I’ve spent some time last weekend looking at Windows Azure Hosted Services.  I’m pretty impressed with how simple the on boarding process was.  I spend a couple hours on Saturday installing VS 2010 and provisioning my account.  By the end of the Sunday, I had a web service calling into SQL Azure and displaying a grid full of data. 

My next step will be securing the data using either Live ID or Open ID.

A few things I got stuck on were:

1. SSMS (SQL Mgmt Studio) 2008 won’t connect to the object browser in Azure.   SSMS 2008 R2 works fine.  The reason being, SQL Azure’s DBs don’t have any connection to the physical machine which is something SSMS 2008 was expecting.  R2 recognized that I was connecting to a SQL Azure instance and handled it correctly.    A workaround if you don’t have SQL 2008 R2 is to cancel out of the initial connection, select new query , and then put in your DB name and credentials.
2. I couldn’t figure out how to generate the .cspkg file that is required to deploy a web service app up to the cloud.   In VS 2010, I finally found it by right clicking on the name of the solution in the solution explorer pane on the right side and selecting publish.     Selecting publish from the Build menu doesn’t create these files.
3. I hit an issue when I tried to start my VM, it got stuck in a Busy state and never became Ready for use.   I worked around this by waiting 30 minutes and then trying to redeploy.