Azure localisation - how to take resource files out of your packaged application?

Question

I have a localised site reading from your standard .resx resource files. Everything works fine, however I am deploying to Azure. The .resx files are packaged along with the rest of the site and deployed onto each role instance. Meaning if I want to make a change to something I need to redeploy the entire package to Azure again and suffer a rolling update.

Is there a way I can get my site to read resource files from a single static location, such as blob storage? Is this a good idea or should I just do my best to get it right first time?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Well rolling updates aren't the end of the world. If your site is hosted with multiple running instances, each instance will be taken out of the load-balanced loop, brought down and updated in sequence, so your users shouldn't experience any real down time.

One option though would be to move to a non-resx based localization setup. you can write your own ResourceProvider to override the built in one. Rick Strahl had a nice example of reading resource information from a database.

http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2009/Apr/01/Updated-WestwindGlobalization-Data-Driven-Resource-Provider-for-ASPNET