C#, .Net and Azure

This website is now officially up and running (I copied some valuable older posts to make it less empty).

Instead of using a virtual machine with IIS I tried using azure web apps to host the website this time.

It's a lot less hassle than setting up a VM with IIS and there's even a free tier (up to 10 free web apps).

However if you want SSL or custom domain names (instead of <name>.azurewebsites.net) you'll have to use the paid version.

The setup was mainly painless thanks to this tutorial.

I did run into an issue with Powershell not wanting to install the azure component.

I initially followed this tutorial to setup azure in powershell.

But I had to execute these commands in order:

Install-Module AzureRM
Install-Module Azure
Install-Module Azure -AllowClobber

Otherwise the installer would fail with "cannot download from url 'some microsoft url'".

After the short hickup I was able to setup run through the remaining tutorial easily.

Since my page is statically generated all I had to do was upload it.

The only "dynamic" component of my page was the 404 page and using the web.config with "customErrors" section (like I always did with IIS) did not work for me. Instead I always got the internal server error:

"The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed or is temporarily unavailable."

After a bit of messing around I got it to work with the httpErrors section as described here.

The web.config looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <httpErrors errorMode="Custom">
            <clear />
            <error statusCode="404" path="/404/" responseMode="ExecuteURL" />
        </httpErrors>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>