Newbie Microsoft Azure Questions

We have a MVC3 .NET application currently deployed using IIS. We are looking to migrate to Azure and have a couple questions.

1. Does Azure suppor开发者_开发知识库t sending email confirmations, such as when a user register, reminder for daily topics, etc.? If so, is there a simple way to implement this? Currently we are hard-coding the email templates in MVC, probably not the best.

2. Does Azure support scheduling of tasks? Like going to a URL every so many hours or kick of a SQL task?

3. Does Azure support basic IIS functionalities like gzip JS/CSS files? ETag?

Cheers, Dean

No, no, and no. Windows Azure (like any other Windows) is just a platform with high scalability and reliability. You have to do everithing by yourself.

Under the covers Azure is just a windows server configured to run your app. So you could configure it to do whatever you need. As for email confirmations, there is nothing built-in to Azure that would do this. You would have to implement something yourself.

As for the other things you asked about, like scheduling tasks or other IIS functionalities, you could definitely configure the server to do these things using a Startup script. Startup scripts can be specified in your Azure configuration file and will be run when the server instance is created. You can create a batch file to run at startup to do the things you mentioned. For example, your batch file could contain appcmd commands to configure IIS, or it could run the schtasks command to create a scheduled task.

See here for more info on creating startup scripts: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg456327.aspx

as for your email question you might want to take a look at the amazon email offering: http://aws.amazon.com/ses/

this will give you email as a service and is easily connected to your program by code.

for scheduling tasks you would probably need to get into Windows Workflow Foundation to get the process running in the cloud constantly.

you could enable full iis mode on azure, for more info check http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/12/02/new-full-iis-capabilities-differences-from-hosted-web-core.aspx

GL