I received a rather...vague...error when trying out a bit of .NET code to connect to a Windows Azure Blob Storage account, and create a new container in which to store some blobs.

The code

CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(
    "DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=REMOVED;AccountKey=REMOVED");

CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient();
            
CloudBlobContainer container = 
    blobClient.GetContainerReference("TestContainer1");

container.CreateIfNotExist(); // This error'd

The error

A StorageClientException was thrown saying "One of the request inputs is out of range.". An inner WebException showed that "The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request."

The cause

I'd assumed (incorrectly) that a container name could be pretty much any string. But that's not the case. As per this MSDN reference, a container name must:

• be in lowercase (this was the cause in my case)
• start with a letter or a number and only contain letters, numbers and hyphens (multiple consecutive hyphens are not allowed)
• be between 3 and 63 characters long

The " Naming and Referencing Containers, Blobs and Metadata" reference is worth a bookmark.