A
forum thread on the official Windows Azure forums indicated that it may be possible to configure the Windows Azure SDK so that it relies on a local or remote SQL Server (not Express) instance. This page provides steps necessary to attempt the process yourself.
Credit for this workaround goes to
David Justice. Any mistakes in the write-up produced here are not his fault.
This is NOT SUPPORTED and may cause negative side-effects. Proceed at your own risk.EditProcedure
1.) Open
C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\bin\DevelopmentStorage.exe.config in
Notepad2.) Edit the
DevelopmentStorageDbConnectionString to point to your SQL Server instance. By default the connection string is:
connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=DevelopmentStorageDb;Integrated Security=True"
3.) Remove any loose instances of
SQLEXPRESS or
\SQLEXPRESS within the file
4.) Save all changes.
EditKnown Issues
While this might work for the development storage tool in the cases of Blob and Queue, you might have problems with Tables. Visual Studio will not be able to create the development storage tables automatically for your entity classes. For that, you need to run DevTableGen.exe (from SDK) to generate the tables.
EditExternal Links