Automatic deployment in Azure Emulator?

Question

How can I automate deployment for Azure Compute Emulator?

We are on the path to setting up internal QA environments to "host" our Azure applications for testing, and decided to try it with Azure Compute Emulator. (We currently use Azure storage (online) for these environments, but later we can also decide to host the storage components on the local computer. But this is another question at a different time.)

I see some great tools for automating deployment in online Azure, such as PowerShell Cmdlets for the Windows Azure platform, and even some paid options that sound great. However, I see that absolutely no one talks about the internal hosting of these for QA purposes. I understand that one obvious option is to locate functionality locally in a shell project (such as a Windows service for the worker role) when deploying an Azure project online, but we decided to take the Azure Emulator route.

Thus, how can we automate deployment in an emulator? VS2010 can clearly install on it, so this should be possible.

PS We are currently using TeamCity, but this may change. However, this does not matter. I want this deployment to be basically a script, so we can use any build software.

Answer 1

You want to use the CSRun command-line tool that comes with the Azure SDK. Remember, however, that the emulator only listens to localhost, so any testing efforts aimed at this should come from the same field, or you will have to configure port forwarding to fake it.