the following new features:

• Support for Silverlight 5 (the standalone installer linked above also supports Silverlight 4)
• DateTimeOffset support + various bugfixes
• Entity Framework Code-First development, using this NuGet package

Known issues include:

• Entity Framework 4.1 is required, but version 4.2 isn’t supported yet
• Requires Visual Studio 2010 or SP1. Visual Studio 11 isn’t supported yet
• Work on supporting Universal Providers for improved Windows Azure deployment is ongoing
• If you want to create a Silverlight 4 Business Application Template, first create an instance of the Silverlight 5 template, and then use the Silverlight project properties to retarget it to Silverlight 4. You might see some temporary errors (System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException) in the designer and error window, but rebuilding will make those disappear.