Deploying Your First Cloud App – WIN an MSDN Premium Subscription

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Once you have downloaded the Azure SDK getting your first app into the cloud is very easy. The Azure SDK provides you with the essential tools to make packing your projects for deployment a simple step. There are several ways to deploy projects, in this post we will start off with a fresh cloud project and run through the steps of deployment. Read below to find out how you can WIN an MSDN Premium Subscription.

1. Open Visual Studio in elevated mode:

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2. Once Visual Studio is fired up, open a new project.

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3. Select a New Cloud Project

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4. When you select a ‘new cloud project’ a window pops up asking you what worker roles you would like to include in your project, there are many ways you can set this up. In this instance we are just hosting a basic web page, so we will add a single web role.

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5. Build your web page. In this case it is a simple example using the PhotoSynth API.

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6. When the project is finished, you can run it locally on the development fabric, debug and test the functionality. The local Development Fabric can be found near the task bar, right click on the Azure Logo and click on Development Fabric.

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7. Once the cloud application is built you can deploy it to your hosting space. Right click the project name and publish your cloud app. This will package the project for deployment.

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8. Once published, you will be directed to the location of the two packaged files. All you need to do now is login to your Azure portal and deploy the files to your Hosting service.

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9. Deploy either to staging or production based on your requirements.

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10. Select packaged files and give the service a name.

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11. The package will take several minutes to deploy, once complete you will get the option to run your project, which will then run your project at the designated URL.

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12. Once this is running, you can move your project from staging to production by flipping the switch.

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Check out my example here: https://nzcommunity.cloudapp.net/ 

If you want to skip the build and just deploy a project to see how it works you can use the sample files I created in this example. Email us your link to your cloud app before the 31st of December and go in the draw to win a MSDN Premium Subscription, more details at www.workit.co.nz.Competition open to NZ residents only.