The Rough Setup Script for PDC09 SVC18 - Getting DinnerNow! to run on Windows Azure

At the bottom of this post you’ll find the DinnerNow version that I’ve been using for my PDC09 talk. The video of that talk is now available at http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVC18 and I recommend that you listen to the talk for context.

The DinnerNow drop I’m sharing here is a customized version of the DinnerNow 3.1 version that’s up on CodePlex. If I were you, I’d install the original version and then unpack my zip file alongside of it and then use some kind of diff tool (the Windows SDK’s WinDiff tool is a start) to look at the differences between the versions. That will give you a raw overview of what I had to do. You’ll find that I had to add and move a few things, but that the app didn’t change in any radical way.

Remember that looking at the code is more important that making it run. There’s one particular challenge you’d have right now with the Windows Azure CTP and that’s getting the two (!) Windows Azure compute tokens needed for separating out the web and the service tier as I’ve done here. It’s not difficult to consolidate the Web and the Web Service tier into a single role, but since I had to do the migration within a short period of time, I chose to split them up.

FWIW, I time-boxed the migration to 3 work days – which included learning about what our buddies over in SQL Azure had done in the past months — and that turned out to be a comfortable fit in terms of time.

Another function of time-boxing is that you’re finding me disabling security on most endpoints, including disabling the Access Control integration with Service Bus for most endpoints by setting the relayClientAuthenticationType attribute on the respective binding elements to None.

I know that’s a sin, but I didn’t want to cause too much churn in the first iteration. The original version of DinnerNow is conveniently using Windows authentication/authorization for its communication paths. While that’s ok for a LAN setup, things get more complicated for an actual WAN setup that the DinnerNow scenario calls for. That would spawn a wholly different discussion that shines the spotlight on our Access Control service and why it’s useful – even required – for that scenario. In order not to overwhelm everyone, I left that out for this round and will revisit that aspect in the next weeks – or maybe one of our (aspiring?) MVPs or RDs will beat me to it.

I’m also going to work with the guys who wrote DinnerNow to find a way to host this modified version of Dinner Now with the on-premise runtime bits expressly not on my primary dev machine, where they’d live now.

 

Here what you need to do to get it to run

I know this is rough. Writing up the long version of this is going to take some time and I prefer getting the bits to you early over me sitting here writing pages of docs. Maybe you can even help ;-)

1. First, you’ll need to go to the Windows Azure portal and get the SDKs and tokens/accounts. The Getting Started page has all the data and links you need so I’m not going to repeat them here in much detail. You will need at least one Windows Azure compute account (apply here), one SQL Azure account (apply here), and an AppFabric account (no application needed, just log in w/ LiveID). 
2. Download and install the regular version DinnerNow 3.1 from Codeplex. This will drop a “Configure DinnerNow 3.1” shortcut on your desktop. Run that, install all prerequisites and make sure DinnerNow runs locally before you proceed.
3. You will later need the databases that the setup created in your local SQLEXPRESS instance by setup. You’ll have to make a few changes, though.
   1. First, (download, install, and) open SQL Server Management Studio, connect to your SQL Server Express instance and switch to “SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode” on the Server Properties under Security. Then you’ll need to go to to the Security settings and either create a new account and grant it all rights on the aspnetdb database or just enable the ‘sa’ account and set its password. 
   2. Then you need to find the “SQL Server Configuration Manager” and enable TCP for your SQLEXPRESS instance like this. The default port will be 1433. If you have a full SQL Server instance on your dev machine and it’s configured for TCP the easiest is to suspend that for the moment and allow the SQLEXPRESS instance to squat the port.
4. Unpack the ZIP file appended below into a directory on your machine. At this point it should be ok to override the existing DinnerNow directory, but I’d keep things side-by-side for reference. If you copy side-by-side, grab the ./solution/DinnerNow – Web/DinnerNow.WebUX/images/’ directory from your local installation and copy it into the location where you unzipped the file here. I left out the images due to their size. And just as with the normal DinnerNow installation you’ll find a solution file named “DinnerNow  - Main.sln” in the unpacked directory – open that in Visual Studio 2008 (not 2010!) because you’ll have to make some changes and edits.
5. If you are lucky enough to have two Windows Azure compute accounts, you can skip this step. Otherwise, you will have to restructure the application a bit: 
   1. In the “DinnerNow – WA” solution branch where the Windows Azure deployment project reside you’ll have to consolidate the DinnerNow.WindowsAzure project and the DinnerNow.WindowsAzureAppSrv projects into one by replicating the DinnerNow.DBBridge reference into the DinnerNow.WindowsAzure project and abandoning/deleting the rest.
   2. In the “DinnerNow – Web” solution branch you will have to modify the DinnerNow.WebUX project by merging the DinnerNow.ServiceHost project from the “DinnerNow -ServicePortfolio2” branch into it, including merging the config files. In the original DinnerNow the hosting default is that the ServiceHost  project lives in the ./services subdirectory of the WebUX app. You can also do it that way, but you’ll have to change the respective client URIs to point to the right path.
6. In the ./database directory is a file called SQLAzureImport.sql. That’s the exported and customized script for the DinnerNow restaurants and menus database. Create a new database (1GB is enough) and load the DB with this script. You can do this with the command line or with SQL Management Studio. The SQL Azure docs will tell you how.
7. Now you’ll need to do a range of search/replace steps across the whole project. These are mostly in *.config files - a few places are in the code, which I count as bugs, but those are faithfully carried over from the original:
   1. Find all occurrences of sqlazure-instance and replace them with your unqualified SQL Azure server name (might look like this: tn0a1b2c3d)
   2. Find all occurrences of sqlazure-dbname and replace them with your SQL Azure database name
   3. Find all occurrences of sqlazure-acct and replace them with your SQL Azure administrator username
   4. Find all occurrences of sqlazure-password and replace them with your SQL Azure administrator password
   5. Find all occurrences of appfabricservicebus-ns and replace them with your unqualified AppFabric namespace name
   6. Find all occurrences of appfabricservicebus-key and replace them with your AppFabric Service Bus issuer key
   7. Find all occurrences of windowsazuresvcrole-acct and replace them with the name of your Windows Azure compute account. If you have just one, use that (given you’ve done the rework in step 4), if you have two use the account-name where you will host the service tier.
   8. Find all occurrences of sqlserver-password and replace them with your local SQL Server Express instance’s ‘sa’ account password.
8. Do a full batch Rebuild of the whole project
9. Go to the “DinnerNow –WA” solution and publish the project(s) to your Windows Azure compute account(s). If you had to consolidate them you’ll have one package to deploy, if you left things as they are you’ll have two packages to deploy. You can also run these packages in the local DevFabric to test things out.
10. The executables you need to run are going to be dropped into the .\bin directory by the build. You need to run all 6 apps – but you could run them on 6 different machines – the two workflow hosts each assume the local presence of the DinnerNowWF database:
    1. CloudTraceRecorder.exe – this is the simple event listener app. You can run this right away to observe the apps starting up inside of Azure as they write events to the event listener. You can and should run this as you deploy. You can run any number of instances of CloudTraceRecorder anywhere.
    2. PortBridge.exe – this is the on-premise bridge-head for bridging to your local SQL Server Express instance so that the cloud application can get at its membership database that you host for it on your machine. After the search/replace steps you will notice that you have modified connection strings that point to a SQL Server role peeking out of your *AppSrv role. The secret ingredient is in the DinnerNow.DBBridge role that’s listening for TCP connections on behalf of your on-premise SQL Server and that connects them down to your local server with the logic in Microsoft.Samples.ServiceBus.Connections. This is the same code that’s in PortBridge.
    3. DinnerNow.OrderProcessingHost.exe is the (new) host application for the workflow that handles the order process.
    4. DinnerNow.RestaurantProcessingHost.exe is the (new) host application for the workflow that handles the restaurant process.
    5. DinnerNowKiosk.exe is the only slightly modified version of the DinnerNow in-restaurant kiosk
    6. Not in .\bin but rather to be started/deployed from VS is the also just slightly modified Windows Mobile app for the delivery app

 

Please also mind that the DinnerNow Powershell support and the other test and diagnostics capabilities haven’t been touched here, yet.

Oh, and … this is provided as-is … I’ll do my best to discuss some of the patterns over the next several weeks, but I don’t have time to provide 1:1 support.

Here’s the code:

DinnerNow-SVC18-PDC09.zip (2.35 MB)