Azure Services Platform was designed to help developers quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute web services and applications on the Internet. Windows Azure is an operating system for the cloud that serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Azure Services Platform.
Windows Azure provides developers on-demand compute & storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft data centers.
Windows Azure is elastic, flexible, and interoperable. With Windows Azure developers can achieve high levels of service availability and application interoperability while maintaining freedom of choice.
The Windows Azure SDK provides developers with the tools and APIs needed to develop, deploy, and manage scalable services in Windows Azure.
Requirements:
· .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
· IIS 7.0 (with ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation)
· Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 or Microsoft SQL Server Express 2008
· Windows PowerShell (optional)
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Windows Azure Service Runtime managed library: The latest version of the Service Hosting Runtime API includes support for enhanced communication between roles and for runtime notification of service configuration changes. Direct communication between role instances enables new application development scenarios, including applications that distribute state across role instances. Service configuration changes include an increase or decrease in the number of request role instances and changes to the values of configuration settings.
· Windows Azure Diagnostics managed library: The new Diagnostics API enables logging using standard .NET APIs. The Diagnostics API provides built-in support for collecting standard logs and diagnostic information, including the Windows Azure logs, IIS 7.0 logs, Failed Request logs, crash dumps, Windows Event logs, performance counters, and custom logs.
· Certificate Management: Enhanced support for SSL certificates in Windows Azure and in the Windows Azure S...
