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The Windows Azure SDK provides a compute emulator and a storage emulator that work in a development environment to provide a local emulation of Windows Azure hosted services and storage services. There are some differences in functionality between storage services and the storage emulator. Prior to Windows Azure SDK v1.3, the storage emulator was named development storage.

An immediate difference is that the storage emulator supports only one account name and access key. The account name is hard-coded to be devstoreaccount1. The access key is hard-coded to be:

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Another difference is that the storage endpoints are constructed differently for the storage emulator. The storage service uses URL subdomains to distinguish the endpoints for the various types of storage. For example, the endpoint for the Blob service for a storage account named myaccount is:

myaccount.blob.core.windows.net

The endpoints for the other storage types are constructed similarly by replacing the word blob with either table or queue.

This differentiation by subdomain name is not used in the storage emulator which is hosted on the local host at 127.0.0.1. Instead, the storage emulator distinguishes the endpoints for various types of storage through use of different ports. Furthermore, the account name, rather than being part of the subdomain, is provided as part of the URL. Consequently, the endpoints used by the storage emulator are as follows:

127.0.0.1:10000/devstoreaccount1 Blob
127.0.0.1:10001/devstoreaccount1 Queue
127.0.0.1:10002/devstoreaccount1 Table

The Windows Azure Storage Client library hides much of this complexity but an understanding of it remains important in case something goes wrong. The account name and access key are hard-coded into the Storage Client library, which also provides simple access to an appropriately constructed CloudStorageAccount object.

The Storage Client library also supports a special value for the DataConnectionString in the service configuration file. Instead of specifying the account name and access key, it is sufficient to specify the following:

UseDevelopmentStorage=true

For example, this is specified as follows in the service configuration file:

This value can also be used for the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString data connection string required for Windows Azure Diagnostics.

The CloudStorageAccount.Parse() and CloudStorageAccount.FromConnectionString() methods handle this value in a special way to create a CloudStorageAccount object that can be used to authenticate against the storage emulator.



Source of Information : MICROSOFT WINDOWS AZURE DEVELOPMENT COOKBOOK