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Create an Azure cloud service project with Visual Studio

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Note

This article applies to Azure Cloud Services (classic), which is now deprecated for new customers and will be retired on August 31, 2024. Existing services built with this technology are still supported through Azure Cloud Services (extended support). For new development, we recommend that you use a newer service type designed for your specific purpose, such as Azure App Service, Azure Functions, or Azure Container Apps. For the latest list of available services, see Directory of Azure products.

Visual Studio provides a project template that lets you create an Azure cloud service, which is a simple general-purpose Azure service. Once the project has been created, Visual Studio enables you to configure, debug, and deploy the cloud service to Azure.

Prerequisites

Steps to create an Azure cloud service project in Visual Studio

This section walks you through creating an Azure cloud service project in Visual Studio with one or more web roles.

  1. From the start window, choose Create a new project.

  2. In the search box, type in Cloud, and then choose Azure Cloud Service.

    New Azure cloud service

  3. Give the project a name and choose Create.

    Give the project a name

  4. In the New Microsoft Azure Cloud Service dialog, select the roles that you want to add, and choose the right arrow button to add them to your solution.

    Select new Azure cloud service roles

  5. To rename a role that you've added, hover on the role in the New Microsoft Azure Cloud Service dialog, and, from the context menu, select Rename. You can also rename a role within your solution (in the Solution Explorer) after it has been added.

    Rename Azure cloud service role

The Visual Studio Azure project has associations to the role projects in the solution. The project also includes the service definition file and service configuration file:

  • Service definition file - Defines the run-time settings for your application, including what roles are required, endpoints, and virtual machine size.
  • Service configuration file - Configures how many instances of a role are run and the values of the settings defined for a role.

For more information about these files, see Configure the Roles for an Azure cloud service with Visual Studio.

Next steps