Windows Azure WebRole Is Stuck in 'Initializing' Status

I had some trouble deploying a Windows Azure application that I’d written into the hosted environment yesterday.  I’d uploaded my application package to Staging and got the “Package is deploying…” notification.

After it finished deploying and the WebRole’s status was “Allocated“, I hit the “Run” button.

The WebRole status went to Initializing and stayed there for minutes.

Eventually, the status went from Initializing to Stopped.  Why won’t my app run?

The Answer: I can’t take credit for this one — the answer came from Aleks Gershaft from Microsoft.  After some hunting around, Aleks figured out that I had built my app with an old version of the Azure SDK.

Now when I hit “Run”, the WebRole status goes to “Initializing” and then eventually to “Started”.

Thanks, Aleks for your help!

-Ben