Do not use iisreset in Azure

So you have remote desktop in to one of you Azure instances and you are free to do anything you like right? Wrong! Do not change things! And as I found do not use IISReset.

I have heard many times that remoting in to an Azure instance is for looking and debugging only, NOT for changing things. In fact I have even given this advice to many clients I have spoken to about Azure. But who am I to practice what I preach?

Really, I give the advice of not changing things when RDPing into an Azure instance because any changes you make will at some point be lost when your instances are automatically updated for you and then redistributed to other machines. Any changes you wish to be permanent on your machine will need to be part of your package.

Anyway, you can see why I avoid making changes, because of a lack of persistence but that doesn't mean I shouldn't do a cheeky IIS reset when trying to fix an issue right? Hmm, wrong.

Do not restart IIS on an Azure instance

I do not know why, there must be some black magic Azure voodoo that goes on after IIS is initialised that doesn't happen when you restart it yourself manually. Anyway, I learnt that it will completely destroy your instance. The site will not respond any longer from that instance. The best way to effectively do an IIS Reset is to Reboot your instance from the Azure Management Portal.