I got a possible project coming up for which a requirement are the application must be hosted in Azure.

Lacking the time to nut out Azure right now, I was wondering that if I create a loosely coupled application with a mocked DAL the "usual" way, this can easily be ported to Azure later on?
(The structure being pretty much what we talked about here)

From the bit I know this should be fine, as Azure have nothing to do with the actual application, only the persistence storage might be one of the Azure storage options.

Just want to make I'll be fine going this direction as at present I just do not have the time for some "research" (hell, even have to do Java in between now!)

Reading back it kind of feel stupid asking this. What proper platform will require you to specially develop your application in a certain way anyhow.