This is an ongoing series on Window’s Azure.  The series starts here, and all code is located on GitHub: https://github.com/mmooney/MMDB.AzureSample.  GitHub commit checkpoints are referenced throughout the posts.

In the last post we covered setting up a basic Azure-enabled web site.  In this post, we’ll show you how to setup your Azure account.  Next, we’ll cover deploying the project to Azure.

So head on over to http://www.windowsazure.com/ and click the Free Trial link:

Singe in with your Microsoft/Live/Password/Metro/Whatever user ID. If you don’t have on, create one:

Why yes, I would like the 90-Day Free Trial:

Once you do a little validation of your phone and credit card, they will go ahead and setup your account.

After a minute or two, click the Portal link:

This takes you to https://manage.windowsazure.com/, the main place you want to be for managing your Azure application.

And there we are.  Poke around a little bit, there is a lot of interesting stuff in here.  In the next post, we’ll create a Cloud Service and deploy our sample application there.