If you haven't already been in touch with someone to get this sorted out, can you e-mail me (jon.galloway at microsoft dot com)? Would like to make sure we're tracking and fixing any issues you ran into.

Same, and I gave up trying to get Node to work with SQL Server. Ended up at Heroku because of this.

The node MS SQL bindings are still terrible, so I haven't really bothered much with Node because of it

I'd recommend using Edge.js for that:

http://tomasz.janczuk.org/2013/06/access-sql-azure-from-node...

http://tjanczuk.github.io/edge/

http://tech.pro/tutorial/1852/how-to-leverage-sql-server-wit...

I gave up on deploying my node.js app to Azure after finding that several modules I was using were simply not possible to run on Windows. Wasn't worth the trouble to refactor and avoid these dependencies.

Windows is not a priority for most node.js devs, so unless you're doing something pretty simple/mainstream, you're likely to run into trouble.

Azure supports OSes other than Windows.

Yes, it does. But if I'm just going to spin up a Linux VM on Azure to host my node.js app, there's not much reason to use Azure over other cheaper options. So that's what I'm doing.

This is a trend amongst developers who rely on monolithic programs for development.

YOu should really just stop developing on windows and learn to embrace docker.