It is possible to add as Cloud Service project to a solution with an ASP.NET web site but the simplest solution is to create a solution with a Cloud Service and a Web Role and copy the files over, and so I will follow this procedure for this walk-through:

1. Create a Cloud Service and a Web Role in Visual Studio. Please refer to this this tutorial for details on doing this. So your solution should look like below:
   
2. Open the folder of the ASP.NET website to be migrated in the File Explorer and drag the files across to the Web Role (you can just open the standard  Windows File Explorer and place it next to Visual Studio). Do not copy the bin folder and the web.config file.
3. Manually add the references of the ASP.NET website to the Web Role (Right-click the Web Role in the Solution Explorer and select Add Reference…).
4. All the .aspx pages in an Azure Web Role have an associated designer.cs or designer.vb page in addition to the code behind page. To manually generate to these files, select the .aspx pages, right-click and select Convert to Web Application.
   
5. In an ASP.NET web application files in the App_Code folder usually have their build action set to Content. In an Azure Web Role these files need to be set to Compile. To do this, select the files in the App_Code folder, right-click and select Properties. In the Properties window set the Build Action to Compile.
6. Copy the configuration elements from the web.config  in your ASP.NET site to the web.config in the Azure Web Role. This can be quite tedious but the quick fixes to this often create compilation errors or overwrite some key features of Azure (such as Diagnostics).

That’s it, now we can proceed to migrate a SQL Server database to SQL Azure .

1. In the Visual Studio Solution Explorer right click the cloud project and select Publish…
   
   This will result in Visual Studio rolling up the solution into a package containing two files – a .cspkg file which contains the code for the app and a .cscfg file which is the configuration settings for the app (as shown below). Once this is done, the Windows Azure developer portal will automatically be launched in the browser.

   
   

   

2. In the online Windows Azure developer portal you will already have at least one project name – click on the appropriate project name. We now need to create a hosted service to run the application, so  click New Service:
   
3. On the Create A New Service page you will be presented with two options – Storage Account and Hosted Services, as we are looking to host and run an application  -  click Hosted Services.
4. Enter a Service Label which will enable you to identify this hosted service (this will not be visible to the public). The Service Description is optional.
5. On the Create A Service page enter a Public Service Name for the app. You will also need to configure the Affinity Group settings. Most applications have several parts – databases, storage, processes etc. For optimum performance these should be located as geographically close as possible to eachother.If the application is simply a  standalone app which doesn’t require any other services click the No radio button, otherwise you should create a new Affinity Group and select a geographic region (which should be the region you expect the majority of your application’s traffic to come from). Click Create once this has been done.
   
6. Azure will now create an environment for hosting the application and you will be shown the main Hosted Service page. Click Deploy…
7. In the appropriate fields browse to the the configuration and code files which were created by Visual Studio. Enter a Service Deployment Name and click Deploy:
   
8. The application has now been provisioned and configured but is not yet live and running. To start the application click Run. There will be a pause of several minutes while Azure starts the application. During this phase it will go through two intermediate stages – ‘Initalizing’ (which creates the instances for running the app) and  ‘Busy’ (which wires up the app to the load balancer and tests the app is available). Finally a ‘Ready’ status will finally be displayed and the application is now live.
9. Click the ‘Web Site URL’ link to see the application running live.

In Visual Studio, start a Cloud Project from File -> New Project… . In the New Project dialog select either Visual Basic -> Cloud Service or C# -> Cloud Service:

Next, select the type of role for to be used. In this demonstration we will select an ASP.NET Web Role which is similar to an ASP.NET website.  Highlight “ASP.NET Web Role” and click the ‘>’ button:

Then name the ASP.NET Web Web Role:

The local Azure application is now created. There are two parts to the solution – the Cloud Service (“CloudService2″) which contains definitions and configurations for running the app on Azure, and the Web Role (“Hello”) which is the ASP.NET website. You add some functionality to the default.aspx page at this stage if you wish.

NOTE – To add Roles to the solution, right-click on the Roles folder in the Solution Explorer and select Add and select the Role to add to the solution.

In the Solution Explorer double-click CloudServices2 -> Roles -> Hello. This loads the configuration settings for the Azure application. In this example we will be changing the Instance count to 2. This will result in our app being run on two instances and enjoying automatic load-balancing between the two instances. Once this change has been made, Hit F5 to run the application.

Once the web page is running there should be a blue Windows Azure Simulation Environment icon in your desktop icon-tray. Right click this and select Show Development Fabric UI to launch the Development Fabric tool. The Dev Fabric is the tool to interact, view and control the local Azure Environment. Expanding the nodes will show two green nodes below the Hello Role. These are the two instances of the ASP.NET application. Selecting them will bring up the running info of the instance.

That’s it! this has been an extremely brief run through and in later articles we will go into greater depth. Next, we can move on to Deploying the App on Azure.