Azure: Upgrading to Azure SDK v2.1

Question

We just upgraded to Visual Studio 2012 and installed the Azure 2.1 SDK. When we opened our Azure project in VS 2012 it upgraded the Azure project to use the 2.1 version (from 1.6) but the ASP.Net MVC project and other class library projects that utilize the SDK as well did not have any of their references changed to use the new libraries. They all still point to the 1.6 bits. Is there a way to upgrade all references to libraries used to the 2.1 SDK? We have references to Windows Azure Storage Clients, Caching Clients, Diagnostics etc and I'm afraid we will miss something just removing old references and adding new ones.

Answer 1

I would not recommend blindly updating the libraries as there have been significant changes.

Storage client library 2.0 (which is part of SDK 2.1) is drastically different (though much better IMHO) from previous versions. There have been namespace changes, some methods were removed.

Diagnostics libraries in SDK 2.1 have a dependency on Storage Client library 2.0. Again, I would not recommend upgrading that either.

My recommendation would be to evaluate the impact of upgrading libraries from 1.6 to 2.0. Please go through the following blog posts by storage team:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2012/10/29/introducing-windows-azure-storage-client-library-2-0-for-net-and-windows-runtime.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2012/10/29/windows-azure-storage-client-library-2-0-breaking-changes-amp-migration-guide.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2012/11/06/windows-azure-storage-client-library-2-0-tables-deep-dive.aspx

I also wrote a series of blog posts on upgrading code to 2.0 version which you can read here:

http://gauravmantri.com/2012/11/17/storage-client-library-2-0-migrating-table-storage-code/

http://gauravmantri.com/2012/11/24/storage-client-library-2-0-migrating-queue-storage-code/

http://gauravmantri.com/2012/11/28/storage-client-library-2-0-migrating-blob-storage-code/

http://gauravmantri.com/2012/12/26/storage-client-library-2-0-exception-handling/

http://gauravmantri.com/2012/12/30/storage-client-library-2-0-implementing-retry-policies/