Connecting to Azure DB from Cloud Service utilizing Entity Framework

I am trying to connect to an Azure SQL Server database from an Azure Cloud Services project through entity framework, but am getting an error of "The underlying provider failed on Open."

I repeated the same process of adding entity framework which I took to create my cloud service on a console based application and the console application was able to successfully connect to the Azure database. For some reason this is not the case with my Cloud Services project. After a few hours of trouble shooting, I think that the problem could lie with my connection string. Can somebody with experience on these technologies please help out? I would really appreciate it. I am new to Azure and so far I think it's great but this is my obstacle right now.

<add name="myProjectDBEntities" connectionString="metadata=res://*/myProject1myProjectModel.csdl|res://*/myProject1myProjectModel.ssdl|res://*/myProject1myProjectModel.msl;provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string=&quot;data source=f55bjjg4wt.database.windows.net;initial catalog=myProjectDB;user id={loginID};password={password};MultipleActiveResultSets=True;App=EntityFramework&quot;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient"/>