Create a Staging .NET Backend for Testing

Debugging on your Live Service is bad!  For instance if you are breaking in the debugger while one of your users is trying to get data, that call will likely timeout.  Also it is difficult to isolate an issue if multiple unplanned requests are coming into your service.  If you have some things you need to test or debug with your .NET backend, you can easily publish your .NET Backend code to a ‘Staging’ service to do your debugging.

Setup

From your .NET Backend project choose publish, but click ‘Windows Azure Mobile Services’ (under ‘Select a publish target’) to publish to a new Mobile Service.

Hit ‘New…’ to create a new mobile service

Give it a name (I like Staging-<<NAME OF LIVE SERVICE HERE>>)

Publish it!

And now you can debug it!

Debug

Notes

This is just a quick publish blog to give you some ideas.  Keep the feedback coming and we can improve this post together!

By using a ‘Staging’ area you will not disrupt your service operations.

You can copy the Azure DB data to the new DB that was created, but that is beyond the scope of this quicky blog.