Upgrading Azure Storage Client Library to v2.0 from 1.7

I upgraded Azure Storage to version 2.0 from 1.7 and I've found a number of differences when using storage. I thought how I'd document how I upgraded these more awkward bits of Azure Storage in version 2.0.

DownloadByteArray has gone missing

For whatever reason DownloadByteArray has been taken from me. So has DownloadToFile, DownloadText, UploadFromFile, UploadByteArray, and UploadText

Without too much whinging I'm just going to get on and fix it. This is what was working PERFECTLY FINE in v1.7:

public byte[] GetBytes(string fileName)
{
    var blob = Container.GetBlobReference(fileName);
    return blob.DownloadByteArray();
}

And here is the code modified to account for the face that DownloadByteArray no longer exists in Azure Storage v2.0:

public byte[] GetBytes(string fileName)
{
    var blob = Container.GetBlockBlobReference(fileName);
    using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
    {
        blob.DownloadToStream(ms);
        ms.Position = 0;
        return ms.ToArray();
    }
}

How to get your CloudStorageAccount

Another apparently random change is that you can't get your storage account info in the same way as you used to. You used to be able to get it like this in Storage Client v1.7:

var storageAccountInfo = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting(configSetting);
var tableStorage = storageAccountInfo.CreateCloudTableClient();

But in Azure Storage v2.0 you must get it like this:

var storageAccountInfo = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(
            CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting(configSetting));
var tableStorage = storageAccountInfo.CreateCloudTableClient();

Why?.. not sure. I have had problems with getting storage account information before so maybe this resolve that.

What happened to CreateTableIfNotExist?

Again, it's disappeared but who cares.. Oh you do? Right well let's fix that up. So, in Azure Storage Client v1.7 you did this:

var tableStorage = storageAccountInfo.CreateCloudTableClient();
tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist(tableName);

But now in Azure Storage Client Library v2.0 you must do this:

var tableStorage = storageAccountInfo.CreateCloudTableClient();
var table = tableStorage.GetTableReference(tableName);
table.CreateIfNotExists();

Attributes seem to have disappeared and LastModifiedUtc has gone

Another random change that possibly doesn't achieve anything other than making you refactor your code. This was my old code from Storage Library Client v1.7:

var blob = BlobService.FetchAttributes(FileName);
if (blob == null || blob.Attributes.Properties.LastModifiedUtc < DateTime.UtcNow.AddHours(-1))
{
    ...
}

But now it should read like this because thought it looks prettier (which it does in fairness).

var blob = BlobService.FetchAttributes(FileName);
if (blob == null || blob.Properties.LastModified < DateTimeOffset.UtcNow.AddHours(-1))
{
    ...
}

Change your development storage connection string

This is just a straight bug so that's excellent. I was getting a useless exception stating "The given key was not present in the dictionary" when trying to create a CloudStorageAccount reference. To resolve this change your development environment connection string from UseDevelopmentStorage=true to UseDevelopmentStorage=true;DevelopmentStorageProxyUri=http://127.0.0.1 then it will magically work.

Bitch and moan

Apologies for the whingy nature of this post, I'm quite a fan of Azure but I have wasted about 3-4 hours with this "upgrade" from Azure Storage Client Library 1.7 to 2.0. It's been incredibly frustrating particularly since there seems to be no obvious reason why these changes were made. I just can't believe the amount of breaking changes when I haven't really written that much Azure storage code.

Randomly taking out nice methods like DownloadByteArray and DownloadText is surely a step backwards no? Or randomly renaming CreateIfNotExist() to CreateIfNotExists()... what is the point in that?!

I remember when upgrading to ASP.NET 4 from 3.5, I spent very little time working through breaking changes and I have 100 times more .NET code than I do Azure Storage code. As well as that, I was well aware of the many improvements with that .NET version update, with this Azure Storage update I have no idea what I'm getting. No matter the improvements, it is just an Azure storage API and this number of breaking changes, often for the benefit of syntax niceties is just unnacceptable.

Oh, if you are still in pain doing this I have found a complete list of breaking changes in this update along with minimal explanations here.