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Azure WebJob has been very helpful to help me running small automated tasks without the hassle of creating VMs or worker roles. Moreover, if you are using a recent version of Visual Studio (from Update 3, I think), you will also get some tooling support for publishing WebJob to Azure Website directly from inside the IDE. It is much more convenient than the old way: building, zipping, going to the portal, deleting the old build and uploading the new one.

However, I then got a strange problem while publishing the WebJob of one project. The error message simply said: “an error occurred while creating the WebJob schedule,” which is not useful for finding a solution at all. I have tried to search around the Internet for a solution, but cannot find any. Even stranger, I can publish that project normally to my staging websites, but not to the production one.

Eventually I found out that I have not set up any deployment credentials for my production Azure Website, and setting one solve the problem completely. I guess the tooling need that credentials to upload the WebJob’s binaries to the website.

I cost me days and days, and I found the solution accidentally after I had tried to connect to the Website using FTP, which requires deployment credentials. I hope this blog post will save you sometime should you got the same problem. I also hope that the tooling will show better error messages next time.

Cloud Computing is becoming a very interesting platform for Startups and small development teams who usually do not have much capital to invest in infrastructure and management. Cloud Computing is usually considered a cheap, quick and easy way to spin up (and down) resources such as websites or virtual machines. However, you may still be spending a lot more than necessary should you not try to make your system “Cloud efficient”.

There has been many articles on the Internet on saving money on the Cloud. As Cloud resources are usually billed by usage, trying to optimize your app can save you a lot of money. If you are using Microsoft Azure, I recommend reading some blog posts from Scott Hanselman on the “Penny pinching” topic:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PinchingPenniesWhenScalingInTheCloud.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingVideoMovingAnAzureWebsiteBetweenDataCenters.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingVideoMovingMyWebsitesImagesToTheAzureCDNAndUsingACustomDomain.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudHowToRunATwoDayVirtualConferenceFor10.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudEnablingNewRelicPerformanceMonitoringOnWindowsAzureWebsites.aspx

In this blog post I will also share some of my experience with saving money on Microsoft Azure through out my team’s projects. And please let me know in the comments if you have even better ways to save money on the Cloud!

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We came to the competition with a very simple application and then got to the World Wide Final. I did not expect that, but I believed we were worth that place in the top 3 because I believed the judges must have seen what we were trying to achieve: we were trying to make our phones handier and make life simpler; we did not try to just showcase technology. Then I arrived in Russia, super proud of our project. I prepared my presentation before all the judges, not following the scoring criteria, but everything we have imagined on the first day we started the project. Those might not be so innovative or mind-blowing to seize the first prize, but those were the true “value” we want to give people, and I believed those were also what we were all proud of. And I presented almost perfectly (in my opinion only, and comparing to my past presentations) without having to write any notes.

I knew we might not win because we focused more on providing people the best experience with every current technology available at the current time, not creating some futuristic tech like many other participating projects. But I also strongly believed that we could win, if we could make the judges saw what we saw: we did not make the technology or the only app using the technology, we made the app using the technology in the most efficient and thoughtful way.

That was how we won the competition. That was how Saint Petersburg became a new milestone of my life!

After using WordPress for a while on a hosting service and suffering from a very slow loading speed, I decided to try to put it on a free Azure Website. The setting up is much faster than last time since Azure already have the WordPress template service and a beautiful wizard to help you create a MySQL database for the blog data. It took me some mouse clicks and then I can already navigate to this page to set up the admin account. I still admire what Azure team has done with the new dashboard. It is too brilliant.

Maybe I will try to re-post my old articles to this blog in a couple of days to see if the loading speed improve. For now, I will just post this and make it the first article of my new blog!