title: How to run Azure worker role locally without running them from within Visual Studio
body: <p>I have several azure worker role projects defined in their own solution and repository. In order to emulate the cloud environment I have to run several of those workers locally.
  Opening a visual studio instance for each worker is not a viable option and I would like a solution that allows to work different workers at the same time and be able to scale out each worker role as required.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to trigger the azure compute emulator to start the roles from the command line? </p>
  
  <p>If not, how about writing a console application that will trigger the onstart, run and onstop methods of the worker. In such a case I am not sure what the implications of such a solution would be on worker multithreading and if it would be possible to scale each worker role.</p>
  
  <p>In general is there a best practice on simulating complex cloud environments on a dev machine (within reason)?</p>