Preventing accidental deployments to Azure

Your Azure Roles won't start. You're in the painful loop of "Busy", "Stopped", "Busy"... maybe they're reporting themselves as "unhealthy". It's Azure Deployment Hell and we (those of us who do Windows Azure dev) know it well.

Well, one of the situations that casuses this is easy to prevent: Deploying the wrong configuration to Azure.

In the name of pride, we need to avoid this embarrassing time sink and I'll tell you how. On my current project, the production scenario consists of using a "Production" Service Configuration and an "AzureRelease" Build Configuration. So, I want to make sure that these two things are selected when Packaging/Deploying the software.

So, we turn to MSBuild tasks:

Manually edit the ".ccproj" file and insert the following before the tag.

  <PropertyGroup>
    <PublishDependsOn>
      VerifyAzureRelease;
      $(PublishDependsOn);
    </PublishDependsOn>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <Target Name="VerifyAzureRelease" Condition="'$(Configuration)' != 'AzureRelease' Or '$(TargetProfile)' != 'Production'">
    <Error Text="Should Not Be Deploying non-AzureRelease Code" ContinueOnError="false" />
  </Target>

The tag redefines the standard group to include your new "VerifyAzureRelease" <Target> Task where we test for the conditions we want and spit out an error if they are not fulfilled.

Hopefully, this will help some other unfortunate souls out there from going through this problem as many times as I have.

Tom