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We use some Azure specific features (mostly blob storage) in our applications. With blob storage, we figured out how to run it without requiring the sluggish Azure Emulator.

We're experimenting with the Azure Caching Preview now. It does some pretty cool things and could help address some performance concerns I have with a few of our features, but I haven't gotten it to work without it running either in the emulator or in an Azure production environment.

So, is there any known way to get it working on its own? Having to run our app in the emulator to get anything done is kind of a deal breaker, especially for some of our developers on machines without solid state drives.

Richard J. Ross III
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Dusda
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2 Answers2

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As of now, Azure Cache cannot be run locally without the devfabric emulator. Although the devfabric emulator adds to load time it helps evaluate the caching service in a manner that is uniform to the cloud and helps avoid surprises. The caching service uses a number of Azure environment features for parity on cloud and on-prem for testing.

If you are hitting issues with respect to Azure cache on devfabric times, could you tell me the extra load time added ? Use the dev config store for a faster load time, once your app loads up it shouldnt take up much extra time.Also considering removing logging etc.

Ankit Sud
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  • Is your question just running your app outside of devfabric ? – Ankit Sud Oct 23 '12 at 19:45
  • Yes, we prefer to develop without the emulator when possible to avoid waiting for it to spin up. Debugging our MVC project in IIS Express is *much* faster when working with frequent (several time a minute) code changes. – Dusda Oct 23 '12 at 23:48
  • There might be a dirty way to make this work (caching in devfabric but client in console app), but it would be a workaround(not supported scenario). Let me try it out and get back if it works. – Ankit Sud Oct 24 '12 at 17:27
  • @AnkitSud Did either of you come to any reasonable conclusions on this? I agree with Dusda that it's too slow to spin up the emulator. I'd like to just run it as a service like memcached on our local machines. – Jorin May 02 '13 at 19:36
  • I wrote a simple wrapper for all cache operations, checking RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable. If not available I use a Dictionary as cache. It doesn't have TTL, Sliding Window and other features, but I don't need that when developing anyway. – Thomas Jespersen May 26 '13 at 10:07
  • @Thomas What if I am setting up session in cache .. dictionary will works? – SOF User Jun 11 '13 at 19:38
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Azure AppFabric Cache is an implementation of Windows AppFabric Cache so if you want to run a Cache without the emulator you could try installing that on a server on premise. There are some differences, but as you're using the Cache Preview and not the Shared Cache, this should be too much of a problem.

knightpfhor
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