A common question I get for people that has just moved to Windows Azure Web Roles, is:
I just want to make a little change to a page but publishing takes too long, what can i do?
Well, there are several things you can do. Usually what I find is that their publishing takes too long because they need to upload a lot of data.. but why? The database is in Azure, so you don't have to upload it, and a asp.net web site is usually just some binaries and some text files?
For answering this question I love to use a tool called HDgraph (http://www.hdgraph.com/)
This tool provides a graphical representation of your hard drive allowing you easily identify which folders are the ones consuming most space.
What I usually find is a lot of graphics (jpg, png, gif files), videos (flv, avi), presentations (.pptx) and PDFs files, that are part of the site. No wonder why uploading site changes takes so long.
if you do that you are not really taking advantage of all the Azure platform features.
Azure provides a massive storage mechanism and you should take advantage of it.
But how do I do that?
First Download a tool like Azure Storage Explorer: http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/
Create a folder (well well a container) for example content in Azure and upload your files to that container.
And now is time to set your CNAME record to point to your storage. Normally it will be something like making A CNAME content or media point to mycutesite.blob.core.windows.net.
(If you don't remember what a CNAME is lets say is something you configure with your registrar, the people you pay for your domain, so you can make entries to say for example if the browser navigates to www.mycutesite.com then send those requests to mycutesite.cloudapp.net and if they type media.mycutesite.com they it will redirect them to mycutesite.blob.core.windows.net)
I recommend reading Brandon Werner's excellent for very details quick intro to Windows Azure, from where I took this CNAME entries image.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brandonwerner/archive/2009/11/28/how-to-host-your-site-and-content-on-azure-quickly-and-easily.aspx
Again the idea is that you will remove most of the content of your asp.net solution and change your html so all resources will be downloaded from media.mycutesite.com\content
And finally, take advantage of Windows Azure new WebDeploy feature which allows a fast way to modify your pages directly. See (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cloud/archive/2011/04/19/enabling-web-deploy-for-windows-azure-web-roles-with-visual-studio.aspx)