I had the opportunity last night to do a presentation about Windows Azure for the Denver Visual Studio User Group – http://www.denvervisualstudio.net/. One of the topics that we discussed was using IntelliTrace for debugging purposes on Azure, somebody in the audience pointing out that this was not recommended by Microsoft for production environments. Since I was not sure about the correct answer at the moment, I did some research last nigh, and he was completely right. There are different reasons behind this statement, but in my eyes, the most important one is the following:
“When IntelliTrace is enabled, the Azure role instances do not automatically restart after a failure. This allows Windows Azure to persist the IntelliTrace data after the failure; Azure waits for a developer to download the data and manually restart the role instance.”
The observation came from a recent blog entry written by David Hardin, which can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidhardin/archive/2011/01/18/azure-intellitrace.aspx
If you need more information about using Intellitrace with Windows Azure applications, there are two good links in the same blog entry, which I am also listing here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff683671.aspx
I want to express special thanks to Chris Wallace for organizing the meeting, and let me interact with such an interesting and smart group of developers. I look forward to more development discussions / presentations in the near future. If you are in the Colorado Front Range area, please consider joining the group; it is a great opportunity to interact and learn more about Microsoft technologies and development platforms.