Jan 18, 2011 10:38 GMT  ·  By

Moving to the Cloud is bound to imply adapting existing software investments to run on hosted servers for some customers, at least.

As far as its own Cloud is concerned, Microsoft has taken the necessary steps to ensure that on-premise applications can be tailored to Windows Azure.

The company is even offering a variety of resources designed to help streamline the migration from on-premise to the Cloud.

Jeff Nuckolls, Senior Technology Specialist in Microsoft’s Education Solutions Group, responsible for the Microsoft Application Platform put together a few videos delivering step-by-step instructions on how to migrate an existing ASP.NET application and a SQL Server database to Windows Azure and SQL Azure respectively.

“It’s intended to be a very simple demonstration to convey the concept and tools used. It does NOT include all features of Azure or various enterprise scenarios such as large database partitioning/scaling, service bus integration, authentication, Worker Roles for background processing, or the multiple storage options available in Azure,” he stated.

Make sure to check out the videos embedded at the bottom of this article. The resources are also available via Nuckolls’ blog.

Here is what the videos show:

“Step 1. Setup your environment, download/install the required tools, and create your Azure Subscriptions.

Step 2. Create a simple ASP.NET web application and SQL Server database using Visual Studio 2010.

Step 3. SQL Server migration to SQL Azure.

Step 4. ASP.NET (on-premise) to SQL Azure hybrid integration.

Step 5. Migrate ASP.NET application Windows Azure.”

Softpedia readers might have already come across a few of my articles dealing with developing new applications for Windows Azure or simply migrating existing apps to the Cloud.

If not, make sure to also read Free Windows Azure Hands on Labs: Moving Applications to the Cloud and Free Windows Azure Hands on Labs: Developing Applications for the Cloud.