Loading a Windows Azure Project from Gallery into Visual Studio 2012

Question

I have a Windows Azure web site. I started this web site as a New -> Compute -> Web Site -> From Gallery. Once here, I chose the Orchard CMS. I have the site successfully running in Windows Azure. My challenge is, I want to do some customizations to it.

How do I get this code into my local Visual Studio 2012 instance so that I can:

1. Make customizations to the site with Visual Studio 2012.
2. Check it into source control so other on my team can work on it

I saw the following post: http://www.davidhayden.me/blog/installing-orchard-cms-as-an-azure-web-site. However, this only talks about opening the site in WebMatrix. I want to skip WebMatrix and go straight to Visual Studio if possible.

Pickett

Answer 1

You do not need to use WebMatrix at all; another option is to just download the files from FTP and then create a VS solution and add the files you downloaded.

From Visual Studio you can easily deploy the solution to TFS and to your azure website.

As a side note, as of today (January 28th, 2014) the registry edit proposed by SilverNinja is no longer needed, I was able to open VS 2013 Professional from Webmatrix without editing the registry.

Terminal

Answer 2

Download WebMatrix and click the Visual Studio button in the ribbon. It must create a solution file for you to then access your website via Visual Studio. I don't have an Azure website at the moment to try it with.

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You may need to tweak the registry to get the VS 2012 to open properly:

• Type regedit and select the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.
• Locate VisualStudio.DTE and change the CurVer to VisualStudio.DTE.11.0
• Finally change the CLSID to {059618E6-4639-4D1A-A248-1384E368D5C3}

Iatrics

When I open the Remote Site in WebMatrix, the Visual Studio button is disabled :(. – Pickett

Did you try downloading your remote site first? – Iatrics

I downloaded the Remote Site. However, when I opened it in Visual Studio, and attempt to compile the project I get an error. The error says: "Object reference not set to an instance of an object. ... Contrib.Cache.csproj" Why can't I compile the project? What am I doing wrong? – Pickett

@Pickett "If you are going to use VS, please use the full source code version." ~ BertrandLeRoy on CodePlex. – Gsuit