Creating & Publishing a Hello World application on Windows Azure Web Sites

This is the second article in series of Windows Azure Web Sites, In this article I am going to discuss about creating a Hello World ASP.NET MVC Web Site & publishing it on Windows Azure Web Site.

To start with Windows Azure Web Sites login to https://manage.windowsazure.com, then go to bottom left corner of portal, we will find a NEW button, click on it.

It will display the following pop up, in the pop up click on COMPUTE then WEB SITE then QUICK CREATE:

Once you click on QUICK CREATE, It will show a textbox for entering the URL (all the website URLS’s on azure ends with “.azurewebsites.net”) of the web site & dropdown for choosing REGION for creating web site. Once you enter the details click on CREATE WEB SITE. With in few seconds a web site will be created & running on Azure.

Now our web site is now ready on Azure.

Let’s go to visual studio & create sample application using ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet Template.

Open Visual Studio 2012, Then go to FILE menu
FILE => New => Project => Visual C# => Web => Select “ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application”

Let’s run this application (Hit F5).

Output is standard ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet ready website, which is running on localhost. Now publish this website to Azure Website we created in earlier steps.
Go back to Windows Azure portal => WEBSITES => Click on “hyd-demosite1” => go to “DASHBOARD” => under quick glance => click on “Download the publish profile”.

A “.PublishSettings” file will download into local machine. This is a xml file contains all the required information(site location, credentials, ftp details etc.) for publishing the web site to Azure.
Now go to Visual Studio => Open Solution Explorer => Right click on Project => select “Publish” in context menu.

It will open a “publish web” window. In “Publish Web” window using import button to choose the “.PublishSettings” file downloaded in earlier step. Then simply we need to follow the wizard &then finally hit the publish button.