SQL Azure connection timeout expired

Since we moved from an on premises SQL Server to SQL Azure we experienced a lot of timeouts. This is the exact errormessage:

Connection Timeout Expired.  The timeout period elapsed while attempting to consume the pre-login handshake acknowledgement.  This could be because the pre-login handshake failed or the server was unable to respond back in time.  The duration spent while attempting to connect to this server was - [Pre-Login] initialization=3; handshake=29995;

After searching the web for a while it appeared that it is recommended to use the Microsoft Enterprise Library. Version 6 was released last April. So there are not so much code samples at the moment. But there is a free e-book! Developer's Guide to Microsoft Enterprise Library, 2nd Edition. You can download it for free from Microsoft's website or order a paperback from amazon.

I installed two nuget packages for the enterprise library.

My data access class required these two additions to the usings:

using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.WindowsAzure.TransientFaultHandling.SqlAzure;
using Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.TransientFaultHandling;

And my function which returns a simple datatable looks like this now:

public static DataTable GetDatatable(SqlCommand com)
{
    DataTable dt = new DataTable();

    RetryStrategy retryStrategy = new Incremental("fixed", 5, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2));
    RetryPolicy retryPolicy = new RetryPolicy<SqlDatabaseTransientErrorDetectionStrategy>(retryStrategy);
    retryPolicy.Retrying += new EventHandler<RetryingEventArgs>(retryPolicy_Retrying);

    List<RetryStrategy> retryStrategies = new List<RetryStrategy> { retryStrategy };

    var manager = new RetryManager(retryStrategies, "fixed"); // this name must match the name of the incremental

    try
    {
        RetryManager.SetDefault(manager); // you have to set the default
    }
    catch { } // but you cannot check if it is already set, that's why I used a try, catch

    try
    {
        retryPolicy.ExecuteAction(() =>
        {
            using (SqlConnection con = new SqlConnection(GetConStr()))
            {
                com.Connection = con;
                SqlDataAdapter da = new SqlDataAdapter(com);

                con.OpenWithRetry();
                da.Fill(dt);
            }
        });
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        WriteDbError(e, com);
    }
    return dt;
}

I know that you can configure the enterprise library to use settings from the web.config. I decided to use hardcoded “variables” because they do not change (much). Please let me know if you have more improvements for the code above. I have a simple GetConStr() method which just returns the connection string from the web.config file.

So this code will solve about 99% of your azure timeouts!

Good luck! Let me know your opinion in the comments!

ps. Happy new year!