How can I determine if I am running locally on my PC or on the cloud?

Question

Using MVC3 and I\'d like to determine if I am running locally or deployed to the cloud?

Answer 1

RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable tells you if you're running in Windows Azure, but it doesn't differentiate between the real Windows Azure and the local development simulator.

I wrote a blog post that shows a trick to figure out whether you're running in real vs. simulated Windows Azure, when RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable == true - hopefully that provides what you're looking for.

EDIT: In case you want the down-n-dirty code I describe in the abovementioned post, without any explanation of why the technique works:

private bool IsRunningInDevFabric()

    {
        // easiest check: try translate deployment ID into guid
        Guid guidId;
        if (Guid.TryParse(RoleEnvironment.DeploymentId, out guidId))
            return false;   // valid guid? We're in Azure Fabric
        return true;        // can't parse into guid? We're in Dev Fabric
    }

EDIT 2: My answer is a bit outdated. There's now RoleEnvironment.IsEmulated, which is much more straightforward to use. MSDN documentation is here