I just spent a few hours trying to figure out something that had me stumped.

In my local dev environment I’m building a web api which has a SQL database. The connection string for the database is an alias with a named pipe. If I set the web api as StartUp project in Visual Studio it works fine. (See this post for some tips on how to do that). But when I’d instead start the Azure emulator as the StartUp project it wouldn’t connect to the sql server, with the good ol’:

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)

Eventually I figured it out. The alias was the problem, because if I changed the connectionstring to .\sqlexpress it worked fine.

Digging deeper, the problem was I had set up the alias on the “SQL Native Client 11.0 Configuration (32bit)” node, but I hadn’t added an alias on the “SQL Native Client 11.0 Configuration” node. So the fix was to create an additional Alias on the “SQL Native Client 11.0 Configuration” node.

So it seems that debugging a web api locally may be a 32 bit process but debugging with the Azure emulator is a 64 bit process. Maybe?

Anyway, hope this helps someone.