How to make nop azure friendly

I posted a few weeks ago about the way in which the Admin project and plugins are stored in the solution.
We have just pushed up some proposed changes to the solution structure to try to prompt some discussion on this.

The issues we had were:
  1. The Admin project was logically outside the web project but physically inside it.
  2. The reliance on the build script outside of studio to create the "real" structure for deployment.
  3. Publishing to Windows Azure requires the structure of the solution to match what the final structure will be

The proposed solution can be found in our fork at https://hg.codeplex.com/forks/cj_browna/azureimplementation
In essence the change we made was to move the admin out of a seperate project and into an Area within the main app.

We are using NOP on the azure platform for some high profile/traffic sites (we are a top 3 australian retailer) but the current structure makes deployements difficult which serves as a barrier to other people adopting nop on the azure platform.

Our development team would like to keep using nop and commit our azure related enhancements back to the core project but Azure support seems to have been given low priority and visibility in recent releases. We are keen for the core team to look at our fork and let us know if they are interested in working with us to promote the use of nop on the azure platform.

Regards

Todd Whitehead

Harvey Norman Kitchenware
Harvey Norman Travel Gear
[url= http://www.harveynormandirectimport.com]Harvey Norman Direct Import[/url]
+more to come

Thanks for info. There's no any ETA but Azure support is on our roadmap

a.m. wrote:

Yes I've seen that item but it was from nearly two years ago with no indication of when it will be worked on. We are actively adapting nop now to work on azure and would like this work to be shared with the community and stay close to the main nop code branch.

A key driver for choosing nop (2.2) was that azure was scheduled for inclussion in the 2.3 release but then it was removed.

The restructure proposed would help those with azure without any negative impacts(in facet some benefits) that I could see for the non azure azures.

I ran across this sample application that may be helpful as well.

link

Thanks that link looks good. Nop already uses many of those practices/technologies.

My aim with this post was to make an offer of contributing to the project to promote its use on Azure and share the work we are doing with the broader nop community. But this is proving much more difficult than I expected.

It looks like we may have to just fork off from Nop and develop in parrallel which would be a shame.

Not to get off topic but Rackspace offers a .net cloud service that by many accounts seems much easier to deploy and maintain than azure.  Some of the negatives though are that their data centers are currently only in US (I think).  Probably not what your looking for being in Aussie land.

Just thought I would point you towards that so you can see for yourself.

Here is a link to get started.

t