Early Mistakes/Gotchas with Azure

Here is a quick list of the things that have tripped me up since I’ve been playing with Azure.

1. Paths to blobs are case sensitive. I have a camera that saves .jpg as .JPG, which had me scratching my head for a while when they wouldn’t work after uploading to Azure. It turned out I was using lower case when I was trying to access them, so I just had to update my code that uploaded the images to convert the extension to lower case.
2. SQL Azure doesn’t support full text indexing yet. You have to set up a VM instance running the regular SQL Server if you want this in the Azure cloud.
3. Always set the blob headers when you upload a file, the content-type header in particular.
4. You can’t use a CNAME with SSL for blob storage. You have to use the long, odd URL that Azure provides you with when you set up the blob container. So instead of https://blob.example.com, you end up with https://xx000000.xx.msecnd.net.
5. There is no way to manually expire a file on the Azure CDN. Once you access it through the CDN, it’s there until the refresh algorithm updates it. So you have to be very sure you’re ready before you hit that “Publish” button.