Using Azure Activity Log to check the progress of deployment slots swap operation

If you use Azure Web App Deployment Slots then you may have noticed that sometimes the swap action may take a while to complete. This may happen when an application that is being swapped into production has a long warmup/initialization phase. It has to be warmed up on every VM in an App Service Plan and that sometimes takes minutes (more detailed description of what happens during the swap can be found in Most common deployment slot swap failures and how to fix them). This blog post explains how to see the progress and the result of the swap operation in the Azure Activity Log.

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Using Powershell to manage Azure Web App Deployment Slots

This blog post has been updated from its original version in order to use the correct names of the PowerShell cmdlets.

This blog post explains how to perform common management tasks for Azure Web App deployment slots by using Powershell cmdlets. To learn more about deployment slots refer to the Azure documentation and my previous blog posts: Azure Web App Deployment Slot Swap with Preview and How to warm up Azure Web App during deployment slots swap.

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Setup IIS on Server Core – Windows Server 2008 R2

This post has been updated from its original version to correct the installation instructions, which have changed since the time the post was written in Feb 2009.

With the addition of .NET Framework to Server Core in Windows Server 2008 R2 the Server Core installation option became even more appealing for those who want to use a very low footprint server for hosting their applications. Availability of .NET framework provides the following great benefits:

  1. ASP.NET support – you can now use Server Core to host your ASP.NET applications.
  2. IIS Remote Management – Server Core does not provide any user interface other than command line. But if you prefer to use IIS Manager UI to administer IIS, you can now use IIS Remote Manager to connect to IIS on Server Core and perform all the management tasks from within familiar UI of IIS Manager.
  3. PowerShell – Windows Server 2008 R2 includes IIS PowerShell snapin, which is also available on Server Core.

This post describes how to setup and configure IIS on Server Core in Windows Server 2008 R2. Specifically the following tasks are described:

  • Using oclist and ocsetup commands
  • Basic Installation of IIS
  • Installing ASP.NET
  • Installing PowerShell and IIS snap-in
  • Enabling IIS Remote Management
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