I've been messing around with some of the Azure services, and am about to try some of the desktop utilities such as the Hyper-V converter to try publishing services. One thing you'll come across if you're trying to do this is the need to create a self-signed management certificate to allow these apps to authenticate, and you'll see all the technet articles mention the makecert.exe tool.
The problem is that makecert is bundled into the Windows 8.1 SDK and Visual Studio 2013 Express downloads, both of which are several hundred megabytes - overkill for what we need.
Well, the easy way to get makecert and only use about 9mb of storage space - download the 8.1 SDK installer from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?linkid=84091 and run the installer. When prompted to select the tools, you only need to install the MSI Tools. This gives you makecert (as well as a few other bits and bobs) but in a much more compact format than having all of the developer tools installed.
