My tweet from 5 days ago:

hitting the green arrow to deploy content delivery environment in #Sitecore #Azure and actually seeing it work – brings a tear to my eye.

— Max S (@nyclamusician) July 8, 2011

You, too, can weep tears of joy after seeing exactly how magical this process is. I did bang my head against the wall a couple of times, but the wonderful support staff @ Sitecore, including Jesper Ravnsgaard, Product Manager for Sitecore, did help me reach the finish line.

First thing is first – you have to make sure you have met all the prerequisites and read the known issues from my previous post. The second thing you want to do is download the Windows Azure SDK from here. The third thing is download the latest version of Sitecore Azure from here, which is currently at version 1.0.4. If you read my previous post, you should have already sent out a request for and received a Sitecore Azure environment file. You cannot proceed without it. So don’t try. Seriously. Don’t.

Continue reading →

For those that follow my blog closely, you probably noticed that frequency of my posts has slightly decreased. Despite the workload, Azure has been a hot topic and has been bugging me for attention for quite a bit now.

I don’t think my workload will free up anytime soon, but I’m going to commit to another Sitecore series of blogs called Sitecore Azure: To The Cloud. It might take some extra spare time, but I plan on documenting everything in detail in multiple posts, even if it takes a while.

Without further ado, the first step is going to be getting an account. You can get a trial account at http://windowsazurepass.com with this promotion code – TBBLIF . If you are reading this after the code expires, try searching for another one unless the program has been discontinued, at which point you will have to provide a credit card.

Account activation will take 2-3 business days. I’ve just submitted mine. We’ll see what happens…

[UPDATE] Found my account activated this morning.  Stay tuned…