the next door (so called) geek @rakkimk | your next door geek | friend | blogs mostly on technology, and gadgets.

If you haven’t noticed, your Azure Website’s SCM site has been updated to work with Azure Single Sign-on. Earlier, it was prompting for a basic authentication prompt where you enter your publishing credentials, but now, you can just login using your Microsoft Account which you are using for your Azure Subscription.

For example, if I go to my site https://<mysite>.scm.azurewebsites.net, it shows me the below:

If I’m already logged into my Microsoft Account, say, I’m already on the Azure Management Portal, I don’t even see this if I’m going to the SCM site. It takes directly into the SCM site. However, in case if you need the basic authentication, you can append /basicauth in the url, like https://<yourwebsite>.scm.azurewebsites.net/basicauth to get the basic authentication prompt.

Azure Websites Paas offering from Microsoft gives you more power to you. You could change a few default configurations that come with the platform by various means, for example, for PHP you can set a few settings in .user.ini, for any custom values for ApplicationHost.config, you can use XDT transforms. There are a lot of times, you want to check what are the default configuration files that are used for your Azure Website. You could easily get those files from the Kudu Console. To access the Kudu Console, navigate to https://yoursite.scm.azurewebsites.net, and login with your deployment credentials.

Once you are in the site, click on “Debug console” menu, and choose “CMD”, or Powershell. Both should open a file explorer, and a console window below. From the file explorer, you can click on the “Site Root” icon, the middle one, and then click on the “Config” folder.

This is the hidden place (well, not anymore) where you will find all the configuration files related to your website instance. So, you have there your applicatiohhost.config file, the rootweb.config file, and also the PHP.ini files for various PHP versions available for the website.

You could either view the file right there by clicking on the could download the file by clicking on the icon. Ofcourse, the below console you see there is powerful too. You could try your favorite command line utility in there. For example, I want to print out the last 10 lines of the configuration file.

And, yes, you can edit a few files right from this Kudu as well.

Well, you get the point! Have fun.

I’m sure everyone appreciates the pace in which Azure Websites team releasing cool features. Azure Websites was all over the announcements in the recent //build. The team has updated the Kudu console with new tab named ‘Process Explorer’. You will see it in the list of options available in the site. To access the Kudu console, go to https://yourwebsite.scm.azurewebsites.net (note the https, and .scm in the url).

If you have used the Kudu console before, you would have seen there are REST APIs available for a lot of things, including “Processes and mini-dumps” which when used in Google Chrome with JSON viewer extension was easier to use to get mini dumps of the w3wp.exe process, or getting a gcdump of the process. This new “Process Explorer” tab gives you a cool UI way of doing the same.

It will list down all your running processes, under your site’s context – including the w3wp.exe that serves your main website (as well as this Kudu site, or any other site extensions like Monaco editor), any WebJobs your site might have, even the cmd.exe/powershell.exe that gets launched when I open the debug console. You could easily see things like, the memory usage of the process, how many threads are there, handles within the process, and more.

Getting memory dumps of the worker process was one of the main post mortem debugging techniques we often do in Microsoft Support while helping the customers with their common issues like hang, slow response, memory leak. Good to see this easy way to get dumps from the Kudu console.

Happy Debugging!