As a side project, David Ebbo, a dev lead on the Windows Azure Web Sites team, developed a new utility called WAWSDeploy that simplifies the deployment of Azure Websites.
If you've used WebDeploy (msdeploy.exe), you know that there's some manual pieces involved where you need to extract profile information so that the process of moving locally stored files and folders to an Azure Web Site understands where and how. WAWSDeploy improves on WebDeploy by automating the retrieval of the information inside your publishing profile and simplifying the command-line needed to migrate data. The publishing profile still needs to be downloaded from your Azure account, but now you don't have to spend time extracting your own profile information.
So, instead of a long, drawn out msdeploy.exe command full of switches, you simply use something similar to:
WAWSDeploy C:\MyFolder AzureWebSite.PublishSettings
WAWSDeploy works with local folders and even .zip files.
The tool is freely available but unsupported by Microsoft.
It's available from Chocolatey: WAWSDeploy
