I want to run PS scripts in C# exactly along the lines of Sample
This works on a Cloud Service (Web Role), on a standard server (with execution policy disabled), but not in a Azure Web Site.
Anyone know why this is so?
I don't know of any official documentation on the issue but there are multiple answers on the related forums where Microsoft employees talk about the limitations of not being able/allowed to launch external processes in Windows Azure Web Sites. See
PHP - Warning: exec(): Unable to fork
PDF Generator failing on Azure Website but not development machine
Recommended HTML to PDF Generator that works on Azure Website Reserved mode with Full Trust
You are probably trying to do that with your powershell script.
You could verify if that is in fact your issue by catching and looking at the exception(s) which should relate to security policies/permissions.
Related
We created multiple powershell scripts that read from word document and extract required information.
Locally on laptop all works fine, but when we deployed on production server.... they dont work.
We run powershell scripts through asp.net web app... that's where any powershell scripts that refers to WORD.APPLICATION are not working
Components we deployed on production server:
operating system: Windows Server 2012
Powershell: Version 5
MsOffice 2010 installed
Asp.net 4.5 all components installed
We have created web application in ASP.NET 4.5 Core where user upload documents and based on certain criteria documents will be searched for specific keyterms. if keyterms found, values will be displayed.
Asp.net invokes powershell script which has all document library code to search through. Everything gets executed in PS script, except where WORD-APPLICATION code is referred.
Has anyone faced any issues while deploying them on server?
Required reading:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/257757/considerations-for-server-side-automation-of-office
All current versions of Microsoft Office were designed, tested, and configured to run as end-user products on a client workstation. They assume an interactive desktop and user profile. They do not provide the level of reentrancy or security that is necessary to meet the needs of server-side components that are designed to run unattended.
...
Besides the technical problems, you must also consider licensing issues. Current licensing guidelines prevent Office applications from being used on a server to service client requests, unless those clients themselves have licensed copies of Office. Using server-side Automation to provide Office functionality to unlicensed workstations is not covered by the End User License Agreement (EULA).
As you can see, the scenario you're trying is officially unsupported, and license wise very expensive, as you officially require an Office license for each user invoking your functionality or for whom you're invoking the functionality.
There is an official Open XML SDK, which will allow server-side processing of the XML-based office documents:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/open-xml/word-processing
If that isn't enough, there are a number of 3rd party libraries that provide server-side execution and don't require office licensing, some commercial, some open source:
Aspose: https://www.aspose.com/
NPIO: https://github.com/dotnetcore/NPOI
There are ways to get your code working on the server from an ASP.NET Application. They are officially unsupported, they open up your server to a number of extra security issues, they are very expensive from a licensing perspective and there is no guarantee they will remain working.
I want to create/update the websites/cloud services in Azure in C#. My objective is to deploy the website/cloud service in Azure without any user intervention.
Can anyone please help me to resolve below queries?
Can we manage Azure websites/cloud services using C# code? If yes then how (any library/api/nuget package)?
If it is not possible in C#, then what are other options to achieve this? I read WebDeploy(MsDeploy), powershell can do this work but I am not sure which one is best in this scenario and how to use them.
This completely depends on your scenario. If you have got a system to run your powershell script from, this might be a good option (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/powershell-install-configure/) You could also use the cross platform command line tools to script your deployment / web app creation. There are different other options, especially for continous deployment to a web app. You can for example connect your github repo to an existing web app and deploy from that repository.
The C# library you were looking for should be this one:
https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-net/tree/master/src/ResourceManagement/WebSite
What are the differences between Azure PowerShell Commandlets and Command-Line Tools?
is there a difference in capabilities?
are new versions published at around the same time?
is one of them the 'preferred' way to manage Azure resources?
I am interested in managing web sites, VMs and cloud services from developer's machine and also from Ci server (TeamCity/MSBuild - starting / stopping VMs).
I've noticed that Command-Line Tools is just a small ~5MB download while PowerShell commandlets have several dependencies (~22MB) and June 2013 version still relies on Azure SDK 1.8 October 2012.
The PowerShell cmdlets work only in PowerShell (on Windows machines). They're great for automating several concurrent tasks (i.e. scripting out an entire environment), or carrying out single tasks.
The command-line tools are cross platform tools (work on Windows, Linux, etc.) These are written in node.js. They're not as good for scripting multiple actions, but are great for developers that prefer the command line to execute tasks (instead of going to the Azure management portal).
As far as I can tell, they are not on a synced release schedule. You can follow the progress of each via their github.com repositories (https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-xplat and https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools).
It appears that Powershell is a wrapper for the node tools. If you get an error in PS it will reference a .js file.
To test this simply allow your authentication token to expire without a login. The error message in the .json file it sends you to indicates a failure in a Javascript file.
The release schedule for WIndows Azure PowerShell and the command line tools are both approximately once every 3 weeks. You can get the latest from the github repo at any time (as shown above).
What is currently the "best" way to develop a back-end system in Azure Mobile Services?
Specifically, what tools are available? From what I've seen, most examples just go to the Management portal and manually add a few lines into the script window. This is worse than using just Notepad, and doesn't have any concept of version control...
Is there any way to make a project in VS 2012 that contains all the Node.js code that will run in the Azure Mobile service? Is there a way of fully running that code on a local development environment that mimics the Mobile Services?
I need to have server-side code with much more complexity than is shown in most of the Mobile Services samples or documentation that I've been able to find.
I have a web site, and a Win 8 Store App that need to authenticate against, and access relatively complex data structures from a back-end database. The solution being pushed right now all seem to include Mobile Services at the center of it, using simple REST against raw tables, but all the examples are too simple to be useful.
Can someone point me to a "real-life" sample of using Mobile Services, and a "mature" way of developing and testing such a system using the tools in Visual Studio?
Thanks.
Why you have no other option than the Management portal is really beyond me. It seems very awkward for a C#/.NET developer to go back to Notepad style programming with console.log() debugging.
What I would love to see is some Node.js entry points that you could connect to a regular C# assembly which could fulfill the request (as in ASP.NET MVC or Web API) having the full .NET Framework at your disposal.
What I could see as a possible architecture is to have:
ASP.NET MVC hosted on Azure
--- writes processed data with logic to --->
Azure SQL DB <--- reads from --- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices
Or
Cloud Worker Role on Azure ---- crunching/processing ----> Azure SQL DB <---- reading/writing raw data ---- Azure Mobile Services ---- bridge to ---> Mobile devices
You can use the Mobile Services facility for mobile devices facilities, scheduling and push notifications with limited code and do most of the coding in a managed .NET environment.
The AMS (Azure Mobile Services) along with Azure has advanced dramatically since this post was written and the replied answers.
Some of this stuff still holds true. If you have a ton of node.js written not in the Azure cloud portal, you will want to copy and paste to the portal online, custom api calls section and even perhaps sql backend tables for CRUD operations.
The hope for C# developers is that it is NOW in preview mode in which YOU CAN skip node.js and build everything without node.js very shortly... Some bugs to work out, but in 6 months this will be fairly solid.
I had questions and issue and a guy named Carlos carlosfigueira was very helpful.
Azure Mobile Services - Getting more user information
Josh covers unit testing server-scripts here: http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Unit_testing_Mobile_Services_scripts_Day_7_.aspx
In this tutorial, he uses the Mocha testing framework for JS (id TDD mode) and walks through an example for testing an INSERT script that encrypts the value of a particular property (text) and a read script that decrypts it (value is encrypted at rest in SQL db).
You can also find aggregation of links and tutorials here.
I would suggest that you build this solution using Windows Azure Mobile solutions especially it supports the Node JS NPM right now, which means you can create the API you want on the Windows Azure using the Node JS NPM and can work with it using WAMS easily. have a look on the following link it will help you understand what I want to say more.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/06/14/windows-azure-major-updates-for-mobile-backend-development.aspx
For the Client I also suggest that you build it using SignalR which is designed for cases such yours where real time applications require a lot of transactions from the server side.
http://www.asp.net/signalr
you can also find more details about how you can integrate both of them in the following link: http://hhaggan.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/signalr-node-js/
I hope these help you, let me know if you need anything else.
For running locally, the mobile service has the same Kudu environment available in azure websites, so you can browse to https://your_service_name.scm.azure-mobile.net If you navigate to the Debug Console from the top nav, you can download everything running in the site/wwwroot folder.
You can run this nodejs project locally (On windows only if you require the SQL Server npm package). Your code is in App_Data/config/scripts. If you replace the downloaded content with your current local git working copy, you can develop and debug locally, and then push changes as usual.
Tools I use:
Eclipse with JS environment (or any nodejs IDE).
Git
Postman
Steps:
Enable source control to your azure mobile service.
Pull to your local and create a eclipse project with the source.
Make changes and push.
Test with POSTman
This procedure allows me to develop really fast and eclipse tell me the common JS errors. But it has obvious downside:
No debugging (I use console.log)
The project ended up with a lot of commits (its hard to use git for proper source control)
I just did a blog post on running Azure Mobile Services locally: http://www.mikelanzetta.com/2014/09/running-azure-mobile-services-locally/ - basically it interrogates the API and starts up express, and allows you to run mocha yourself locally. It's a bit cleaner than pulling down the full wwwroot from the scm link, and I found using my local runner as a git submodule made it easy to work with (and easy for me to use VSO for managing my tests).
Anyway, for actual development, I use the Git integration and WebStorm - it automatically figures out the tasks in my local Gruntfile and makes it easy to run and test. For once it's deployed, Postman is helpful.
After looking around for some information about managing my azure app i found csmanage and powershell commandlets. What are the difference between these applications and which one to choose?
The basis of Windows Azure Services management is REST API and beauty of using REST API is that you can wrap REST in any programming language as longs as there is networking and security infrastructure available. Most of the tools you mentioned above are using REST API underneath and using Windows Azure Service Management API. CSMANAGE and PowerShell Cmdlets are using Windows Azure Service Management API to manager Windows Azure subscriptions. You can learn more about Service Management API here.
There is also another tool call WAPMMC (Windows Azure Platform Management Tool (MMC) which is also built upon Service Management API.
Besides it there are 3rd party tools which are built using Service management API i.e. Cerebrata Powershell cmdlets.
Comparing all of above, I would say Windows Azure Powershell Cmdlets is the most powerful tool among all of these and it has been updated with bug fixes and many more features added frequently. To use it in your machine you just need to download powershell cmdlets and Windows Azure SDK in your machine as these are required.
http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/
Recently I also found a Java based tool called Burp to use REST API directly from its shell to manage Windows Azure subscription. There is no need for .net framework or Azure SDK. You just need a machine with Java runtime and Burp. I have added a blog on this regard here.
I think it depends on what you're more comfortable with. I don't think the CSManage tool is being updated that much any longer (maybe at all - unsure). The PowerShell cmdlets get a lot of attention - both from Microsoft and partners like Cerebrata.
My vote - learn PowerShell and go with the PowerShell cmdlets for working with your Windows Azure apps. Small learning curve and well worth it.