Microsoft has released several enhancements to Windows Azure which includes support for HTML5/JS client, Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), PhoneGap and Windows Phone 7.5. It is now possible to connect both HTML5 web client apps as well as Apache Cordova/PhoneGap apps to your Mobile Services, and use Windows Azure for both data storage and authentication purposes.
The recently released update includes new mobile services web client library that supports Internet Explorer 8, and latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari including PhoneGap 2.3.0 that offers same data querying and storage APIs support we have in other native SDKs, and allows easy user authentication via any of the four identity providers such as Microsoft Account, Google, Facebook, and Twitter supported by Mobile Services.
As mentioned previously, Microsoft has added support for CORS that enable your mobile service to accept cross-domain Ajax requests including the ability to configure a whitelist of allowed domains for your mobile service from within the management dashboard.
Moreover, the recently released update includes support for portable library which provides an ability to work with a variety of new client platforms, as well as enable you to call mobile services from your ASP.NET and .NET server backend. Moreover, the release also provides support for Windows Phone 7.5, Json.NET and HttpClient.
Windows Azure also includes support for Mercurial (Hg) source control with improved user interface and includes an ability to deploy site from Dropbox, CodePlex, Bitbucket repositories from within the management portal.
The recently released updates also includes improved user interface for managing source control deployments and the ability to renew the certificate used by Team Foundation Service for continuous deployment directly from the Windows Azure management portal by selecting Renew TFS certificate option from the dashboard.
It also provides support for regenerating the publish profile by making use of a new quick glance command in the dashboard called Reset publish profile credentials including a new HDInsight server (now integrated with Windows Azure portal), which enables you to deploy, manage and use Hadoop clusters running on Azure.
The recent update enables you to create HDInsight clusters and you will be able to drill into the dashboard view to see the cluster quick glance screen. It shows the basic information about your cluster and gives you a simple method to connect to the cluster.