Windows Azure Tools and Upgrades

Scott Guthrie unveiled the new Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio. These extend Visual Studio’s capabilities to allow for the creation, building, debugging, running, and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure. The Azure Tools download also includes the Windows Azure SDK.

The Windows Azure Platform itself received an upgrade, too. Microsoft added new capabilities including support for full trust to increase the level of flexibility for developers through support of native code, non-.NET language support via FastCGI, and geolocation which will allow developers to host data and code across two U.S.-based datacenters. The Azure team has also addressed the top customer bugs and has implemented update notifications for future releases. Customers were reminded, however, that Azure is still a CTP (Community Technology Preview) and should not yet be used on production systems.