How to run Azure worker role locally without running them from within Visual Studio

Question

I have several azure worker role projects defined in their own solution and repository. In order to emulate the cloud environment I have to run several of those workers locally. Opening a visual studio instance for each worker is not a viable option and I would like a solution that allows to work different workers at the same time and be able to scale out each worker role as required.

Is there a way to trigger the azure compute emulator to start the roles from the command line?

If not, how about writing a console application that will trigger the onstart, run and onstop methods of the worker. In such a case I am not sure what the implications of such a solution would be on worker multithreading and if it would be possible to scale each worker role.

In general is there a best practice on simulating complex cloud environments on a dev machine (within reason)?

Answer 1

It turns out that azure emulator can be run from the command line after all using csrun that is included with Azure SDK.

Don't how I didn't stumble upon it earlier. It seems a bit tedious, since the worker role has to be run at least once from within visual studio to create a csx directory (maybe there is another way?).

For other people looking for it. You have to run azure SDK command line using administrative rights and get into your Azure cloud service project directory and run something like:

csrun csx\Debug ServiceConfiguration.Local.cscfg

which will start the emulator and run the worker.