The fact of migrating or developing new applications on Azure provides the opportunity to review architectures, refactor code and apply best practices that we may have missed.  This is most current documentation available from the MS Patterns and Practices team:

Link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921347.aspx 

Solution Development Fundamentals

Solution development fundamentals cover the cross-cutting aspects of solution development, such as security, caching, data access, validation, exception management, and so on. It also includes application architecture, development process, the software development life cycle (SDLC), and application life cycle guidance. You will find guidance and patterns that are generally applicable to solution development regardless of the specific architecture or scenario.

Active Releases

  • Enterprise Library. Enterprise Library is a collection of application blocks that address common cross-cutting concerns that developers face when developing applications. The latest version of Enterprise Library (version 5.0) was released in April 2010 and includes support for Visual Studio 2010, as well as many performance and functionality improvements.
  • Unity. Unity is our implementation of a dependency injection container. We recently released Unity 2.0 (also part of the latest version of Enterprise Library) which includes a number of key features, including support for policy-based interception and support for Silverlight. Unity provides a mature and stable foundation for building high-quality, flexible, pattern-based libraries and reference implementations.
  • A Guide to Claims–based Identity and Access Control. This guide gives you enough information to evaluate claims-based identity as a possible option when you're planning a new application or making changes to an existing one. It is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates Web applications and services that require identity information about their users.
  • Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition. This guide provides design-level guidance for the architecture and design of applications built on the .NET Framework.
  • Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications. This guide shows you an end-to-end approach for implementing performance testing for your Web applications.
General Guidance
Enterprise Library
Unity Application Block
Process
Technical Articles

Enjoy,

Patrick