The recent upgrade to Azure Websites included a service hook, to enable automatic deployments from GitHub.
To use it, go the ‘configure’ section of your website’s settings:
Copy the URL.
Go to the Admin -> Service Hooks section of your GitHub project, and paste the URL as a WebHook URL:
Now just push updates to your GitHub project, and they’ll automatically be deployed to Azure.
Windows Azure Mobile Services allows you to execute your own JavaScript (node.js) for each of the CRUD operations on your entities.
As I wrote earlier, you can access a number of the standard node modules, however, several of them have been disabled. I was particularly keen to try to write data to Azure Storage, but the Azure and HTTP modules are not available. However, the Request module is, and using crypto, you have just about enough to sign a header, and make an authenticated request to storage.
This Gist shows you how to push a message onto a Cloud Queue:
https://gist.github.com/3690582
Thanks to Rob Blackwell for writing most of the JavaScript to do the header signing.
When using Azure Cloud Services you choose to open up ‘endpoints’ (probably by editing the configuration in Visual Studio), which basically opens ports on the Azure Load Balancer to direct traffic to your Web / Worker Roles.
When you configure these endpoints, the Windows Firewall on the server is also configured to open the same ports. However, these ports are not fully opened, instead they are opened to ‘System’.
If you start a socket listener from a startup task, or from your code, this seems to be fine. However, if the listener is a Windows Service or similar, the firewall does not forward the traffic, and the port appears blocked.
To overcome this, add a command like this to your startup task to open the port completely.
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="my rule" dir=in localport=12345 protocol=TCP action=allow
Richard Astbury's Blog 
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