Deploying Your Application To Windows Azure

You can deploy your application to Windows Azure either through the portal or directly from within Visual Studio. This guide shows you how to deploy your application from within Visual Studio.
In order to deploy your application to Windows Azure, you need an account. If you do not have one you can create a free trial account. Once you are logged in with your account, you can download a Windows Azure publishing profile. The publishing profile will authorize your machine to publish packages to Windows Azure using Visual Studio.

CREATING A WINDOWS AZURE ACCOUNT

1. Open a web browser, and browse to http://www.windowsazure.com.
   To get started with a free account, click free trial in the upper right corner and follow the steps.
   
2. Your account is now created. You are ready to deploy your application to Windows Azure!

PUBLISHING THE APPLICATION

1. Right click on the ToDoListApp project in Solution Explorer and click Publish to Windows Azure.
   
2. The first time you publish, you will first have to download credentials via the provided link.
   
   1. Click Sign in to download credentials:
      
   2. Sign-in using your Live ID:
      
   3. Save the publish profile file to a location on your hard drive where you can retrieve it:
      
   4. Within the publish dialog, click on Import Profile:
      
   5. Browse for and select the file that you just downloaded, then click Next.
   6. Pick the Windows Azure subscription you would like to publish to:
      
   7. If your subscription doesn’t already contain any hosted services, you will be asked to create one. The hosted service acts as a container for your application within your Windows Azure subscription. Enter a name that identifies your application and choose the region for which the application should be optimized. (You can expect faster loading times for users accessing it from this region.)
      
   8. Select the hosted service you would like to publish your application to. Keep the defaults as shown below for the remaining settings. Click Next:
      
   9. On the last page, click Publish to start the deployment process:
      This will take approximately 5-7 minutes. Since this is the first time you are publishing, Windows Azure provisions a virtual machine (VM), performs security hardening, creates a Web role on the VM to host your application, deploys your code to that Web role, and finally configures the load balancer and networking so you application is available to the public.
   10. While publishing is in progress you will be able to monitor the activity in the Windows Azure Activity Log window, which is typically docked to the bottom of Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer:
       
   11. When deployment is complete, you can view your website by clicking the Website URL link in the monitoring window: