The current project I’m on is performing some integration with Team Foundation Server. The code worked very well from the developer stations, but then we ran into some issues once we deployed the system to a web server. While we were trying to track down the issues we ran into the scenario where things just looked like a black box to us once we hit the TFS Client API code. Luckily the TFS team does output trace messages using specific trace switches.

Have you installed the Windows Azure 1.7 SDK with the Visual Studio 2012 RC? If so, you might have opened up the New Project window looking for the templates for Cloud projects only to see the following: This looks pretty empty, but note the comment about “verify that a matching Framework is selected.”. This is hinting that you should change the framework version to something other than 4.5, which isn’t yet supported on Windows Azure.

Back in January I wrote a blog post explaining why Windows Azure was taking five to ten minutes to deploy an application when Heroku was doing it in seconds. At the time the reason was how the two platforms approached their Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings: Heroku focused their abstraction layer at the process level whereas Windows Azure was at the Virtual Machine level. Now some things have changed, but more on that in a bit.