Over the past two weeks I've begun moving a lot of my hosting infrastructure onto Microsoft Azure. This has consisted of all sorts of configuration – virtual networks, VPN's, backups, servers, databases and sites. One of my sites uses Code First Migrations at it's core, and during the migration simply nothing would work. After much pain and frustration I made the worst mental leap a developer can make: I came to the simple conclusion that is was everyone else's fault. Like most of these kinds of problems, I was to blame all along.

When configuring an Azure Virtual Network one of the most common things you'll want to do is setup a Point-to-Site VPN so that you can actually get to your servers to manage and maintain them. Azure Point-to-Site VPNs use client certificates to secure connections which can be quite complicated to configure so Microsoft has gone the extra mile to make it easy for you to configure and get setup – sadly at the cost of losing the ability to connect through the command line or through PowerShell – Let's change that.

Over the last few years we've seen a lot of blog posts floating around showing how to setup and deploy a website to Windows Azure. In my opinion they all cover the the "Azure 101" point of view and don't speak too much about migrating a website that already exists to Azure and some of the pains and gains experienced along the way. This post covers the migration of this very website to Azure websites and migration of my blogs database to SQL Azure.