Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC in Azure – Part 2, Deploying your Application

In Part 1 of this series we covered how you can create an MVC (both MVC 2 and MVC 3) web application that is ready to be published to the cloud. Of course we also went through how you can make this application a Telerik application, taking use of our Visual Studio Extensions. What the application actually does is up to you of course, but now that you’ve finished developing everything you want to take it to the next level; you want to deploy!

Launching to the cloud

So your project is ready to rock and you’re eager to brag to everyone that you have an application hosted in the cloud. To get started all you have to do is right-click on your Azure project (not the MVC application) and select Publish. A little dialogue will pop up that allows you to either directly deploy to Azure, by providing all of your credentials for your Azure account, or you can go the route of creating a Service Package (a file created on your machine which you can upload at a later time). For this particular post I decided to go the route of creating a service package:

This will go ahead and create two files ServiceConfiguration.cscfg and [NameOfYourAzureProject].cspkg. An instance of Windows Explorer should pop up as well, with the folder that contains these files already being open. This actually completes the publishing step so the next thing to do is log into Windows Azure.

Once you are logged in, go ahead and click on the New Hosted Service icon (should be in the upper left hand corner)

We are then brought to the Hosted Service form. Here you are required to enter various pieces of information pertaining to your project. All of these are required to fill out, and it’s up to you what settings you think will fit best. I tend to pick the North Central US region, since that’s the closest to where I’m located, but that really should not be the deciding factor. This will most likely be influenced by where the majority of your users will be located. Since we went the route of using a service package it is important is that you browse to the package file and configuration file locations locally. If you've followed this blog post so far you shouldn't have closed the Windows Explorer window that was opened during publishing, so go ahead and grab the path to this folder and navigate to it (easiest just to copy and paste the path) through the Browse Locally... dialogue.

The next step is really just to wait everything out. The deployment process entails quite a bit of waiting, but Azure will take care of all of the necessary steps to ensure that our application will live happily in the cloud. Here are some snap shots of the uploading and creation process:

Initial Creation

Initializing (aka, setting everything up)

Completed!

That least screen shot is what we’re looking for – nice green text that says “Ready”. Once we have reached this stage your application is now officially on Azure! The process took about ten minutes for me, but could be a longer (or shorter) wait. I originally thought that project size was the culprit, but I’ve had larger projects deploy in less time than smaller projects. So just be patient, and your application will eventually be deployed! :D

So there we have it, we have now created an ASP.NET MVC (either MVC 2 or MVC 3) application that has been deployed to the cloud. On top of it all we included the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC so our application can take use of the awesome components that come with that product! That's really all there is to it! What are you waiting for? Go ahead and create amazing cloud applications using ASP.NET MVC and the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC! :)