When building applications to run on Windows Azure you can get a lot of development and testing done without ever leaving your developer desktop. Much of this is due to the convenient fact that much code “just works” on Windows Azure. How can that be, you might wonder? Running on Windows Azure in many cases amounts to nothing different than running on Windows Server 2012 (or Linux, should you chose). In other words, most generic PHP, C#, C++, Java, Python, and <your favorite language here> code just works.

Once your code starts accessing specific cloud features, you face a choice: access those services in the cloud, or use the local development emulator. You can access most cloud services directly from code running on your developer desktop – it usually just amounts to a REST call under the hood (with some added latency from desktop to cloud and back) – it is an efficient and effective way to debug. But the development emulator gives you another option for certain Windows Azure cloud services.

A common use case for the local development emulator is to have web applications such as with ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and Web API that run either in Cloud Services or just in a Web Site. This is an important difference because when debugging, Visual Studio will start the Storage Emulator automatically, but this will not happen if you debugging web code that does not run from a Cloud Service. So if your web code is accessing Blob Storage, for example, when you run it locally you will get a timeout when it attempts to access Storage. That is, unless you ensure that the Storage Emulator has been started. Here’s an easy way to do this. (Normally, you only need to do this once per login (since it keeps running until you stop it).)

In my case, it was very convenient to have a shortcut that I could click to start the Storage Emulator on occasion. Here’s how to set it up. I’ll explain it as a shortcut (such as on a Windows 8 desktop), but the key step is very simple and easily used elsewhere.

Creating the Desktop Shortcut

1. Right-click on a desktop
2. From pop-up menu, choose New –> Shortcut     
3. You get a dialog box asking about what you’d like to create a shortcut for:
4. HERE’S IMPORTANT PART 1/2: click hit the Browse button and navigate to wherever your Windows Azure SDK is installed and drill into the
5. In my case this places the path "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\Emulator\csrun.exe" into the text field.
6. HERE’S IMPORTANT PART 2/2: Now after the end of the path (after the second double quote) add the parameter /devstore:start which indicates to start up the Storage Emulator.
7. Click Next to reach the last step – naming the shortcut:
8. Perhaps change the name of the shortcut from the default (csrun.exe) to something like Start Storage Emulator:
9. Done! Now you can double-click this shortcut to fire up the Windows Azure Storage Emulator:  

On my dev computer, the path to start the Windows Azure Storage Emulator was: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\Emulator\csrun.exe" /devstore:start

Now starting the Storage Emulator without having to use a Cloud Service from Visual Studio is only a double-click away.

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