Windows Azure 1.5 Compute emulator won’t start! (and fix)
So a few days ago the Azure team announced the release of the Windows Azure 1.5 SDK and Visual Studio tools, which I grabbed and started working on upgrading our application to make sure everything continued to work correctly. While the VS project upgrade went fine, I couldn’t for the life of me get the compute emulator to actually start up. Over and over again, I would see the “Compute emulator is starting” followed immediately by “Compute Emulator shut down” toast notifications. I could find no log entries in the event log or on the filesystem that would explain the behavior, and was getting quite frustrated. Doing a web search I found some old posts about profile names with spaces in them causing issues, so I logged in as a user without spaces in the profile name and, sure enough, the compute emulator started right up.
Since this was a VM, I took a quick snapshot, logged in as a different Admin user, renamed my profile, and did a search/replace in the registry (search for a registry editor that does this – saved me a bunch of time) for my old profile path and replaced it with the new one, logged back in, and everything was good to go. It appears this is a regression bug that is being looked into at Microsoft, but I hadn’t seen much about it on the inter-tubes so I figured I’d pass this along for those having the issue.
Happy cloud computing!
