Azure ASP.NET to SQL Hello World! on the Introductory offer

  • Article

“Inspired” by a pub discussion with a mate last night, I finally got around to doing a “hello world” ASP.NET->SQL sample on Azure today.

 Unfortunately, I couldn’t leave it up as I don’t want it to start accruing charges. However, I included a screen capture of it running below!

 I set it up under the “free” Introductory Special that is available to the general public. The most limited "free" resource under the intro offer is the 25 hours. Note, The intro offer available to MSDN subscribers is much more generous.

 Key findings from my investigation:

· I needed to provide my credit card even for the “free” intro.

· I needed to delete the app to prevent it using up my hours. Stopping it isn’t good enough. Fortunately, you can keep the URL when you delete the app as long as you don’t delete the service.

· The db will start accruing charges if you leave it there beyond 3 months provided by the intro. You can’t stop a db but you can drop it or the entire server.

· Generating a SQL Azure compatible script to create a typical app db was easy (Tasks->Generate Scripts). However, you do need the SQL R2 version of SQL Management Studio.

· Here’s an example ASP.NET web.config db connection string:

 <add name="MyDB" connectionString="Server=tcp:your_server.database.windows.net;Database=your_db;User ID=your_user@your_server;Password=your_password;Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True;" />