In more conference-related news, I’ll be speaking on Future Insights Live’s newly announced Cloud Track! Registration is still open… see you in Las Vegas!

Writing Node.js apps for Windows Azure
Friday, May 4th: 2:05pm – 2:55pm

Server-side JavaScript? On Windows Azure? Has hell frozen over? Learn about how Azure is quickly turning into an open cloud platform that supports a variety of runtimes: .NET, Java, PHP, and even Node.js! In this session, we will show how to build exciting realtime apps in JavaScript, and how to run them in the cloud. We will take advantage of features such as storage, caches, and queues to make our app scale without a hitch. We will also share the team’s plans for future Windows Azure improvements and give you a chance to voice your opinion.

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Visual Studio 11 Beta went out a few days ago, and with it we have a refreshed RIA Services SP2 version that supports all VS 11 goodness:

• Universal Providers
• Support for the new Metro UI
• Miscellaneous small changes to adapt to changes in project system, msbuild, and the designer.

However, there are some kinks that you should be aware of… it is a Beta after all:

• If you try to use the Data Binding picker from the Properties pane to bind a property (for example the text in a TextBlock) to a property on a Domain Data Source, you’ll see it is not available. We are looking at addressing this issue.
   
• Universal Providers have a known issue where Windows Authentication and Role Providers don’t work as you might expect. If you switch your web app containing your Domain Service to Windows auth, be sure to make the change shown below. Having to do this is a limitation that will go away after Beta.

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Great photos by Timothy Allen of the Buzludja (Бузлуджа) monument in Bulgaria. One of many amazing abandoned buildings, right up there with the Ryugyong Hotel.

Thanks to Norah for the forward.

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beat-machine:

Not bad for a crew of 4

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We just pushed out a small February update (0.5.3) to the Azure SDK for Node.js, containing the following fixes:

• #81: Start-AzureEmulator errors if there’s a space in the service path: we corrected an issue where the emulator would fail if there was a space in the path to the service
• #82: Remove-AzureService prompts for yes/no confirmation: when you want to remove a service, you will now see this prompt to prevent accidental data loss: Confirm: Are you sure you want to remove service "foo"?
• #131: Start-AzureEmulator -Launch fails if run twice on the same web role: corrected a problem where our attempt to clean up logs was causing the emulator to crash
• #138: Publish-AzureService throws ArgumentNullException when no certificates element provided in .cscfg: this may have affected folks using the Mongo commandlets
• #141: Worker role did not allow write access: the user under which Node was running in worker role did not have sufficient permission to write to disk. This may have surfaced as some modules who need to write to disk (such as stylus) failing.

Here is a one-click install of the new bits.

Alongside this, we also released a refresh (0.5.2) of the npm package for Azure, adding support for accessing ServiceBus queues and topics, among other fixes. Read Glenn’s blog post for more details.

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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

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