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I am developing a C#, MVC4, EF5 Code First application on .NET in Visual Studio 2012 and have used the VS publish mechanism to deploy it to an Azure Website with an Azure SQL Database.

I now want to use Git and GitHub for version control and involve others in the project.

However, although I am familiar with using Git in a LAMP environment, I have no experience of using Git with Windows, Azure Websites and a compiled environment.

I would like to use the Azure Website as the production server, another Azure Website as a Staging server, developer Windows machines using Visual Studio for development and GitHub as the central repository.

There is a helpful article here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/publishing-with-git/ . I can get my head around what would be needed here for, say, a PHP application on Azure. But I am unsure of the best approach with a compiled application and what I can achieve using Azure Websites and Visual Studio.

A nudge or two in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!

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don't publish from VS to azure, instead setup your azure website to pull from the github repo. the deployment process compiles your solution.

watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NGieL0tinw&feature=youtu.be&hd=1 or read http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2012/09/continuous-deployment-from-github-to.html

Also SocttGu announced this on his blog @ http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/09/17/announcing-great-improvements-to-windows-azure-web-sites.aspx he also talks about a cool feature of publishing branches, this will nail your requirement for a stage server and production server. Have a stage branch and a production branch and merge to them as desired. see the section "Support for multiple branches"

looks like they added support for private repos finally.

appharbor is a competitor to azure that does something similar.

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Had a quick look at these links. Just what I needed .. thanks.
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You are basically introducing a new step with the requirement that the source code must be compiled before it can be deployed to the server. Where you implement this step is up to you. You could:

  1. Ensure that your target server has the capabilities to compile the source code (some Continuous Integration tools could help with this, such as CruiseControl.NET). This has the caveat that the target server be able to compile source code (possibly even requiring Visual Studio to be installed), so that may not be an option.
  2. Check the compiled binaries into source control. You could keep these compiled binaries separate from the main source branch, to keep things clean. Deploy the binaries to the target server.
  3. Some hybrid of the previous two options is also possible; you could set up a Continuous Integration server with CruiseControl.NET, which can check out the current source, build it, and check the resulting binary back into a special branch, then deploy that branch to your target Server.
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Thanks, these are helpful comments. I was hoping to keep to using Azure WebSites. I think if I were to have a CI server, I would need at least an Azure WebRole in order to run something like CruiseControl.NET? Not sure. A full CI server might be overkill for me at the moment.
Azure will compile your code for you - you don't need to do this before deploying to the server.

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