Windows Azure Management Tool Upgraded

A tool designed to streamline the management of Windows Azure hosted services and storage accounts has been upgraded to version 2. Windows Azure Management Tool (MMC) 2 is currently available for download, having been updated on the MSDN Code Gallery since May 10th. Softpedia readers already received a heads-up in relation to MMC back in 2009. Now, according to Ryan Dunn, Windows Azure tech evangelist, the tool’s evolution to the May 2010 release milestone was so consistent that the latest Build was deemed version 2.

“It is a very significant upgrade to the previous version on Code Gallery. So much, in fact, I tend to unofficially call it v2 (it has been called the May Release on Code Gallery). In addition to all-new and faster storage browsing capabilities, we have added service management as well as diagnostics support. We have also rebuilt the tool from the ground up to support extensibility. You can replace or supplement our table viewers, log viewers, and diagnostics tooling with your own creation,” Dunn explained.

Windows Azure MMC is set up to bring to the table a variety of features that will significantly make easier the work of customers administering accounts in Microsoft’s Cloud platform. In this regard, The Windows Azure Management Tool can help with tasks associated with hosted services, diagnostics, certificates, storage services, blob storage, queues, tables, and extensibility. One of the best things about the tool is that admins can circumvent the UI, and work directly with PowerShell cmdlets, a feature that IT pros are sure to appreciate.

“This update has been in the pipeline for a very long time. It was actually finished and ready to go in late January. Given the amount of code however that we had to invest to produce this tool, we had to go through a lengthy legal review and produce a new EULA. As such, you may notice that we are no longer offering the source code in this release to the MMC snap-in itself. Included in this release is the source for the WASM cmdlets, but not for the MMC or the default plugins. In the future, we hope to be able to release the source code in its entirety,” Dunn added.

Windows Azure Management Tool is available for download here.