What are the limitations of the Azure Development Fabric?

Question

I've been reading around and it seems that there are some differences between the dev fabric and a production windows azure cloud fabric but nowhere can I find a list of what is capable on the dev fabric and what isn't compared to the cloud fabric.

For instance, as seen here:

All Windows Azure environments in the cloud are the same; there's nothing special about a test or staging area. However, there are differences between the local development fabric and the cloud fabric, which is why it's important to test your application in the cloud.

(emphasis mine)

I've seen allusions to these differences in a number of places, but again... nothing saying what is different.

Anyone know of any resources that describe these differences?

Chape

Answer 1

Here's the MSDN article describing specific differences between the Storage emulator and Azure Storage.

And... here's the article describing specific differences between the Compute emulator and Windows Azure VM instances.

The top-level article link is here.

Veedis

Interestingly, this is a broken link in the MSDN page itself. I just tested the top-level link, which contains a link to the differences article, and it's broken there. I'll report it. – Veedis

Answer 2

David's answer is good, but I want to add that a key difference between the dev fabric and the cloud is that the dev fabric runs on your computer (with a bunch of DLLs GAC'd, different settings in IIS, etc.).

Coussoule

Yup - great point, and a source of many apps that work magically locally but fail to start, once published. – Veedis