Build an application on Azure SQL Database

This is a router, not a tutorial. It owns the order the work happens in and the four decisions that get made wrong at the start. Every technique it names belongs to another skill, and the handoff is the point.

Verified 2026-09-03 against Azure CLI 2.90.0, go-sqlcmd 1.10.0, Data API builder 2.0.9 and .NET SDK 8.0.421, and against the four first-party Azure SQL Database quickstarts on Microsoft Learn. The two sqlcmd builds were compared again on 2026-09-05, go-sqlcmd 1.10.0 against ODBC sqlcmd 18.6.0002.1.

The failure this exists to prevent

Asked to build an application on Azure SQL Database, an agent starts inside the application: it picks a stack, writes a data layer, and puts a user name and password in configuration.

Every first-party Azure SQL Database quickstart starts outside the application. All four open with the same section, before a line of code, and it configures the server rather than the project. The three things that section does are the three things that fail silently: