Windows Azure Platform Announcements at TechEd North America

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Today at the TechEd North America conference Bob Muglia made several announcements about the Windows Azure Platform during his keynote.  I wanted to make sure you are aware of these announcements and some new resources to help you drive evangelism of the Windows Azure Platform.

Here is a summary of the key announcements with some pointers to additional details:

  • Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.2 – Today the Visual Studio and Windows Azure teams released a new Windows Azure SDK and Tools for Visual Studio.  These new tools enable developers to build apps that target the .NET Framework 4 and run in Windows Azure.  They also have a number of other enhancements including support for IntelliTrace with Windows Azure apps and direct deployment to Windows Azure from Visual Studio.   You can download the new Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.2 which enables access to the .NET Framework 4 from here:  https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=128752.  You can also find some more information about this release here.

 

  • SQL Azure Updates – Starting on June 28th customers will be able to take advantage of a couple key updates to SQL Azure.   Customers will be able to extend the size of a SQL Azure database from the current limit of 10GB to 50GB.   Customers will also be able to take advantage of spatial data types to store location based information (like latitude, longitude) and enable rich queries using the data.  You can find more info about the SQL Azure updates here.

 

  • Windows Azure CDN – The Windows Azure CDN enables developers to cache their Windows Azure Blob storage data in various data centers around the world so that the content and data is available closer to users.  Today the Windows Azure CDN has 19 locations strategically placed around the world and it is used by various Microsoft products including Windows Update, Zune videos, and Bing Maps.  We initially announced the Windows Azure CDN at the PDC conference last November and now we have announced the pricing and commercial availability.  You can find more details about the Windows Azure CDN announcement here.

 

  • Data Sync Service for SQL Azure –The Data Sync Service for SQL Azure is a new service available as a preview in the labs environment that enables customers to synchronize data between two SQL Azure databases.  This is the second service to be added to the SQL Azure Labs environment.  At the Mix conference we announced an OData Service for SQL Azure.  You can access these services at https://www.sqlazurelabs.com and you can find out more about the Data Sync Service here.