Deploying Azure Apps Just Got a Whole Lot Easier

I noticed earlier this week, thanks to David Makogon, that a new release of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio (v1.2) is now available. There’s much coolness in this release, particularly with respect to deeper Visual Studio integration (.NET 4 support, monitoring of compute and storage via Server Explorer, deployment improvements, etc.), but my favorite feature so far is support for deploying your apps directly from Visual Studio, as opposed to packaging the app, and then having to use the web portal for the actual deployment. Here’s a screen grab:

David has all the details in this blog post, so rather than re-hash the whole thing, I’ll just point you there.