Is it a problem calling the method within code or just simply executing the task? I've got a simple method I created that will allow me to rebuild an index by its name and I have a similar issue with our dev environment but I chalk it up to very frequent changes in dev and the indexer does not keep up. We're not running in Azure but we are in a web farm environment with MS DFS enabled.
Maybe this helps, maybe not:
private bool RebuildIndex(string IndexName)
{
// Get the search index
SearchIndexInfo index = SearchIndexInfoProvider.GetSearchIndexInfo(IndexName);
if (index != null)
{
// Create rebuild task
SearchTaskInfoProvider.CreateTask(SearchTaskTypeEnum.Rebuild, index.IndexType, null, index.IndexName);
return true;
}
return false;
}