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 ]

New for the November 2009 release:
· Service Model UI: A redesigned and significantly more complete interface for manipulating Role configuration information. To access, double-click on a role node in the Solution Explorer.

· Additional role templates: Support for ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010 only), F# worker roles (2010 only), and WCF Service Application web roles.

· VS2010 Beta2 Support: Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and VWD Express 2010 Beta 2.

· Support for dynamically creating tables: The Create Tables functionality is now performed automatically; there is no longer a need to right-click and select Create Tables… on the project after your table definitions have changed.

Full support for and installation of the November Windows Azure SDK release:

· The sample storage client has been replaced by a new production quality library.

· New Diagnostics library enables logging using .NET APIs and enables the collection of diagnostic information from the service.

· Service Runti...