I was hoping to write a blog post covering the details of setting up a Windows Azure VM role by going through all the steps my self and taking screenshots ...etc as I've done in my previous Windows Azure post. In order to do so however I need to have a spare workstation which I can deploy Windows Server 2008 R2 on so that I can go with the process but unfortunately I do not have one handy and on my primary PC I've got Virtual-PC installed but that can't handle installing Windows Server as a guest OS 
.
So rather than writing the tutorial myself I thought I'd just point you to a good one I've come across. Checkout the MSDN Virtual Machine Role tutorial for more info.
More Windows Azure posts soon...
In Part 1 of this series I covered the Home tab of the new Windows Azure Portal.
This post will continue on from where we started and will be covering the following tab
Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN
Deployment Health
As you can see below the Deployment health menu provides a general view of your application deployments and their statuses.
This tab allows you create an manage the application side of your Windows Azure application including the number of instances, deployment type such as Staging or Production ?etc.
Using the menu bar at the top of the screen you can very easily create new hosted services and storage accounts. When you click the New Hosted Service button you will be presented with the following screen which allows you to create your application in the cloud.
To get a feel on how much easier this is to do in the new Windows Azure Portal in comparison to the old one check out my Beginners Guide: Hosting a Silverlight application on Windows Azure post. The new portal makes it a lot quicker to get things done in a much easier way.
Affinity Groups
The next menu item under the Hosted Services? tab is Affinity Group
The nice thing about the new Windows Azure Portal is that the interface layout is very consistent in usage as you can see from the above screenshots for the 2 menus we have covered so far. Each left hand menu item has it?s own context menu as you see in the top menu bar and allows you to create/modify things that are only relevant to the current selection. The same goes for the addition of new items via the popup menu that obtains focus and provides an easy way to get this done.
Management Certificates
Once again for this menu you see the same consistent behaviour as per the previous screens as shown below.
Hosted Services
The Hosted Services tab allows you to manage the properties of your Azure application and again is a major improvement over the older version of the portal which you can see from links posted earlier.
As you navigate your way through the tree-view structure of your hosted service you will see each of the related components of that services such as instances, certificates ?etc and the properties for each item will display on the right side pane. Depending on which node you have selected different menus will be enabled/disabled at the top of the screen to allow you to perform the relevant actions such as creating new deployments, configuring instances stopping and starting and so on as you can see in the menus and as you can see blow the interface is still consistent throughout the portal.
Storage Accounts
User Management
VM Images
I do not yet have access to the VM images menu stuff as the beta is pending but will show more once I do.
I was playing around with some Windows Azure tutorials today and was following the Create Your First Windows Azure Local Application. The tutorial is pretty simple to follow but I ran into some little issues which were very annoying?
After installing the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio v1.2 I followed the tutorial's steps to try and get the Hello World app up and running. However, after starting the application without debugging as instructed in the tutorial I got the following error.
"Windows Azure Tools: Failed to initialize the Development Storage service. Unable to start Development Storage. Failed to start Development Storage: the SQL Server instance ?localhost\SQLExpress' could not be found. Please configure the SQL Server instance for Development Storage using the ?DSInit' utility in the Windows Azure SDK."
As you can see by default the storage install assumes that the instance name is SQLExpress and if you have the full SQL Server installed this wont work and therefore you are instructed to use the DSInit utility (which you can run from the Windows Azure command prompt under the SDK) to install the Development Storage.
I'm not sure what I misread along the way when trying to fix the error but I when running the DSInit command I ended up running it as per below.
and this resulted in me getting an error like the following
and when I started to try and investigate the problem I just went into too much unnecessary trouble until I saw this post.
To cut the story short. The issue was basically that I've specified the instance name as MSSQLSERVER instead of leaving it blank as this is the default instance (see the DSInit command link I wrote earlier in this post). And surely enough, once I removed the instance name from the command it all worked well!
So, if you run into this issue, ensure your instance name is correct before going too deep to try and figure out what the cause might be.