Windows Azure was designed to be a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.
To build these applications and services, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, and XML. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments.
Use Windows Azure to:
- Add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications.
- Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources.
- Perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc.) off premises.
- Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively.
- Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources.
- Reduce the effort and costs of IT management.
Here are some key features of "Microsoft Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio":
Computation Services:
· Ability to run Microsoft ASP.NET Web applications or .NET code in the cloud
· Service hosting environment that includes Internet Information Services 7.0 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
· Security supported by flexible Code Access Security policies
· Small runtime API that supports logging and local scratch storage
· Web portal that helps you deploy, scale, and upgrade your services quickly and easily
Simple data storage services:
· Blobs, tables, and queues hosted in the cloud, close to your computation
· Authenticated access and triple replication to help keep your data safe
· Easy access to data with simple REST interfaces, available remotely and from the data center
Development Tools:
· Complete offline development environment, including computation and storage services
· Complete command-line SDK tools and samples
· Visual Studio add-in that enables local debugging
Requirements:
· Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
· Windows Azure SDK
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
Visual Studio 2010 RTM Support:
· Full support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM.
· .NET 4 support: Choose to build services targeting either the .NET 3.5 or .NET 4 framework.
Cloud storage explorer:
· Displays a read-only view of Windows Azure tables and blob containers through Server Explorer.
Integrated deployment:
· Deploy services directly from Visual Studio by selecting ‘Publish’ from Solution Explorer.
Service monitoring:
· Keep track of the state of your services through the ‘compute’ node in Server Explorer.
IntelliTrace support for services running in the cloud:
· Adds support for debugging services in the cloud by using the Visual Studio 2010 IntelliTrace feature. This is enabled by using the deployment feature, and logs are retrieved through Server Explorer.
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