Skipping windows azure startup tasks when running in the emulator

Http://blog.smarx.com/posts/skipping-windows-azure-startup-tasks-when-running-in-the-emulator

Startup tasks are often used in Windows azure to install things or make other configuration changes to the Virtual Machine hosting your role code. Sometimes those setup steps are things youDon'tWant to execute when you're running and testing locally via the compute emulator. (For example, you may want to skip a lengthy download or an installation of something you already have on your computer .)

With sdks 1.5, there are a few supported ways for code to determine whether or not it's running emulated. From. Net code, there's the newRoleenvironment. isemulatedStatic Property. From other code (like a batch file startup task), sdks 1.5 adds a nice way to put the valueIsemulatedInto an environment variable. Here's the definition of a startup task that will getEmulatedEnvironment Variable telling it whether or not the role is running under the compute emulator.

 <  Startup  > 
 <  Task  Executioncontext = "Elevated"  CommandLine  = "Startup \ Startup. cmd"  > 
 <  Environment  > 
 <  Variable  Name  = "Emulated"  > 
  <  Roleinstancevalue  Xpath  = "/Roleenvironment/deployment/@ emulated"     /> 
 </  Variable  > 
 </  Environment  > 
 </  Task  > 
 </  Startup  > 

NoteXpathAttribute. there are too useful paths you can provide that will help you get at things like the port for an endpoint, the location of a local storage resource, or configuration setting values. see the msdn documentation for the full details: "XPath values in Windows azure" and "webrole schema ".

Now all we need to do is make use of this environment variable in our startup task. The first lineStartup. cmdSimply checks the environment variable and immediately exit if it's setTrue:

If "% emulated %" = "true" Goto: EOF

I used to write all sorts of tests in my startup tasks to try to avoid rerunning installers on my laptop, and this nice feature is going to save me the effort.