This morning I decided this was something I wanted to do. So, I BINGed around and saw others had already been down this path. However, their techniques didn’t work for me (this is still a CTP, change is certain, and perhaps that’s why). Eventually, I connected, and thought I would do a post here for the benefit of others who may have similar issues.

As has been stated, you need to cancel out of the initial connection dialog box you get when you start Management Studio, and then choose New Query to get a connection dialog. If you don’t do that, you will not be able to connect.

Some key points about my dialog below:

  • Server name: this is the FQDN (do NOT include the “tcp:” prefix the Azure portal shows in the connection strings for server name)
  • Login: this is just my user name as shown in the connection string on the portal (and not <username>@<servername>) as most posts show
  • Click the Options button an type in the name of the database you want to connect to

 

After doing that, if all goes well, you’ll get the following dialog, which you can ignore.

 

After I did that, I was able to do this:

Some more notes:

  • As Richard points out here, you need to specify a clustered index, or table creation will fail
  • As Ramaprasanna says here, most problems people have are firewall issues

 

Hope this help. Now that I’ve successfully flexed this brand new capability, I’m going to brainstorm with myself about what cool things I can do with it.