@home: Most Common Problems #1

Jim and I are nearly done with the @home with Azure series, but we wanted to document some of the biggest issues we see every week.  As we go through the online workshop, many users are deploying an Azure application for the first time after installing the tools and SDK.   In some cases, attendees are installing the tools and SDK in the beginning of the workshop.

When installing the tools and SDK, it’s important to make sure all the prerequisites are installed (available on the download page).  The biggest roadblock is typically IIS7 – which basically rules out Windows XP and similar pre-IIS7 operating systems.  IIS7 also needs to be installed (by default, it isn’t), which can be verified by going into the control panels / programs and features.

The first time you hit F5 on an Azure project, development storage and the development fabric are initialized, so this is typically the second hurdle to cross.   Development storage relies on SQL Server to house the data for the local development storage simulation.  If you have SQL Express installed, this should just work out of the box.  If you have SQL Server Standard (or other edition), or a non-default instance of SQL Server, you’ll likely receive an error to the effect of, “unable to initialize development storage.”

The Azure SDK includes a tool called DSINIT that can be used to configure development storage for these cases.  Using the DSINIT tool, you can configure development storage to use a default or named instance of SQL Server.

With these steps complete, you should be up and running!