What are the Differences Between an Azure Web Role and an ASP.NET Project [FAQ]

An Azure Web Role is very similar to the traditional ASP.NET project. However there are three differences in the default setup:

1. In an Azure Web Role, references are added to 3 assemblies. Diagnostics which contains all the logging and diagnostics classes, ServiceRunTime which allows access to the configuration settings and recycling of roles etc, and StorageClient which is a .NET library wrapped around a REST interface for Blob, Table, Queue and Drive storage.

   

2. There is a WebRole.cs or WebRole.vb file added to an Azure WebRole project, this file just adds some boiler-plate template code for basic Azure tasks such as setting up diagnostics and logging.

   

3. In the Web.Config file a trace listener is added to enable logging and debugging.