In this demo, you saw how we could easily build and debug web applications using the familiar ASP.NET programming model and the new Windows Azure SDK and extensions to Visual Studio. You also saw how we could use the Windows Azure Management Portal to create projects, deploy applications, and manage the staging and production environments. Finally, in less than 5 minutes we created and ran a new application in the cloud.

What you did not see is the entire infrastructure Windows Azure provided. For example, we did not worry about physical machines, rack space, network switches or connectivity. We also did not have to remote into machines and physically copy files across machines. Windows Azure abstracted us from the underlying infrastructure and provided the automated deployment, isolation, redundancy, and load balancing for our application. This was intentionally a simple demo to help you understand the concepts. In later demos, you will see how we can build more complex applications that utilize additional roles, the Windows Azure APIs, and Windows Azure Storage services.