Windows Azure Storage in VB: Not running in a hosted service or the Development Fabric.

Question

I'm trying to run an instance of the Azure Blob Storage in the Azure Visual Studio 2010 development environment, but keep getting the following error:

System.InvalidOperationException: Not running in a hosted service or the Development Fabric.

The stack trace is pointing to these lines:

Imports Microsoft.WindowsAzure
Imports Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics
Imports Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient

...

CloudStorageAccount.SetConfigurationSettingPublisher(Function(configName, configSetter) configSetter(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings(configName)))

Dim this_storage_account = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString")

...

I'm a little dubious about the first line as it comes from a c# interpretor output of what appears to be a common hack to get around a quirk of the CloudStorageAccount class.

DataConnectionString is set to UseDevelopmentStorage=true

Both the Development Fabric and Development Storage are running in the task bar.

I've tried creating a clean solution to see if this was a configuration issue, but am still getting the same error.

Any ideas gratefully received.

Answer 1

This was extremely dense on my part. I believe that it was because I was running the WebRole through the Visual Studio server, rather than the Development Fabric. It therefore couldn't find the Storage service.

For those that follow:

When viewing your WebRoles in the browser you should note that the functionality associated with Azure (beyond a simple web browser) will not be available unless you run them through the Debugger (F5).