Detecting if a .NET app is running in Azure or on a non-Azure environment

Question

We are currently moving some instances of our application to Azure, but will still maintain backwards compatibility with existing instances which are not Azure hosted.

Is there a good way to detect the environment without installing the SDK on the non-Azure production server?

I've tried using:

if (RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable)

from Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime, and it works perfectly locally, and in Azure. However, I need to set the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime.dll to CopyLocal, and even then I get:

Could not load file or assembly 'msshrtmi, Version=2.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies

There doesn't seem to be a NuGet package, and I don't want to manually copy the msshrtmi dll about.

Perhaps there's a way of detecting without the dependency on Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime?

Mirella

Answer 1

Unfortunately the easiest way to resolve this is to copy the msshrtmi.dll file from:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\.NET SDK\{version}\bin\runtimes\base\x64

I know it's not very nice copying DLLs around, but this is the only one you'll need to prevent the error, and its tied to the SDK version you're using, so won't change until you update the SDK.

A viable alternative would be to add a config value in appSettings and apply a config transform when you build the application for Azure.

Wien

Thanks Greg - I ended up using a config transform to create a switch. Would have been nice if there was a way to auto-detect, but never mind. Thanks again for a comprehensive response! – Mirella

Answer 2

You can verify if the RoleRoot environment variable is present. If it is, your application is running in a Web or Worker Role.

Disintegrate

public static bool IsRunningInAzure() { return System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleInstanceId") != null; } – Atchley

Answer 3

You can check using if(RoleEnvironment.IsEmulated)

Exhibitionism

Answer 4

You could try calling Assembly.Load on the msshrtmi, Version=2.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35 assembly, and if it fails then don't try and call the RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable method (as you know you're definitely not running on Azure).

Alternatively you could try using the machinename, as all Azure Instances start off with "RD"

Anamorphism

A non-azure instance may also be running on a machine where the names starts with RD. – Genitive

Also - if I were running it in my emulator, the machine name wouldn't start with RD. I don't want to look for files that don't exist either so I've just gone with the config switch option. – Mirella

I just needed to add a comment on this one. I originally coded to check the environment machine name started with RD, as Gusdor suggested. That code broke, though, just this past year, when Microsoft started introducing additional sets of servers that had different 2 letter prefixes (I think we are up to 3 at this point). Looking for RoleRoot or RoleInstanceID as environment variables is a better trick (without any additional libraries). – Atchley