How to migrate your ASP.NET site to the Azure cloud

Cloud computing is one of the hot topics of 2011 with those willing to make the jump to a cloud-based solution finding financial savings in this new approach as well as, in many cases, better fault tolerance and a more responsive service turnaround in many cases. However, what many developers may not realise is just how straightforward it can be to migrate a web site from a local or hosted server into the cloud.

To demonstrate, this article will show you how to upgrade and deploy an existing ASP.NET 3.5 or 4.0 web application to the Windows Azure cloud platform.

We will cover:

1. The SDKs and tools to be installed on your machine before you can continue
2. How to set up your Windows Azure instance in preparation for the application
3. How to alter the application so that it will function in the cloud
4. How to deploy the application to Windows Azure

MVC 2 - Dropdownlist with JSON

I setup the Database and LinqToSql classes for my app. The table structure is MeterTypes > MeterCollections > MeterUsages. Where a MeterType is the top level (ie. Electricity, Gas, Waste, etc.) the MeterCollections are the next level down (a MeterType may contain many of these, for Electricity I have Peak and Off-Peak) and MeterUsage is the actual usage on a meter for that MeterCollection.