Some issues with my latest package of Windows Azure

“The path is too long after being fully qualified.  Make sure the full path is less than 260 characters and the directory name is less than 248 characters.” was an error I kept getting after I added some new files to my Azure Web Role solution a few weeks ago. I was working on integrating a new design into the Boston Azure Group's website which runs on the Azure platform. The web role would not initialize in the development fabric and there was no diagnostic information at all to work from. I “googled” around for a bit and found some entries describing the path being too long, which was an error I received earlier but then it went away.

After pulling down fresh code and trying to deploy again to the dev App Fabric the problem persisted. I found a blog entry describing to change the environment variable _CSRUN_STATE_DIRECTORY to directory closer to the root because the path was too long during deployment. I tried this but it did not work. I gave up and then contact Bill Wilder who leads the Boston Azure group and he steered me towards another article describing to do the same thing but it specifically said to set a system environment variable and not a local environment variable. I find this strange but it must be because the deployment runs under a system account. IT WORKED!! Thanks Bill!

Here is the link to the article and some steps to fix this issue if it happens to you.