14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made available for download updated versions of the development resources associated with its Cloud platform. Developers leveraging Windows Azure are now able to access and use new releases of the Tools and Software Development Kit offered by the Redmond company for free via the Microsoft Download Center. The delivery of version 1.1 of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK was designed to coincide with the launch of Windows Azure Guest OS 1.1 (Release 201001-01), which in its turns marks the general availability of Windows Azure, as of February 1st, 2010.
“The Windows Azure SDK provides developers with the tools and APIs needed to develop, deploy, and manage scalable services in Windows Azure,” Microsoft revealed, underlining the new additions to the February 2010 release of the SDK: “Windows Azure Drive: Enable a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure application to mount a page blob as a drive letter, such as X:, and enables easily migration of existing NTFS applications to the cloud. OS Version support: Allows a Windows Azure application to choose the appropriate Guest OS to run on in the cloud.”
Microsoft emphasizes the fact that Windows Azure Tools and SDK 1.1 are designed to support only Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. Microsoft plans to make available the first RC development milestone of Visual Studio 2010 by the end of this month, and to launch the platform on April 12th, 2010. Devs that want to continue running Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 will need to also stick with the November 2009 release of the SDK and tools.
The Redmond company also enumerated some of the bug fixes introduced:
“- StorageClient: Expose account key from storage credentials, expose continuation tokens for pagination, and reduce maximum buffer size for parallel uploads. - Windows Azure Diagnostics: Fix path corruption for crash dumps, OnDemandTransfer now respects LogLevelFilter. - VS 2010: Improved packaging performance. - VS 2010: Support for linked files in Web projects. - VS 2010: Support for ASP.NET web project web.config transformations. - Certificate selection lists certificates from LocalMachine\My instead of CurrentUser\My. - Right click on Role under Roles folder to select whether to launch the browser against HTTP, HTTPS or not at all.”
Windows Azure Software Development Kit (February 2010) version 1.1 is available for download here. Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 (February 2010) is available for download here.