Automated deployment to Azure Emulator?

Question

How can I automate a deployment to Azure Compute Emulator?

We're going down the path of setting up internal QA environments to "host" our Azure apps for testing and have decided to try to do this via the Azure Compute Emulator. (For now, we're using Azure storage (online) for these environments but we may later decide to host the storage components locally as well. But that's another question for another time.)

I see some great tools to automate deployment to online Azure, such as Windows Azure Platform PowerShell Cmdlets and even some paid options that sound great. However, I see absolutely nobody talking about internal hosting of these for QA purposes. I realize one obvious option is to host the functionality in a shell project locally (such as a Windows service for a Worker Role) while deploying the Azure project online, but we're choosing to go down the route of the Azure Emulator.

As such, how do we automate deployment to the Emulator? VS2010 clearly can deploy to it, so it must be possible.

P.S. We're using TeamCity for now but that may change. That shouldn't really matter, though. I want this deployment to be largely script-based so we can use any build software.

Answer 1

You'll want to use the CSRun command line tool that comes with the Azure SDK. Remember, though, that the emulator only listens to the localhost, so any testing efforts aimed at it need to originate on the same box, or you'll have to set up some port forwarding to fake it out.