• You get this error because sql server do not support backward compatibility, which means 2008/2008R2 Management Studio cannot connect to a higher version of SQL Server, it will be the same case for SQL Azure.

    Workaround is to Use SQL Server 2012 / Express to be able to connect to a 2012 instance and also you can try once from sqlcmd, you don't need to install whole of SQL 2012.