NWSGI on Window Azure

I have had a couple of people ask about NWSGI on Windows Azure. Architecturally (as far as NWSGI is concerned), Azure is just IIS7 running in medium trust. You have to use xcopy deployment, which makes me glad I went to the effort of supporting it.

NWSGI 0.6 actually supports medium trust. I only discovered after the release that the error I was hitting was a bug in Cassini; it works fine in medium trust on IIS7. With that hurdle out of the way, there's no reason NWSGI shouldn't work on Azure.

And, what do you know, it works just fine: NWSGI "Hello, World" for Windows Azure. You'll need the Azure SDK and the Visual Studio tools to run it.

The big downside is that every NWSGI app would have to include its entire framework and the Python standard library (or whatever subset that it uses).

Integrating Django and ASP.NET

Using NWSGI to run Django on IronPython opens up some interesting possibilities, such as using ASP.NET's caching, session, or authentication systems for Django. I imagine any ASP.NET shop spent time configuring their ASP.NET providers for those systems, and I thought it would be interesting to see if that effort could be used for Django apps as well, and it certainly looks like they can.

A demo version of django-aspnet is now available. I'll expand on the details later, but for now: set the *_BACKEND variables in settings.py to point to these modules (they must be on the Python path). All other configuration settings for the Django apps are ignored; you must use Web.config to configure them, like any ASP.NET app.

Some parts are still missing, but the basic functionality seems to work.

NWSGI 0.6 Released

NWSGI 0.6 has been released on Codeplex. This release has some possibly breaking changes and a whole host of new features. There is also an installer available along with the zip archive. The HelloWorld example has been rolled into the zip file.

There is one minor feature addition: wsgi.file_wrapper is now supported for faster file transfers. It uses HttpResponse.TransmitFile to send the file directly.

The major new feature is IIS7 management integration, including a UI editor. This is a huge addition and one I'm quite proud of. It makes configuring NWSGI a breeze from the command line (appcmd) or from the UI. The IIS7 integration is only available through the installer.

The changes are in the configuration system to support the IIS7 management system. Unfortunately, IIS7 doesn't use System.Configuration; instead, it has its own assembly, Microsoft.Web.Administration. This caused some complications for configuration. There are now three possible usage scenarios (IIS6, IIS7 xcopy, and IIS7 installed) that require slightly different web.config settings; I will detail these in an upcoming post.