Deploy BidNow to the Cloud

In order to setup BidNow and deploy it to the cloud, you will need to follow the same setup process (Getting Started with BidNow) guide as when configuring BidNow to run locally. However, during the BidNow Configuration Wizard, you need to configure BidNow three items not required to run locally:

• Hosted Service DNS Name (e.g. bidnow.cloudapp.net)
• Storage Account Name
• Storage Account Key

Specifying these values will update BidNow to register Access Conrol with a Windows Azure hosted service and use Windows Azure storage accounts (i.e. not local development storage) for blobs and queues. Specifying these values will prepare you to deploy BidNow into Windows Azure.

Configuration Tasks

Here are the steps required:

1. Execute StartHere.cmd to setup BidNow and provide the credentials and endpoints required to run the application in the cloud environment. As a rule, this implies avoiding the default settings proposed by the setup scripts, which in general, use local settings as the default values.
2. During the Access Control Service Configuration step, make sure to provide an Azure Hosted Service DNS name instead of using the Compute Emulator.
3. During the “Importing Blobs” setup step, make sure to provide an Azure Storage Account Name instead of using the Storage Emulator.
   1. Enter the Storage Account name; this is the first piece of the Blob Url (e.g. storagaccountname.blob.core.windows.net).
   2. Enter the Storage Account key.
4. Choose SQL Azure (option 2) as the database server type during the Database configuration step, and provide the appropriate credentials.
5. Once the setup ends, you will need to upload the required certificates to Azure.
   1. Open IE and browse to https://windows.azure.com, sign in with your windows live credentials in which the Hosted Service is created.
   2. Enter the Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN page and select the Hosted Services node in the left pane.
   3. Expand the hosted service node in which you will deploy BidNow, and select Certificates. Note: you will need to follow these three steps twice, one for each certificate (BidNowServicesClient.pfx and BidNowServicesServer.pfx).
      1. In the Hosted Service Certificates group of the ribbon, click on Add Certificate
      2. In the Dialog Window, choose browse, go to setup\scripts\certificates, and select the certificate to upload.
      3. Type Passw0rd! as the value for the Password field and again for the Retype Password field and press Create.
6. Finally, you need to configure the SMTP Server in the Worker Role. BidNow uses email notifications as part of its bidding process. To do this:
   1. Open the BidNow.sln solution located at code\BidNow.sln
   2. Open App.Config configuration file located under the BidNow.Worker.Host project.
   3. Replace the default SMTP configuration with the following (note: Make sure to replace the placeholders with your Windows Live SMTP server. If you choose to use other SMTP Provider than Windows Live, you will need to update the hosts address and port to match the one from your provider):

  <system.net>
    <mailSettings>
      <!-- remote smtp -->
      <smtp deliveryMethod="Network">
        <network host="smpt.live.com" enableSsl="true" port="25"
                 userName="{WindowsLiveID.UserName}"
                 password="{WindowsLiveID.Password}" />
      </smtp>
    </mailSettings>
  </system.net>

At this point, you can package your application and deploy.