Microsoft Azure provides a perfect solution for those with a subscription (BizSpark, MSDN etc.) to test out the previews of various software. I can immediately think of Visual Studio 2015 Preview and Windows 10 Technical Preview. If you don’t want to download the ISO’s or don’t want to set up your own VM to test them on, Microsoft Azure is the way you want to go.
Microsoft Azure – Setting Up The Virtual Machine
Log on to your Azure account and head on over to the Virtual Machines tab. Click on the ‘Create a Virtual Machine’ link.
You are now presented with a short list of images to choose from (Nice to see Ubuntu Server here). To see the full catalog of images, select the ‘More images…’ link at the bottom of the image list.
The next screen will display all the images available to you. As you can see, there are a lot to choose from. If you want to create a VM to run Visual Studio (this includes 2015 Preview) on, you simply select the appropriate image from the list. For our purposes, we want to play around with Windows 10 Technical Preview.
You will now enter a setup wizard where you can configure your logon name and password among other settings. These are very self-explanatory, so I will not go through these here. Once you have created your Virtual Machine, it will be listed under your Virtual Machine instances.
When the status of your VM is displayed as Running, click on the connect button at the bottom of the screen.
And that is all there is to it. Once you have connected to the Virtual Machine, you can really get stuck in and play around to your heart’s content. Enjoy!
