I was presenting at the Lincoln .NET User Group last night and about midway through, my Azure project failed.  I was getting an error that said the Account Name was not specified when my app tried to work with Azure Storage. It was bizarre because the first demo had gone great and the same error was showing up even when I went into my “completed and I know this will work” project.  It was very weird. 

I started to bang on it today, and discovered that somehow the Startup Project in the solution (in both solutions actually which made it doubly weird) had switched from the Azure Service project to the WebRole project.  That meant that my app was being run as a normal ASP.NET app and not being packaged and deployed into the Azure Development Fabric.  Without being in the Fabric, the StorageClient code could not access the Config Settings from the Azure Service project – BAM! No account name to be found!

Sorry to my Lincoln folks for that stumbling block. I’ve never had that happen before and not sure how it switched in mid-demo.  But now we know… ;-)