Developers playing around with Microsoft's Cloud operating system and with the associated services platform are now able to access evolved .NET Services and the .NET Services Portal. Both were taken down and unavailable for a short time on June 7, as Microsoft introduced an update. The .NET Services Scheduled Maintenance has now been completed and the .NET Services for Windows Azure Cloud OS (Azure Services Platform) are functioning under normal parameters. The downtime experienced on June 7th is a direct result of the scheduled maintenance for the introduction of the updates.

“The .NET Services and .NET Services Portal (including account provisioning) planned maintenance due to a major software upgrade is now complete and all services are back online. We apologize again for the inconvenience,” revealed a member of the .NET Services Team. Devs already taking advantage of the .NET Services will be able to notice that the Windows Azure .NET Workflow Service is no longer accessible.

This situation is a direct result of the upgrade delivered to .NET Services, however, it is at the same time a planned move. Microsoft already made it clear that the Windows Azure .NET Workflow Service would be offline until the delivery of .NET Framework 4. The Redmond company indicated that it had taken the .NET Workflow Service offline temporarily as a response to feedback from developers that had indicated they were more than willing to wait for .NET 4 rather than transition from a previous release of the framework.

“The existing Workflow Service will be removed from .NET Services in the July 2009 CTP release. Any solutions that currently rely on the Workflow Services will have to be modified on or before 7/7/2009 9am PST in order to continue functioning smoothly. Existing solution Workflow Service metadata such as Workflow Type will also be deleted and cannot be retrieved after the July 2009 CTP release,” Microsoft informed.