ASP.NET website to be deployed on Windows Azure with databases

Question

I know this is a very common question and I could find several answers , but I think my situation is a bit different.

So, I have an ASP.NET Website (NOT a web application), built using "Web forms". Its a very simple website which does bunch of REST calls and talks to the SQL Server 2008. Can you please help me finding a step by step guide to deploy the same on Windows Azure using VS 2010? As of now, the website runs fine on a traditional web hosting server.

So far what I am getting are approaches which use MVC (and using ASP.NET web application, not website). I don't think that I should be concerned about MVC at all? Does a website vs. web application aspect make a difference? If yes, do I need to convert the website to web application?

There's a lot of content on web, so I am a bit confused given my condition. Can someone please put me in right direction? Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

You'll need to convert your Website project to an ASP.NET Web Role project, whether you first convert it to a ASP.NET Web Application or not doesn't really matter . The rest of the tutorial you already linked to applies just fine.

There's no need to look at ASP.NET MVC, It's a different technology than web forms, and there's no need to move to it in order to get your site hosted on Azure.

As for your database, unless you host that yourself in a VM-Role or somewhere else (and connect it using Azure Connect), you'll need to convert it to Sql Azure or Azure Table Storage. SQL Azure is largely compatible with SQL Server, but there are a few features which are unsupported.