Add WebRole.cs - and have it called - in an existing ASP.NET MVC site converted to web role

Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC 4 site running perfectly well in an Azure WebRole. The ASP.NET MVC project was started on its own, after which I added an Azure Cloud Service project to the solution and added the ASP.NET project/site as one of the 'roles' of the service (so it shows up in the 'Roles' folder).

My problem is that I would like to have working a WebRole.cs file within the ASP.NET MVC project, but no matter what I've tried to do, it appears that when deployed, it just never gets called. OnStart and the override of Run (which I know, must never leave the loop) -- these just apparently never get called.

But if you startup a new CloudService project and add, at that time from the start, an ASP.NET MVC project, it automatically has a WebRole.cs file in it, so my guess is that I need to configure something somewhere for the WebRole.cs (actually speaking, the WebRole class, which inherits RoleEntryPoint) to get called. What might that be?

using System;
using System.Web;
//using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Threading;

namespace Us.WebUI
{
    public class WebRole : Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime.RoleEntryPoint
    {
        public override bool OnStart()
        {
            return true; //return base.OnStart(); // CALL THIS???
        }

        public override void Run()
        {
            while (true) {
                Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30));
                try {
                    EmailFuncs.SendEmailToUs("An email from our WebRole?????", "Email me this, email me that.");
                }
                catch { }
            }
        }

    }
}

UPDATE: Thanks, the question has been answered. But I will add: On doing this, while it clearly was working (fully deployed and in emulator), that suddenly I was having problems doing a full publish of the site. After a azure publish took 3 hours:

Verifying storage account 'xyz'... > Uploading Package... > - Updating... [stayed here for 3 hours], it failed with this error: The server encountered an internal error. Please retry the request. So one thing I was wondering is, did I need to override OnStop in WebRole.cs?

UPDATE 2: Those previous problems were fixed, and had nothing to do with this issue. Actually, I've learned this: If you ever have any warnings generated in your build, Azure often will not work with them even when they don't cause problems locally or in other hosts. Since then, I've been much more studious to tackling build warnings (but critical to this is turning off with warning codes the many warning types you want to ignore!).

Sandrino Di Mattia Sandrino Di Mattia · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-04T10:56:22

Adding a class to your Web Project which inherits from RoleEntryPoint is sufficient, it should just work. Did you try setting a breakpoint in the emulator?

What you might be experiencing is that EmailFuncs.SendEmailToUs requires info from the app/web.config and that this info is not available. You need to know that your WebRole class runs in a different process (not your web application), meaning it's not using your web.config. If you want the WebRole.cs to read info from the configuration file, you'll need to add these settings in WaIISHost.exe.config

Add WebRole.cs - and have it called - in an existing ASP.NET MVC site converted to web role

1 Answers