The fast, yet as complete as, possible SQL Azure Start to Finish Guide – aka What is a “DB as a SQL Azure/web service” demo without Northwind?

Bruno Terkaly - Developer Evangelist - SQL Azure – Relational Database as a Service – Soup to Nuts – The Whole Enchilada

“This post will be very direct. It will get a database running in the Azure cloud ads quickly as possible. There is plenty of material about why SQL Azure might be of interest and how it works.

Brief Goals

• Build a simple data driven ASP.NET Page using the graphical controls in Visual Studio 2008
• Develop against a local SQL Server/SQL Express database before connecting to SQL Azure

Steps in this post

1. Create the northwind database
2. Add northwind to sql server
3. Create a cloud project with 1 web role
4. Add a grid and attach grid’s data source our data (Northwind database)
5. Run our cloud application against local data
6. Create a SQL Azure database
7. Download and install the SQL Server Migration Wizard
8. Upload the customers table to SQL Azure
9. Change our connection string to point our app to the cloud
10. Run our app and verify everything works using the data from SQL Azure (NorthwindInCloud)

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One of my personal projects I’m thinking about doing will, if I do it, likely use SQL Azure, so when I saw this I wanted to grab it for future reference.

Also I thought this would be great materials for someone out there doing a SQL Azure presentation (say to a user group, etc).