Deployment times are abysmal. Having come from EC2 to work on Azure, it's a huge frustration. It is simply not usable. For a small app single instance, we see deployment times in the range of 8-15 minutes (heavily skewed to the upper end) and for a deployment of 5 machines the time varies between 30-50 minutes. It's appauling. Upload time of the application is fine, it's just deployment itself takes forever.

The path we've not tried, but perhaps should is doing development in a VM with VS2010 installed. For now, we've been using VS on development machines and uploading either via the web UI or from VS itself.

EC2 was massively better. Development locally, upload binaries and open source tools to VM, enable debugger on VM, get staging working. Replicate, deploy, done. Breeze.

Why are there no tools to help with diagnostics and logging from MSFT? The integration of tables in VS is read-only and having to use generic third party table manipulation tools is a pain.

5) Ability to have VM boot and run off ISO. Not good for Windows VMs but great for BSD and Linux.

To be clear:

1) ISO images can be trivially made from command-line tools on Windows or your OS. They require no admin rights, unlike creating VHDs on Windows. Creating VHDs typically requires two invocations of diskpart and the use of a shell script and admin rights, ie not something your really want as part of your build process.

2) ISO images have less overhead than VHDs since you don't have to guess the appropriate size before creating the image. VHDs with NTFS include lots of chaff that is not needed for read-only.

3) ISO images better suit read-only operation. No need to snapshot, just don't allow mounting read-write. When running foreign applications on Windows (e.g. Java), the runtime and libraries required are all read-only.

4) In 2010, the Windows code base got that ability to mount VHDs so it's not completely impossible to achieve. NB On Linux/BSD this has been possible for 15 years.