Windows Azure: When Visual Studio eats up all memory

Every now and then I encounter a what seems to be a rather weird case of Visual Studio pushing the OS to its knees, to the point where all memory appears to be exhausted and all kinds of weird problems start appearing, such as dialog boxes without text and processes closing unexpectedly.

Every now and then as well I’ve discovered that it’s related with the Azure Emulator attempting to start a role then failing.

[fabric] Role state Busy
[fabric] Role state Unhealthy
[fabric] Role state Stopping

This repeats ad infinitum (or at least, until your memory is exhausted). There are log files provided as well that don’t offer much as to what went wrong.

 

Here’s why this is happening:

You’ve updated the Azure SDK version in one of your projects. Visual Studio is supposed to update the reference to the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime .DLL to the one that comes with the new SDK, but… a lot of times it doesn’t or it crashes midway through, leaving you with a mess that you need to fix yourself (same thing happens with NuGet by the way).

 

Every single time this happens to me, I waste too many hours trying to figure out what’s wrong and to remember how I solved it last time. I’m posting this here in case it helps you save time too.

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