Testing the Application Locally

When you run an Azure application locally for the first time, the environment needs to be initialized. Fortunately Visual Studio and the Windows Azure SDK will do the work for you. The first thing you notice is that the tools generate a new database on your machine; this is required for storing blobs, tables, and queues. This step also reserves local ports for reaching the previously mentioned contents locally. You can see this when you press F5. The Windows Azure Simulation Environment is started, and a dialog shows the progress of the database generation and IPs initialization, as represented in Figure 40.6.

Figure 40.6 Completion of the Simulation Environment initialization.

This also creates a local developer account that replicates on your local machine what you can activate on the online services. After you click OK, you can see the application correctly running in your web browser. Figure 40.7 demonstrates this.

Figure 40.7 The application running locally.

You can now try to add or delete other books and finally save changes. So we reached our objective locally. The next step should be deploying the application to the cloud, but doing making this, here’s some brief information about the Simulation Environment tools. The Simulation Environment is essentially composed of two main tools: the Development Storage, which is used for locally storing blobs, tables, and queues, and the Development Fabric that is useful for monitoring running services. The Simulation Environment provides a tray bar icon that you can right-click to access both tools. Figure 40.8 displays how the Development Fabric gives information about the running application.

Figure 40.8 The Development Fabric shows services information.

It is worth mentioning that the Development Fabric can show information about multiple running Azure services. Figure 40.9 shows instead the Development Storage UI. Notice that here you can just enable or disable endpoints for blobs, tables, and queues, but the suggestion is to leave unchanged the default settings.

Figure 40.9 The Development Storage user interface.

Because the application runs correctly, we can now deploy it to the cloud environment of Windows Azure.