DevFC.exe (Development Fabric) for Windows Azure Crashes

Question

Whenever I debug my application (ASP.NET Web Application converted to Web Role), I am able to get to the login page. I go ahead and sign in, debug through that and it seems to work fine, but as soon as it takes me to the landing page after login, DevFC.exe stops working with the error:

An unhandled exception ('System.Net.Sockets.SocketException') occurred in DevFC.exe [8072].

Now, I've searched for the issue and have seen something about DevFC.exe crashing due to VMWare Workstation that listens on the same port (12000) and HTC Sync that also listens on that port. I have neither of those applications on my machine, so I am lost here. Using TCPView (from Sysinternals), I find no other application using that port.

The one thing I do notice is that [System Process] goes crazy creating connections to localhost:12000 once DevFC.exe gets started.

Anyone have some insight on this?

Answer 1

This might sound ridiculous but restarting your machine might solve the issue. If that doesn't work, try your project on a different machine. If the project works then there is an issue with your primary machine try uninstalling then reinstalling the Azure SDK. If the devFabric still crashes on the secondary machine then it's something related to your project.

Answer 2

You might want to take a look at the logs created in the DevFC folder here: %localappdata%\dftemp\DevFCLogs (C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\dftmp\DevFCLogs). This will hopefully shed light on the actual error (which in my case, was a conflict on port 12001. Ran netstat -ab afterwards and found it was vmware-hostd.exe. This is a service included with VMWare Workstation 8. I know you said you don't have that, but you may have some other conflicting software).

See this thread as well for more detail.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuredevelopment/thread/7e205afd-4b9a-4387-8e10-99e4b8f27788