Melissa Coates has a list of tools she uses when working with Cortana Intelligence Suite:
4. Azure SDK
The Azure SDK sets up lots of libraries; the main features we are looking for from the Azure SDK right away are (a) the ability to use the Cloud Explorer within Visual Studio, and (b) the ability to create ARM template projects for automated deployment purposes. In addition to the Server Explorer we get from Visual Studio, the Cloud Explorer from the SDK gives us another way to interact with our resources in Azure.
This is a nice tools checklist to compare against what you’re using.