Step-by-step guide to setup a Dynamics CRM 2011 development environment on Windows Azure – Part 1

Vincent Zhong, 22 August 2012

Last week I was preparing for my Dynamics CRM 2011 Installation Exam. I guess same as most people, I used Virtual Machine as my platform for practicing, specifically Hyper-V. While I was building my Hyper-V virtual machine, I did come up another idea, which is can I set up the same Dynamics CRM 2011 development environment, but not in the Virtual Machine running on my Windows Server 2008, but on Windows Azure? I thought it is doable and I decided to give it a try.

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The first task is to create a Windows Azure trial account. I think Microsoft is quite generous. You can try Windows Azure for 3 months. So as long as you cancel your trial account within these 3 months, you don’t need to pay anything.

First visit Windows Azure’s website: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/ , then click the “Free trial” button on the top right corner.

Then you will see a summary page of what your trial account contains, you just need to click the “try it free” button again:

Then you need to sign in with your Microsoft account. You can create one if you don’t already have it. Here is the definition of “Microsoft account”:

"Microsoft account" is the new name for what used to be called a "Windows Live ID." Your Microsoft account is the combination of an email address and a password that you use to sign in to services like Hotmail, SkyDrive, Windows Phone, or Xbox LIVE. If you use an email address and password to sign in to these or other services, you already have a Microsoft account—but you can also sign up for a new one at any time.

After you sign in, you will see this “Create Account” page. Nothing you need to do here, just make sure the country is correct, then click the arrow to go to the next step:

Then you need to vilify your account. I think the easiest way is to enter your mobile phone number, you will receive a text message containing the validation code within minutes:

After you received your validation code, just enter it into the second text box appear, if your code is correct, you should be able to process to the next step.

Next you need to enter your Credit Card details.

If you see the following page, congratulation, your Windows Azure 3 months trial has started.

You can just click “Portal” on the right top corner to go into your Control Panel. As you can see from the following screenshot, there will be some tour steps from Microsoft to show you around the manage area of Windows Azure, I will skip them on this blog post, but I suggest you to follow them when you setting up your instance.

Finally if you come to this page, your Windows Azure online trial is done.

On part 2 of this series, I will show you how to create the Virtual Machine that we are going to install the Dynamics CRM 2011 on.