Get Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio!

The new release of Windows Azure tools for Microsoft Visual Studio is available for download. The 1.2 (or June) release integrated lots of new functionality that enables you to easily develop and deploy your applications on Windows Azure Platform:

  • Visual Studio 2010 RTM Support: Full support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM.
  • .NET 4 support: Choose to build services targeting either the .NET 3.5 or .NET 4 framework.
  • Cloud storage explorer: Displays a read-only view of Windows Azure tables and blob containers through Server Explorer.
  • Integrated deployment: Deploy services directly from Visual Studio by selecting ‘Publish’ from Solution Explorer.
  • Service monitoring: Keep track of the state of your services through the ‘compute’ node in Server Explorer.
  • IntelliTrace support for services running in the cloud: Adds support for debugging services in the cloud by using the Visual Studio 2010 IntelliTrace feature. This is enabled by using the deployment feature, and logs are retrieved through Server Explorer.

The last one is one of my favorites!!! You can historically debug your cloud applications, which is amazing when you think about it … For more info you can also check a great post on Soma’s blog!