WCF service deployed to Azure

Question

I have create a WCF Service Web Role project.I can consume the service locally. But I am having issues trying to deploy the service on the azure cloud. After starting the webrole it justs kepps going in a loop where it init then stops. I have not made any changes to the default WebRoleclass that was added automatically. Can anybody point me to some samples or examples of WCF being deployed to azure

Answer 1

The behaviour you're seeing occurs when the instance errors in the OnStart or Run. The usual diagnostics error trapping hasn't had a chance to start yet so this is a difficult problem to debug. You might try adding error trapping inside this functions that writes the error details out to either a blob or a queue so that you can see what is actually happening.

Having said that, with code that works in the dev fabric, but continues to cycle when deployed to live, the first thing to check is that all of the references have the appropriate "Copy Local" property set. Anything that is part of the framework or Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime will need to have Copy Local to false, everything else should be set to true (third party assemblies an the like). If this is a web role and you're using MVC, you'll need to check that System.Web.Mvc has Copy Local set to true as well as this is not included as part of the standard framework deployed in Azure.

Answer 2

Have you looked at the Known Issues information on the WCF Azure code page? There's a patch that's needed, as well as a tweak to the service behavior. Hopefully this will help you.

Answer 3

I just found out the root of the problem. It was caused by one of my projects having the target platform set to x86. Seems like it does not support x86 build assemblies which can be a problem