Do we have azure based site to share technical knowledge with team. To interact with colleagues. Or Do we have ready made site which we can customize?
I'm going to make a big assumption that I understand what your question is. Assuming you are looking for some type of collaborative website engine that can easily be deployed within Windows Azure, for the purpose of collaboration amongst your peers:
If you create a new Windows Azure Web Site and look at the gallery, you'll see several ready-made options such as Mediawiki, phpBB, DotNetNuke, Joomla, Kentico, Lemoon, mojoPortal, Orchard, Umbraco, and WordPress. I'm guessing at least one of these would help you build a collaborative knowledge site for your team.
Per your comment (which makes me think I assumed correctly): here's starter info on Web Sites, from the Azure portal. Also you should download the Training Kit, also linked from the Azure portal.
Related
I am very new to Azure and Azure market place apps.
I could not find any samples in the Web to create an web application in azure market place. I want to create simple web application then i can publish this in Azure market place. For example, this web application simply retrieves all the users in a SQL table and show the list in a html page.
I tried different solutions in web and also here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/gg607768.aspx. But could not able to succeed.
I am confused on how to start developing the market place apps. I mean which project template i should use to develop an Market place App.
Can any one please help me how to start developing the web application for Azure market place?
You may check the process outlined in this document Publish and manage an offer in the Azure Marketplace - this article is provided to help - create, deploy, and manage solutions listed in the Azure Marketplace.
Refer to the Marketplace Publisher Guide and Azure managed applications in the Marketplace for details.
Publish a Solution Template: Based on your requirement, you could use the solution templates which allows you to combine multiple items already available in the marketplace to create more powerful solutions.
Whereas, the ‘Publish a Developer Service’ provides fully managed developer services (SAAS) for developers to use in custom application development.
Note: Solutions Template has migrated to the new Cloud Partner Portal (requires registration prior to access).
Additionally, check the Marketplace FAQs (here): Who do I contact with publishing or offer management questions? : Please visit the Azure Marketplace Publisher Guide for up-to-date resource and documentations on frequently asked questions. Additionally, you can log a ticket with Microsoft Support in the Cloud Partner Portal.
I want to deploy Kentico 9 site on Azure and want to use shared file system for my media content, can you please suggest which Azure configuration (Azure Cloud Services or Azure Web Apps) I should referred?
I'd highly recommend going with Web App over Cloud Services. Mainly because Web App is almost like running on a regular server where Cloud Services is quite a bit different and harder to work with in my opinion.
Check this article out regarding some issues with Kentico and Azure Blog storage as well as how to setup your storage provider to only store media files.
http://www.kehrendev.com/blog/brenden-kehren/may-2016/problems-with-azure-and-kentico
Could you describe what do you mean by shared file system for my media content?
From my experience - it`s (a little bit) easier to deploy (and maintain) Kentico to Azure Web Apps but they do not provide so many customizations - in my humble opinion - the biggest one is you are not able to connect via remote desktop (but this is supported by Azure Cloud Services).
Please note - if you are using Cloud Services you must use Azure Blob Storage - source - which could be in conflict with your requirements.
You can find more information about Web Apps vs Cloud Services vs Virtual Machines on the mentioned page.
TL;DR; - if you do not need customizations, remote desktop and startup tasks - go for WebApps. If not, try to specify more requirements.
You can also check comparinson of the technologies from the Microsoft`s point of view here.
It's not clear who you want to share the media with...
If you want to share the assets amongst more Kentico instances or with a 3rd party system, I'd probably use the Azure Blob Storage. Kentico comes with a dedicated file provider for this exact use out of the box. It's called CMS.AzureStorage.
Using the blob storage is not a limiting factor in terms of hosting your app. You can still use all available options: Web Apps, VM or Cloud Service. There are some technical implications, of course. But they're all described in the documentation.
I recommend checking the comparison matrix to find a hosting option that suits your need best. Kentico recommends using App Service (Web Apps) for most projects as it's easiest to maintain. However, you can't use certain features like Kentico Windows services, for instance. Question is, do you really need them?
I've recently been asked to redevelop an .Net 2.0 WinForms application with a back end SQL Server Express DB.
One of the requirements is to allow remote users access to the application, so I've been considering hosted options to avoid VPN setup. The data is not sensitive and does not fall under data protection act, so a basic security approach for the web will cover me.
I like the idea of using Azure for a few reasons, but I'm not sure if a good fit for a users base of 5 or 6 with no real scope to grow. I've never used Azure and I plan to develop using MVC and a SQL backend as this is my main skillset.
A few points in favour of Azure in my mind are:
Tight integration with the TFS preview that I'm using for this project
Easy to setup a sandpit and a live version
Easy maintenance as I expect other hosted options will require more knowledge of underlying OS
Sticking to a full Microsoft stack should hopefully make things simpler
From what I find on the Azure site the message is all about scalability, which is great if you need it.
My question is simply, do you need a large user base, or plans to grow quickly, to use azure or is it how we should be hosting apps now?
What you're asking here is the perfect case for Windows Azure Web Sites:
You get 10 web sites for free (no custom DNS, but this is perfect for your 'sandpit'/test version). The shared mode supports custom DNS and is very cheap.
Tight integration with TFS preview and GitHub
You don't need to worry about the underlying OS, you simply publish from Visual Studio or with TFS Preview.
Sticking to the Microsoft stack is the easiest solution, but other technologies work great aswell. Since you're talking about MVC I'm assuming you are considering ASP.NET MVC, which is a perfect match with Windows Azure. Take a look at the training kit for some good examples.
The day you'll need a solution which more scalable (meaning you'll have more users and more income) you can easily upgrade to a reserved instance or to a Cloud Service (Web/Worker Role).
About your question: "My question is simply, do you need a large user base, or plans to grow quickly, to use azure or is it how we should be hosting apps now?"
Windows Azure is a cloud service platform (includes PaaS as Cloud Services, IaaS as Windows Azure Virtual Machines and also Websites suggest by Sandrino above), and with cloud services you have ability to start very small and grow as much and as quickly as your user requirement is, so you can use Azure with both cases. On the other hand there are some advantages using certain offering depend on your which service you are going to use to run your application.
I think article (Section: "What Should I Use? Making a Choice") will explain the strategy about how you make a selection among various services.
This SO discussion does talks about the difference between cloud Services and Azure WebSites as well.
I am looking at migrating a dotnetnuke website to Azure. I need both staging and production versions of the site to be running.
I have looked at using Azure Websites, but at the moment there is no support for SSL on custom domains so this can't be used for the production website. I have migrated the staging site to an Azure Website and now have numerous options for publishing updates (ftp, git, using web matrix).
Due to the constraints of Azure Websites, I used the DNN Accelerator to create a cloud service for the production environment. This set up will allow me to have control over IIS and therefore manage SSL certificates (I think).
The problem I have with this is there does not seem to be any publishing options. The only way I can publish is by connecting to the Azure instance via RDP and then copying the website files onto the files system.
Are there any other ways of publishing? I have looked at converting the website to a WAP, but I believe this has implications when it comes to updating to new DNN versions.
You should never publish your application through RDP since these changes are non-persistent (meaning what you published might disappear after a hardware failure / ...). Adding new instances would also mean that these instances don't have the files you published before.
I suggest you start by looking at the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator first. If this doesn't fit your needs you might always try to build something yourself, but if you want to say with a regular website and not a web application I wouldn't count on Visual Studio support. In that case you might want to look at creating a package from the command line and using startup scripts to add your website in IIS.
Sounds like you need to use a Start-up task to install the files in the correct place for a Web Role (Cloud Service) Smarx has a nice overview here, MSDN has a wealth of info too http://blog.smarx.com/posts/introduction-to-windows-azure-startup-tasks
Another option is IAAS for Azure with a persisted VM, more work mind you, Cloud Service would be the most efficient and correct solution...
I have a bit of challenge. Knowing only the basic URL for the sharepoint installation, can I get a list of the site collections that have been created using only the basic web services that are installed?
Using the Webs web service or the SiteData web service I've been able to get information on the default site collection that's at the base URL (http://MySharePointServer/). I can also get a full list of sites below the site collection and a description of the site collection itself but I can't seem to get any info on the other site collections under the same web application.
Any help would be appreciated, I thought it would be a piece of cake to get the info.
Unfortunately, no. That functionality isn't available from the out-of-the-box web services. The only option that might work is using the Search Web Service (I'm not familiar enough with it to know).
This walkthrough describes how to add your own custom web services to the product. I strongly recommend this approach as it's very likely there will be other missing functionality you will need to add - if not now, in the near future.