How to restart Azure Worker Role

Ok, here's partial solution to the problem of restarting worker roles within an Azure Computing Cloud.

As suggested by Daniel C. Wang, I've tried something that you normally never do in an application - throwing unhandled exceptions.

When you launch the Development Fabric by clicking F5 (with the debugger attached) any unhandled exception is intercepted by the IDE.

However, when running the worker role without any debugger and throwing an unhandled exception will:

• Kill the RdRuntimeLoader.exe
• Put the Worker node into unhealthy status
• If you just let the loader die, then the role will be restarted by the Development Fabric.

So this does the trick on DF (for the time being, till there is a proper solution from Microsoft).

Update on Friday, November 21, 2008 at 14:16 by Rinat Abdullin

Windows Azure Fabric CTP (that's the real cloud being hosted on Windows virtual machines, as opposed to the Development Fabric that you run locally) deals with the unhandled exceptions in a similar way - it restarts the worker role.