Microsoft announced Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.2 (June 2010) at TechEd 2010. Some of the most important features are: .NET 4 support, support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM, and IntelliTrace debugging. Microsoft also announced a billing plan for Azure CDN, and new options for SQL Azure.
Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio
The Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio enable developers to create, build, debug, run and deploy web applications and services from Visual Studio on Windows Azure. The latest package supports both Visual Studio 2008 and VS 2010 RTM. Also, developers can write applications for the cloud running on .NET 4.0 in addition to .NET 3.5 which was previously supported. The complete list of new features contains:
- Full support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM
- .NET 4 support to provide developers with the flexibility to build services targeting either the .NET 3.5 or .NET 4 framework
- Cloud storage explorer to make it easier for developers to build compelling services by displaying a read-only view of Windows Azure tables and blob containers through the Visual Studio Server Explorer
- Integrated deployment, which will enable developers to deploy services directly from Visual Studio by selecting 'Publish' from the Solution Explorer
- Service monitoring to help developers track and manage the state of their services through the 'compute' node in Server Explorer
- IntelliTrace support for services running in the cloud to simplify the process of debugging services in the cloud through the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate IntelliTrace feature. For more information see this post.
Windows Azure CDN
Microsoft has also announced the billing plan for Windows Azure CDN starting on June 30th:
- $0.15 per GB for data transfers from European and North American locations
- $0.20 per GB for data transfers from other locations
- $0.01 per 10,000 transactions
Windows Azure CDN is present on 5 continents, North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
Guest OS Auto-upgrade
The Service Management API and the Developer Portal have been enhanced to enable developers to set an option for their Azure Guest OS to be automatically upgraded to a new version if it is available.
SQL Azure
The limit for an SQL Azure database has been raised from 10GB to 50GB, allowing customers to store mode data when needed. SQL Azure now supports spatial data or location-based data, enabling mapping operations.
Microsoft has also announced the public preview of Data Sync Service enabling customers to decide how to distribute data across multiple datacenters.
