Azure osFamily="1" discontinued

As I mentioned in my last post, we had one technical issue to overcome last week.  The server for Monster Cache is hosted on a Windows Azure server.  I set that up when we first started testing, around 2 years ago. At that time, I had a 6 month free trial, or something like that.

It was probably a couple months ago that I got my first email form Microsoft warning that Guest OS 1 was being retired.  That was totally meaningless to me.  I've never heard of "Guest OS" of any version.  Later, they sent more emails saying things like "You *may* be affected by the retirement of Guest OS 1".  So I kept the emails in my inbox and thought I'd look into it more later.  The day I looked into it happened to be Sunday June 1st.  I opened the email again, and noticed that coincidentally the OS was being retired that day,Sunday June 1st.  I followed the instructions to determine if my server was affected or not.  Sure enough, it was.   Uh oh.  The site hadn't stopped working yet, but it was time to get to work.

I had no idea I was using Guest OS 1.  What determined that was a simple attribute in one of the configuration files that said osFamily="1".  It seemed it might be as simple as changing that to osFamily="4" to sue the latest version, but not quite.  The different osFamily version required a different version of the Azure SDK, so I would have to download that.  The new SDK required that I use Visual Studio 2013 instead of the Visual Studio 2010 I had always used for my Azure project.  Thank goodness I had only recently purchased Visual Studio 2013 for the sake of a different project.  So I installed the new SDK, opened the project in Visual Studio 2013, let it perform a migration, then tried to run it locally.  It failed.

When I tried to run the project locally with the debugger, the emulator would just hang.  So I started doing some research for the status messages I was seeing.  Found lots of posts of people saying that happened with the debugger, but not if you ran without debugger.  I found that was true for me too, but it didn't make me confident to release it that way.  I eventually found it was an emulator setting.  More details are in an answer I posted on Stack Overflow.  Then I got another error on my static pages after that, which required more research and another change to one of my configuration files.... so 3.5 hours later, I finally had everything running again with the debugger in Visual Studio 2013.

As it turned out, Microsoft extended the cutoff date for Guest OS 1 to September 1st.  So the server never went down, and I released the changes with plenty of time.  But just one more example of hours of work needed for a Google or Apple or Microsoft upgrade.