Publishing to Azure

When you are ready to push your application into Azure, you can do so directly within Visual Studio. For example, when you create your site and choose hosting in Azure, Visual Studio creates the site locally and works with Azure to establish a hosting area, uniform resource locator (URL), and configuration. It also creates a publishing script in your project. This script enables publishing and configuration of that publishing. However, Visual Studio does not deploy the site at the time of creation or when you run your application. Instead, you choose when to deploy.

To deploy, you can right-click your website and choose Publish, or you can use the Web Publish Activity window (View, Other Windows, Web Publish Activity). This launches the Publish Web dialog as shown in Figure 1.14.

FIGURE 1.14 The Azure Publish Web dialog allows you to publish your project directly to Azure.

After deployment, you can start, suspend, configure, or upgrade the application from the Microsoft Azure management site. Of course, you can also now access your site directly from its temporary URL.