Exception Downloading Azure Blob

Question

I am sometimes unable to download from an Azure blob storage when debugging locally. I have a static file that I uploaded and then download it during testing. I can download it many times successfully, but sometimes when I call DownloadToFile, it blocks for a while, creates a 0kb file with the correct name, then throws an exception saying "Server encountered an internal error. Please try again after some time".

After this, I cannot download again unless I delete and upload the file again. No code changes occur during this time.

The inner exception is a 500 error with an HResult of -2146233088.

Answer 1

HResult -2146233088 is the default value for exceptions so that doesn't say much, but after some googling it seems like it's almost always associated with MS SQL Server, so I think this is an issue with the local Azure storage emulator which uses MS SQL Server.

Try upgrading to Azure SDK 1.7 (which uses SQL Server 2012 Express) if you haven't already, and then try to download data from a real blob storage on the cloud to make sure the problem is actually in the local emulator.