System.Windows.ThickFog.TryDispel

Transferring the work to Azure August 3, 2010

Although I had sample programs from the Azure Boot Camp that could have uploaded the collection to Azure, I wanted a tool, preferably a free one. First I downloaded CloudBerry. Couldn’t evaluate it, Norton Anti Virus killed the installation. I think the vendor has opened a ticket with Symantec. Next tried Gladinet. It uploaded 1,000 of my 9,000 files in 3 hours and then wanted money. I don’t think so! Then I discovered an MMC snap-in at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuremmc and that’s what I used. The UI is great and it’s promising, but it’s in a very Release 1.0 state. The documentation is lacking. There’s a very professional 15 min. video which told me everything except what I wanted to know, which was how to upload to a container. I succeeded at the second attempt, and probably all my problems were due to fat-fingering and not understanding what they expect me to do. What I learned:

1. If menu items like “Upload BLOB” disappear, just X out and reload.
2. View Details in the BLOB pane because you need to watch what it is doing to the full blob name. I had to put a slash in front of my /collection1.cmxl to get it to work, I don’t know why.
3. Check the MIME type when you upload a single BLOB because it doesn’t know .xap or .cxml.
4. Delete BLOB takes a long time because it causes a reload of the BLOB pane and it’s hard to tell when it has finished, so avoid it until you are doing a final cleanup.
5. In fact, at first, I was often wondering what it was doing, until I realised I was supposed to monitoring the “Operations Queue”.
6. It took about 50 minutes to upload my collection, which was only 20% of my real data. There is discussion in various places about how to do faster uploads. I have seen mention of a program called robocopy