Now that you have an application you can customize it to
meet your needs. For this article we'll just leave the application as is and
deploy it to the cloud. You'll first need to create an account for Windows
Azure. You can click here
to view the list of offers from Microsoft. You can create a free trial account
by choosing the introductory offer.
1.
Before you deploy your project to the Cloud you need to create a Service
Package. This is done by right clicking on the MyCloudService node in your
solution explorer.
2.
Select Publish from the pop-up menu. You should see the Publish Cloud
Service dialog box.
3.
Choose the option to "Create Service Package Only" and click
the OK button.
4.
Visual Studio will create two files and open up Windows Explorer so you
can upload them to the Windows Azure web site. The two files are called
MyCloudService.cspkg and ServiceConfiguration.csfg.
5.
Open up Internet Explorer and navigate to https://windows.azure.com/
6.
Once you log in to your account you should see your home page.
7.
Click on the "New Hosted Service" button in the upper left
hand corner of the page.
8.
This will display the "Create a new Hosted Service" dialog.
9.
Enter "MyCloudService" for the name.
10. Enter
"MyCloudService1" for the URL Prefix. The URL Prefix must be unique
across all sites so you'll have to append a number to the end of the prefix
until the site tells you it is unique. The name you enter here is the publicly
available name that people will use to get to your web site.
11. Next,
select a region where you want your site hosted. I'll choose anywhere US for
this example but you may want to choose a region closer to your target
audience.
12. Under
"Deployment options" choose "Deploy to production environment".
You can deploy to the stage environment and then promote stage to production
but for this example we'll just deploy directly to production.
13. Enter
"MyCloudService" for the Deployment Name.
14. Now
you need to upload the package and configuration files that were created by
Visual Studio in step 4. Click the "Browse Locally…" button on the
respective sections to upload the files.
15. Now
click the OK button. You'll get a warning regarding the fact that there is
only one role with one instance for this deployment. You can ignore the
warning by clicking the Yes button.
16. The
hosted service will then be created after a several minutes. The first time I
did this it took about 10 minutes.
17. Once
the service is created you can then open Internet Explorer and navigate to http://mycloudservice1.cloudapp.net/
to see your application. Remember to change the "1" in the URL to
whatever number you used when you created the URL Prefix in step 10.
