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Azure Web Jobs Installer

I’m currently working on a project where we want to use the WebJobs feature of Azure Websites. Azure WebJobs enables you to run programs or scripts in your web site either continuously, on demand or on a schedule.

I really like this feature, the only thing annoying is that you have to deploy your web jobs separately. You cannot use Web Deploy and deploy it together with your Azure Website.

Thanks to the WebJobsVS extension this is no longer true, and you get a way to deploy your web job together with your website.

From the site:

With this extension you can right click on a web project in Visual Studio and associate a console project as a WebJob. After doing that when you publish the web project the webjob project will be published into the correct location in your Azure Web Site.

After selecting this you will see the following dialog.

In this dialog you'll select the console project which contains your webjob and specify the schedule for the webjob. If you are using the WebJobs SDK most likley you will want to chose Continious here. After you do this the following changes will be made the the web project.

  1. A reference will be added to the console project
  2. In the web project the WebJobsBuilder NuGet package is installed
  3. In the web project a readme.txt file will be created at App_Data\jobs\continuous\<project-name>

The WebJobsBuilder NuGet package contains an MSBuild .targets file that is added to the projects build/publish process. This is what extends the publish process to consume the output of the webjob project.

Nice one! Hopefully this will be an integrated part of the Windows Azure SDK soon…

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