Creating a SharePoint 2013 App With Azure Web Sites

This post will show how to create a SharePoint 2013 app for Office 365 and publish it to an Azure web site.  If you don’t have either today, you can get an Office 365 trial for free and an Azure web site for free.  If you are an MSDN subscriber, you have access to free MSDN benefits including Windows Azure and Office 365.

Now we need a web site for our app.  Hmm… where to get one?  Oh yeah… Azure gives me TEN FREE WEB SITES.  Plus, I have an MSDN subscription that gives me $150 per month, I’ll just use that.  Free money.

You’ll also need to install the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio.  Go ahead, go do that, then come back when you’re done.  I’ll wait.

Creating the Azure Web Site

Since you already installed the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, you have a new option in Server Explorer to connect to Windows Azure.

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You are prompted to sign into Azure. 

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Once signed in, expand the tree view.  Right-click on Web Sites and choose Add New Site.

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Give the site a name (it must be unique) and choose a location nearest to you.

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Click Create.  OMG, that is so cool.  Creating web sites without leaving Visual Studio.

Creating the App

To get started, install the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio.  Once installed, open Visual Studio 2013 and create a new SharePoint provider-hosted app.

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In the next screen, provide the URL for your SharePoint site and leave the hosting type as the default “provider-hosted”.

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Finally, choose what type of hosting model you want.  SharePoint developers have been asking for years for ASP.NET MVC… well, here it is!

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Finally, choose how you want your app to authenticate.  We are using Office 365 for this example, leave the default “Use Windows Azure Access Control Service”.

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That’s it, you now have an app.  If you look at the code that was generated by default, you’ll see that it shows how to use the managed client side object model to obtain the user’s Title property, displaying their name. 

Creating an O365 SharePoint Developer Site Collection

To enable side-loading of apps, you’ll need a Developer Site Collection in O365.  Go to your SharePoint site as a tenant administrator and choose Admin / SharePoint.

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In the tenant administration screen, choose New Private Site Collection.

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Give the site a name and choose a URL, and choose the site template as “Developer Site”.

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Once that’s created, you now have a SharePoint site capable of side-loading apps.

Debugging Locally

To do this, you’ll need a Developer Site Collection in SharePoint to deploy to. 

Hit F5 and notice that you first have to log into Office 365.  This is because the .app package for the app is being deployed to SharePoint in the cloud while the app runs locally in IIS Express.  SharePoint needs the credentials of a user who is authorized to deploy the app package.

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You are then prompted to enter your credentials, this time as the user who is installing the app to the site.

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Of course you trust MyAzureDemo Smile  Click Trust It.  You are then redirected to your web page running on IIS Express that uses the managed client side object model to query data from an O365 SharePoint site.

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The point here is that you would typically just hit F5 to debug locally until you are ready to publish. 

Publishing to Azure Web Sites

We now have a web site and our app, how do we get our app onto the web site?  We first download the publish profile for the web site.  Right-click the web site and choose “Download Publish Profile”. 

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A file with the extension “.publishsettings” is now in your downloads folder.

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We now need to get a client ID and client secret from SharePoint.  Go to your SharePoint site and append the URL “_layouts/15/appregnew.aspx” to the site.  Click Generate to create a client ID and a client secret.  Give the domain name of your new Azure web site (the one I created was called KirkEAzureDemo.AzureWebSites.net… capitalization doesn’t matter).

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Click Create and the app principal is created.  Copy the Client ID and Client Secret values, we’ll need those in just a second.

Now, in Visual Studio 2013, right-click the SharePoint app and project (not the web site) and choose Publish.

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Create a new publish profile.

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Select the .publishsettings file that you downloaded previously.

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Provide the client ID and client secret and choose Finish.

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You now have a profile that contains your client ID and client secret as well as the location of the Azure web site to deploy to!  In the next screen, choose “Deploy your web project”.

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You can preview the changes.

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Click publish and then watch the Output window to see that the web site was successfully published.

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Installing the App in SharePoint

Now, choose “Package the app”

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The window will now have a lovely big RED X on it telling you that a valid HTTPS connection is required. 

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Just change it to HTTPS and it goes away (Azure web sites are nice like that… no futzing with certificates to get this to work).

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Finally, click FINISH.  Windows Explorer comes up to show you the .app package for the app.

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Once you have the .app package, you can upload it to an app catalog and then install the app to your site.  However, since we are using a Developer Site collection, we can take advantage of side-loading to quickly test our app.  Go to your SharePoint developer site collection and choose “Apps in Testing”.  Notice that our app package is still there from when we pressed F5 previously. 

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Before continuing, we need to get rid of that existing app package.  Just click the elipses and choose Remove.

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Choose “new app to deploy”.  On the next screen, click the link to upload an app package.

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Browse to the location of your newly published .app package, and leave the checkbox to overwrite existing files.

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Click OK, then click Deploy.

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Trust the app.

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Now click on the app name to launch it.  You are redirected, and finally the app shows in the browser.  Notice the URL is no longer “localhost”, it is now your Azure web site.

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Congratulations, you just published an app to an Azure web site. 

Bonus Feature – Editing with Visual Studio “Monaco”

Wanna see something cool?  Go to the Azure Management Portal, select your web site, and go to the Configure tab.  There’s a new option to enable editing in Visual Studio.  Turn that on.

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Now go to the dashboard for your web site and choose “Reset your deployment credentials”.

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Provide a username and password.

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On the Quick Glance menu in the dashboard, you will see a new link to “Edit in Visual Studio Online”. 

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Click that, and you are prompted for credentials.

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Once you log in, you can now EDIT PAGES FOR YOUR WEB SITE ONLINE.

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Click the Run button on the left of the screen.  You will see output:

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Ctrl + Click on the link to your web site, you’ll see an unfriendly error.  This is because there is no host URL to redirect to.

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Change the URL to “/Home/Contact” to see the page you edited.

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Summary

If you are attending SharePoint Conference 2014, make sure to come to my session Building SharePoint Apps with Windows Azure Platform as a Service. I will be showing this and a whole lot more about building apps to take advantage of Azure PaaS.