I was using a clean machine for some Azure development and it just happened to have the developer edition of SQL Server, as the default instance, installed instead of SQL Server Express Edition. When I pressed F5 to launch the local developer app fabric, I received an error message about the local developer storage. By default, the local developer storage is looking for .\SQLExpress on your machine.
Here’s the error message that popped up in Visual Studio 2010:
I looked in the output window and found this message:
Windows Azure Tools: Failed to initialize Development Storage service. Unable to start Development Storage. Failed to start Development Storage: the SQL Server instance ‘.\SQLExpress’ could not be found. Please configure the SQL Server instance for Development Storage using the ‘DSInit’ utility in the Windows Azure SDK.
I needed to configure the default instance of SQL Server for Azure local development. So I searched online for “Azure DSInit” and the first hit shows how to invoke the command.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179457.aspx
To configure development storage against the default SQL Server instance:
DSInit /sqlInstance:.
The program DSInit.exe is found in the Azure SDK:
C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\bin\devstore\
Once I ran that program to initialize the local development app storage, I was off and running with my cloud development tasks.