TNWiki Article Spotlight - Creating and Deploying Microsoft Azure WebJobs
Hello and welcome everybody to our TNWiki Article Spotlight on Tuesday.
Have you ever asked yourself how you can implement CRON jobs in Azure? Instead of using a worker role (if it even still exists) what could be an alternative? Over the last couple of months I have worked on a course about that alternative: Azure WebJobs. Azure WebJobs is part of the Azure App Services and helps you to do great things in the background. Mh, do we have something on the wiki which helps you to get started with it? Of course! Chervine created an article, called Creating and Deploying Microsoft Azure WebJobs, which helps you to get started. He explains how to create a WebJob in Visual Studio, which is essentially a simple console application, and how you publish it from VS. After this section, which also covers older versions of Visual Studio, he shows how to start the WebJob from the Azure portal. That is of course not everything you can do with WebJobs. It ships with an SDK to do more with it. At the end Chervine goes through a short example of daily sales. The demo application retrieves the daily sales from a database, sends an email with the results and writes them to Azure Blob Storage.
There is even more you can do with WebJobs. In this post a Blob client is created manually, but you can achieve the same result by using the BlobAttribute. Triggers and Bindings are a good way to communicate with other services in Azure and help to reduce the total lines of code.
If you are working with Azure Web Sites or want to implement something running in the background you should definitively check out WebJobs. It helps you to build amazing things.