windows azure development storage blob service not starting

Question

When I start development storage emulator, I get an error

The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process

I guess th

Answer 1

I had the same issue, but in my case, the problem was somewhere else. There was the process System (PID 4) listening on the port 10,000, so it's obvious I wasn't able to kill such process. The only workaround was to reboot Windows (Windows 7 64-bit), but that's too extreme and time consuming.

The most challenging part was to identify, why is the System process listening on that port. Google didn't help at all in this case.

So I simply tried to connect to the port 10,000 on localhost using Netcat (better Telnet) and send there something:

$ nc 127.0.0.1 10000

I quickly noticed from the response, that there is an HTTP server listening on the port 10,000. The most important information in the response was this header:

Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0

Then it was really fast to free this port for Azure Emulator. Brief googling revealed the details about what is this thing actually doing: HTTP Server API, and most importantly who is it doing: Windows HTTP Services.

Then I went to Services Management Console, found the service called Service WinHTTP WPAD which was running and simply stopped it. And voila, the port 10,000 is free as a bird now.

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Does anyone know how does it work? I guess that some 3rd application creates a listening HTTP server on the port 10,000 using the WinHTTP WPAD service. I doubt that it's anything from Microsoft since they wouldn't configure the Azure Emulator to use the port already used by them.