February 10, 2015 at 11:02

Reduce development and testing time with Azure Web-Sites and Visual Studio Online

Original author: Anton Staykov
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Visual studio online


Not so long ago, Visual Studio Online became publicly available. Its main advantage was a little publicity - the preliminary version of the IDE Visual Studio. This means that the tool that we use for development is now available online as a preliminary version (sign up on the Preview Features page of the Azure portal).

  • What can be done with this?
  • Make real-time changes to Azure websites!
  • Seriously!? How?

First of all, if you don't have a VSO account yet, you need to create one . Then associate it with your Azure subscription.

We connect the existing VSO account


Once you have (or may already have) a VSO account, you can link it to your Azure subscription.

Access the Azure Management Portal with the same Live ID used to create your VSO account.

In the left navigation pane, you will see Visual Studio Online. Click on it. A page will appear on the screen asking you to create a new or link an existing VSO account.

Enter the name of your VSO account and connect it.



Connect VSO for Azure Web Site


You need to enable VSO for each Azure Web site that you are going to edit using it.

This can be done by navigating to the Azure Web Site home page inside the Azure Management Portal.

Then go to Configure. Scroll down to find “Edit Site in Visual Studio Online” and set the setting to ON. Wait for the operation to complete.



Editing a website in VSO


After connecting VSO for your website, go to the control panel of this site in the Azure management portal.

A new link will appear in the list on the right “Edit in Visual Studio Online”: the



VSO IDE is protected by your credentials for hosting the code (if you don’t know what the credentials are for hosting the code, please take a couple of minutes to this article ).

Get it - your website, your IDE, your browser. What? You said that I forgot to start deploying my site? Hm. Visual Studio Online is Visual Studio Online.
Thus, you can make “File -> New” and it will work:



Every change that you make immediately in real time is reflected on the site.

This is the fastest way to troubleshoot JavaScript / CSS / HTML (View).
And, if you work with PHP / Node.js - just edit the files on the fly and you will see the changes in real time. There is no need to redeploy and unpack the solution. There is no need to even have an IDE installed on your machine - only a modern browser.

You can edit your site, even from a tablet.

What is the catch?


Trick? What do you mean by “Trick”? Version control system?

There is integrated support for Git. You can link your website to Git (a project with GitHub or VSO with Git support), or just work with a local repository. The choice is yours.

And now you get a fully integrated version control system with support for your changes.

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