Windows Azure Web-Role Caching (Preview) "hangs" makes the emulator stuck in deploy loop

I had the same issue. To do with an AppFabric Server dll conflict - check whether you have AppFabric Server installed and either deinstall the cache or remove the cache assemblies from the GAC. I removed and the emulated cache works fine.

I have some information which may be helpful on our blog:

http://blog.elastacloud.com/2012/06/09/using-the-windows-azure-cache-preview-with-sdk-1-7/

Missing method probably means that the assembly loaded doesn't have the method in there. Can you make sure that you've the proper assembly being added to your project ?

Ensure that you don't have Windows AppFabric Server installed in the machine as well, as it'll GAC the caching dll which will get picked up during runtime

For me, the problem was that I was running my project off of a UNC Share (actually its running in a VM on my macbook). When I'd start the debugger after checking the "Enable Caching" box on the worker role, it would just hang. Come to find out, about every 2 seconds it was creating a 160MB dump file in C:\Windows\System32\%LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps. After debugging one of those, I could see the first error was when it tried to start cmd.exe on the caching stuff in my worker role and it said CMD cannot be run on a network share, so it would default to windows/system32 or something.

That's when I found this handy dandy 7 year old MS KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156276 When I added DisableUNCCheck REG_DWORD and set the value to 0 x 1 (Hex) under the registry path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor everything started up just like a champ. Hopefully this helps someone else.