Over the last few years we've seen a lot of blog posts floating around showing how to setup and deploy a website to Windows Azure. In my opinion they all cover the the "Azure 101" point of view and don't speak too much about migrating a website that already exists to Azure and some of the pains and gains experienced along the way. This post covers the migration of this very website to Azure websites and migration of my blogs database to SQL Azure.

I’ve been a long time supporter of Visual Studio Web Deployment projects. Not because I built ASP.Net websites and wanted to compile them, but more because they held so much unadulterated power from the simplicity of just being an MSBUILD file inside your solution. With the launch of Visual Studio 2012 Microsoft has made the call to no longer support WDP moving forward. This made me sad; but I was just being naive. Visual Studio 2012’s Publishing profiles are even more powerful, and they bring all your old friends along for the ride.