Maarten Balliauw has a new post today showing you how to work with your Azure site from inside the popular PHP IDE phpStorm.

Working with Windows Azure and my new toy (PhpStorm), I wanted to have support for doing specific actions like creating a new web site or a new database in the IDE. Since I’m not a Java guy, writing a plugin was not an option. Fortunately, PhpStorm (or WebStorm for that matter) provide support for issuing commands from the IDE. Which led me to think that it may be possible to hook up the Windows Azure Command Line Tools in my IDE.

He shows how to add a new "framework" to the IDE for the Azure CLI tools and how to get to a command line from inside the editor. From there you can execute any of the Azure CLI calls just as you would outside of the IDE (like his example, creating a new site called "GroovyBaby").