I’m a couple of hours away from giving up completely with it. I think its basically too hard to use and so undocumented.

Yesterday I read in the documentation that omitted properties aren’t interpreted as “leave unchanged”. This will mean we cannot “layer-up” small, reusable templates, instead we need to supply all property values each time which makes for huge templates and loads of parameters. I even considered dynamically generating my template with an MVC view engine.

There’s a new Azure Resource Explorer in preview but it displays read-only properties, too, so you can’t tell what needs copying into your template and what’s generated at their end. And the props aren’t exactly well-named, either.

In some places the portal is able to show me the template, in others, not. The portal doesn’t use the same language, properties or the type namespaces from ARM. Even with the AR Explorer I’m unable to find things I’ve set in the portal, like website “app settings” (environment variables). I can’t search it either.

It feels like I’ve been given access to the raw innards of Azure and left to trial and error. It’s like an internal CRUD “REST” API that’s been opened to the public, but we’ve no idea what all the stuff means.

They missed an opportunity to make an idempotent, hypermedia API that could have used JSON and XHTML, making it both browsable in Chrome and automatable in Curl etc. or with a simple hypermedia client. Being browsable would mean the GUI is the API, so you learn your way around it even before you begin trying to automate it. I’d rather that than a fancy portal.

Or perhaps they could have created a set of C# and other language POCOs and some fluent builder classes to let you construct an object model that serializes down to a perfect template, `ToString()` and out pops your JSON.

Or even just not bother. At the moment I’d have been more productive had it never existed.