Discussion on:

Getting started with Azure IaaS and the new Windows Azure Portal

>>"You can get started with Windows Azure infrastructure VMs with a 90-day free trial"

Apparently that is not the case, the free trial does not include free VMs:
"Virtual Network is available at no charge during preview, while Virtual Machines is significantly discounted off of our current compute rates during preview."

Am I missing something? If not, it is very misleading on the azure site.

Can you try signing up from this link: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/.
That site is specifically for the free trial and it contains this statement: "750 total hours of a small compute instance used for either Cloud Services or Virtual Machines." It does conflict with what you found at https://account.windowsazure.com/PreviewFeatures, but 'preview' is different from 'free trial'.

Hi John
I took the getting started arcticle of you a bit further and tried quite a lot in Windows Azure. My goal was to see whether it would be useful to deploy small networks mostly automated.
Link: http://www.cloudtec.ch/blog/tech/installing-windows-8-on-windows-azure.html
As there is not much in documentation out I would like to point to my blog where I posted my experiment and also made a YouTube video of some functionalities.

Regards
Chris