Q38. What are Compute Emulator and Storage Emulator?

Compute Emulator and Storage Emulator are the two tools Microsoft provides to developers to develop and execute cloud applications on local desktop. These tolls are part of the Windows Azure SDK.

Compute Emulator

Compute Emulator emulates the compute environment. After the application is developed we can run and test the application on the local desktop. The Compute Emulator internally uses IIS to execute the application. The advantage is without uploading the application to the cloud, we can test the application locally. The requirement to use Compute Emulator is that Visual Studio should be run as an Administrator.

Storage Emulator

Storage Emulator emulates the Azure Storage services on local desktop. If your application is using Azure Storage services, you can do two things:
1. Connect to the Azure Storage services like Table storage, Blob storage and Queue storage on the cloud by specifying the storage connection string, pointing to your storage account.
2. Connect to the Azure Storage services in the storage emulator which is running on local desktop by specifying the storage connection string which points to Storage emulator.

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