Windows Azure SDK 2.4 hates you

The new Azure SDK is out and I was just about to install it. Then I notice this little notice here (emphasis is mine):

Cloud Services: Emulator Express as Default; Deprecation of Full Compute Emulator

We launched Emulator Express to address the longstanding customer ask to be able to test multi-role Cloud Services locally without requiring administrator privileges. This has since become the primary Compute emulator used by our customers for new projects. To focus our future investments on a single code base, we are deprecating the Full Emulator in favor of Emulator Express.

New Cloud Services projects in SDK 2.4 will use Emulator Express by default. Do note, however, that Emulator Express is limited to one instance per role.

Now here’s the thing. One of the most essential features of Azure is the ability to scale stuff easily using their PaaS features. Scaling on the cloud depends on idempotence; if your services aren’t idempotent, scaling them becomes very difficult. One of the tools that you need to test idempotence is to see how it would perform with 2 or more instances running at the same time, preferrably without having to deploy to a Staging environment first.

 

And apparently Microsoft is deprecating that, spouting nonsense about single code bases, just because some people want to develop on their PCs without running Visual Studio as Administrator.

I understand that the ability to run things as a non-Administrator account still is the holy grail for Windows developers, but does it really matter that much? I’d even go one step further and state that I would never work for a company that would not allow me to operate on my development machine as a local administrator.

 

But it’s OK. I understand. However, let me keep the option of running multiple instances; you’re Microsoft after all, and you should share most of the code between the two emulator flavours. If you don’t, you still have more than enough people to make sure that there’s feature parity.

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