Unable to force azure web role to run locally with emulator

Question

I have a web role that I am trying to run locally using an emulator. I have work on another computer, but I can’t get it to work on another, and I got to the point of reformatting it and starting from scratch.

When I start the site from Visual Studio, Chrome shows the following message:

This webpage is not available

The connection to 127.0.0.1 was interrupted.

There is also an error code below:

Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): The connection was reset.

One of the most interesting assembly results is these lines:

Starting process 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\Windows Azure Tools\v1.8\Debugger\WindowsAzureDebugger.exe' with arguments '"C:\Program Files\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe" /trace:error /config:"C:\Users\brian\AppData\Local\dftmp\Resources\159c7254-b7d0-4076-a4fd-820b00feca5f\temp\temp\RoleTemp\applicationHost.config" /site:"deployment18(27).AzureApp.MyApp.Web_IN_0_Web"'...

Process 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\Windows Azure Tools\v1.8\Debugger\WindowsAzureDebugger.exe' exited with exit code 0.

If I run C:\Program Files\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe" /trace:error /config:"C:\Users\brian\AppData\Local\dftmp\Resources\159c7254-b7d0-4076-a4fd-820b00feca5f\temp\temp\RoleTemp\applicationHost.config" /site:"deployment18(27).AzureApp.MyApp.Web_IN_0_Web" from the command line, I get the following message:

The system cannot find the file specified. Unable to start IIS Express in background.

I don’t know which file he cannot find, but I checked that the configuration file I am transferring actually exists. Does anyone know what is going on here?

Answer 1

While I can’t tell you what could be the main cause of your problem, I can offer several solutions to this problem:

• Try changing IIS Express to full IIS and see if it changes behavior. You can do this by going to the project properties of your Windows Azure application and looking at the Internet option.
• Try to run the application without debugging
• Run CSrun at a command prompt with the / launchDebugger switch / run switch to verify that the debugger is working without any problems.
• Try using IE as your default browser
• Empty the dftemp folder completely for any residual configuration, and then run Azure Emulator separately to make sure there are no problems.

Answer 2

Procmon " http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645 " can help you find a file that is missing ...

Answer 3

Hope someone stumbles on this answer with similar symptoms. When deleting a role in caching, the <dataCacheClients> section was deleted. One way or another, the section to the left of <dataCacheClients> remained in the web.config file. Everything is compiled and deployed to the emulator successfully. However, the role will not work since applicationHost.config is missing. The fix was to simply remove the unnecessary <dataCacheClients> section from the web.config file.