Saturday, 30 May 2015

Integrating Visual Studio 2013 with Microsoft Azure Websites

There a number of ways to interface with Azure Websites including Web Matrix, PowerShell, X-Plat and even Visual Studio. This is handy as Visual Studio can be directly integrated with your Azure subscription so that you can publish your web applications and sites seemlessly from the Visual Studio IDE environment.
You must first install the Microsoft Azure Tools for Visual Studio. Please note that you need to have the Web Developer Tools installed for Visual Studio.

Just to test this integration I simply created a new application from one of the templates from the wizard. Click Tools and then Connect to Microsoft Azure Subscription.

You will then be prompted for your Azure subscription details, enter them and you should be able to expand Azure from the Server Explorer. If you have already created an Azure Website expand Websites and right click on it and select Download Publish Profile.

From the Solutions Explorer window you can right click on your project and select Publish. If you have not already Build the site and effectively compiled it, this option will be grayed out.

Click Import.

Browse to the Publish Settings file you downloaded in the earlier step.

Review the settings and click Publish.