Azure account creation confusion

I had an Azure CTP account and I received an email from Microsoft saying that my account was about to expire on January 31, 2010 and that I’ll need to “upgrade” my account.  A link in the email pointed to this pricing page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/

If you just want to kick tires and don’t want to invest too much, Microsoft has an introductory special that has enough “hours” to do some basic testing for free. 

AzureAccountSetup1

Here are the details:

Included each month at no charge:

  • Windows Azure
    • 25 hours of a small compute instance
    • 500 MB of storage
    • 10,000 storage transactions
  • SQL Azure
    • 1 Web Edition database (available for first 3 months only)  - FRAK!  Only 3 months!  :-(
  • AppFabric
    • 100,000 Access Control transactions
    • 2 Service Bus connections
  • Data Transfers (per region)
    • 500 MB in
    • 500 MB out

Any monthly usage in excess of the above amounts will be charged at the standard rates. This introductory special will end on July 31, 2010 and all usage will then be charged at the standard rates.

Sweet but I have an MSDN Premium subscription with some Azure hours included as benefits, I should be able to link the account that I just created to my MSDN subscription, right?  Well, no.  I haven’t found a way to do that so far.  So how do you create an Azure account using your MSDN subscription benefits?  Simple, you need to log on the MSDN Website and click on the “My Account” tab.  From there, you can create an Azure account that will be linked to your MSDN subscription.

AzureAccountSetup2

Notice the account naming difference once the accounts have been created:

AzureAccountSetup3 AzureAccountSetup4

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