Windows Azure emulator without admin privileges

Question

How can you avoid future for allowing the Windows Azure emulator in Visual Studio to be able to run without needing admin privileges?

Answer 1

As I understand it the admin rights are required so that the emulator can have control over IIS. I've seen statements in the past that they would like to remove the requirement (or at least the confirmation dialog), but no ETA on when this will happen.

The only other option you have is to deploy it to hosted services (which you then pay for).

Answer 2

If your error is this (or vice versa) :

Compute Emulator and the current Emulator client process are running with different privileges. Please restart the emulator and current process with same privileges

One very simple solution is:

1. Close visual studio.
2. Shut down Azure emulator as shown in this picture (click on ^ at the bottom right of windows screen, right click on Azure emulator symbol and select shut down for the required emulator) :
3. Restart visual studio in administrator mode, by searching visual studio in the windows search, right click on it and select run as administrator.

Voila! This will automatically restart Azure emulators with the required permissions.

Answer 3

It is now possible (as of Windows Azure SDK 2.1) to run the azure emulator without admin privileges. You can choose a 'Use Emulator Express' option in the project properties in Visual Studio, see Debugging a Cloud Service with Emulator Express.

You can also, pass /useemulatorexpress to csrun on the command line.

Limitations Before you use Emulator Express, you should be aware of some limitations:

• Your cloud service can contain multiple roles, but each role is limited to one instance.

• You can't access port numbers below 1000. For example, if you use an authentication provider that normally uses a port below 1000, you might need to change this value to a port number that's above 1000.

• Any limitations that apply to the Windows Azure Compute Emulator also apply to Emulator Express. For example, you can't have more than 50 role instances per deployment.