Wednesday 14 December 2011

Gotcha when installing Windows Azure SDK for Node.js

I’m pretty excited about the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js which landed this week. However there is one thing to be aware of when installing this SDK if you also do Azure development in Visual Studio. Essentially the problem is that the installer does not update the Visual Studio tools for Azure, and you can end up with bits on your machine that are out of sync. Here’s an example of what can happen:

You have a Visual Studio solution with a web application project and you right click and choose “Add Windows Azure Deployment Project”:

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Visual studio gives you this generic error:

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio

The command could not be completed: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.

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You might end up with a deployment project anyway, but if you try to package it you get this error:

WAT080: Failed to locate the Windows Azure SDK. Please make sure the Windows Azure SDK v1.5 is installed.

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Fortunately, the resolution for this is very simple. You just need to download the newest version of the Azure SDK for .NET (at time of writing this is the November 2011 version):

This will get all your bits in sync, and you can then deploy both .NET and Node.js apps to Azure without issues.