When I tried to start an Azure project I  got an error stating that azure “Failed to initialize Windows Azure storage emulator.”.

I usually have a SQL Server Developer instance on my development machines, but Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio apparently assumes, that I have a SQL Server Express instance installed on my development machine.  So the reason for the error is that Azure looks for a wrong SQL Server instance.

The “Development Storage Initialization” command line tool (DSInit) can however be used to make Azure Tools look for another SQL Server instance.

As I just wanted to point Azure to the default SQL Server instance I could get away with running the following:

dsinit /sqlInstance:.

in the “Windows Azure SDK command prompt”.

You can get a bit of help on dsinit command by providing the /? switch:

dsinit /?