Publishing a Cloud Service using the Windows Azure Tools

When you are ready to publish your application, open Solution Explorer, open the shortcut menu for the Windows Azure project that contains your roles, and choose Publish.

To create a service package only, follow these steps:

1. On the shortcut menu for the Windows Azure project, choose Package.

2. In the Package Windows Azure Application dialog box, choose the service configuration for which you want to create a package, and then choose the build configuration.

3. (optional) To enable Remote Desktop for the cloud service after you publish it, select the Enable Remote Desktop for all Roles check box, and choose the Settings link to configure Remote Desktop.

   For more information, see Using Remote Desktop with Windows Azure Roles.

4. To create the package, click OK.

   File Explorer shows the file location of the newly created package. You can copy this location so that you can use it from the Windows Azure Management Portal.

5. To publish this package to a deployment environment, you must use this location as the Package location when you create a cloud service and deploy this package to an environment with the Management Portal. For more information, see How to Create a Cloud Service.

(Optional) To cancel the deployment process, right-click the line item in the activity log and point to Cancel and remove. This stops the deployment process and deletes the deployment environment from Windows Azure.

Note
To remove this deployment environment after it has been deployed, you must use the Management Portal.

(Optional) After your role instances have started, Visual Studio automatically shows the deployment environment in the Windows Azure Compute node in Server Explorer. From here you can see the status of the individual role instances. For more information on the Windows Azure Compute Explorer, see Viewing the State of a Cloud Service using Server Explorer.

The following illustration shows the role instances while they are still in the Initializing state:

To enable the Enable Web Deploy for all Web Roles check box, you must first configure remote desktop connections. For more information, see Using Remote Desktop with Windows Azure Roles.

To enable Web Deploy for all the web roles in your application, select Enable Web Deploy for all Web Roles.

A yellow warning triangle is displayed. Web Deploy uses an untrusted, self-signed certificate by default, which is not recommended for uploading sensitive data. If you need to secure this process for sensitive data, you can add a SSL certificate to be used for Web Deploy connections. This certificate needs to be a trusted certificate. For information about how to do this, see the section To Make Web Deploy Secure later in this topic.

Click OK to publish,

The Windows Azure application is published. The virtual machine that is created has remote connections enabled for IIS so that Web Deploy can be used to update your web roles without republishing.

Note
If you have more than one instance configured for a web role, a warning message is displayed that each web role will be limited to one instance only in the package that’s created to publish your application. Click OK to continue. As stated in the Requirements section, you can have more than one web role but only one instance of each role.

To use Web Deploy, you must make code changes to the project for any of your web roles in Visual Studio that you want to publish. Right-click this project node in your solution and point to Publish.

The Publish Web dialog box is displayed.

(Optional) If you added a trusted SSL certificate to use for remote connections for IIS, you can clear the Allow untrusted certificate check box. For information about how to add a certificate to make Web Deploy secure, see the section To Make Web Deploy Secure later in this topic.

To use Web Deploy, the publish mechanism needs the user name and password that you set up for your remote desktop connection when you first published the package.

1. In User name, type the user name.

2. In Password, type the password.

3. (Optional) If you want to save this password in this profile, select Save password.

To publish out the changes to your web role, click Publish.

The status line displays Publish started. When the publishing has completed, Publish succeeded is displayed. The changes have now been deployed to the web role on your virtual machine. Now you can start your Windows Azure application to test out your changes in the Windows Azure environment.

Web Deploy uses an untrusted, self-signed certificate by default, which is not recommended for uploading sensitive data. If you need to secure this process for sensitive data, you can add a SSL certificate to be used for Web Deploy connections. This certificate needs to be a trusted certificate.

To make Web Deploy secure for each virtual machine for each of your web roles, you must upload the trusted certificate that you want to use for web deploy to the Management Portal. This makes sure that the certificate is added to the virtual machine that is created for the web role when you publish your application.

To add a trusted SSL certificate to IIS to use for remote connections, follow these steps:

1. To connect to the virtual machine that is running the web role, from the Management Portal, click the instance of the web role in Server Explorer, and then click Connect using Remote Desktop. For the detailed steps about how to connect to the virtual machine, see Using Remote Desktop with Windows Azure Roles.

   Your browser will prompt you to download an .RDP file.

2. To add a SSL certificate, open the management service in IIS Manager. Then, in the Connections group box, click an SSL certificate from the SSL certificate list. For more information, see Configure Connection Settings for the Management Service.

   Note
   If you add a trusted SSL certificate, the yellow warning triangle no longer appears in the Publish Wizard.