Two exciting new releases from the Windows Azure today which is already installed on my system:
Release of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
Update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit
So what’s new?
The new Azure Tools now include
- Profile applications running in Windows Azure
This is a really cool new feature. You can now deploy your application with one of four profiling settings turned on. This enables collection of profiling information in the application as it is running in the cloud.
After a while of running your application you can then select “View Profiling Report” from your application shown in the Server Explorer inside of Visual Studio. This effectively downloads and opens up the profiling report right inside of Visual Studio where you can drill down into the profiling data and find out many interesting things about your application.
- Create ASP.Net MVC3 Web Roles
I have actually deployed Razor (ASP.NET MVC 3) to Windows Azure as a script startup task (like Steve Marx shows here: ASP.NET MVC 3 in Windows Azure). Why? Because I could! ;~) Well no more of that. Windows Azure is now up to ASP.NET MVC code:
- Manage multiple service configurations in one cloud project
Thank God or maybe Microsoft (same thing?) for this one! It’s been such a HUGE paint to have to handle one single configuration file for several different deployments (local development Compute Emulator, Windows Azure staging and Windows Azure Production, etc.). Now you can define multiple, I say again MULTIPLE (yay) service configuration files. Default is Cloud and Local:
- Improved validation of Windows Azure packages
Appears there are a bunch of validation improvements for your package when you create or publish the Windows Azure Application Package. That is really friendly news for us developers. Anything you can do in advance, with validation, that helps you deploy to Azure fewer times is good in my book. Nay – it’s pretty great actually!
The updated Training Kit has a bunch of updates
All the labs and demos have been updated to leverage the new Window Azure Tools 1.4, the Windows Azure Platform Management Cmdlets are updatet to the latest version. Plus a bunch of smaller bug fixes. The Windows Azure Platform Training Course is also updated.
Also check out posts by Microsoft Windows Azure dudes: Wade Wegner, Nick Harris and Nathan Totten for all the details.
Cheers,
M.
posted @ Wednesday, August 03, 2011 9:41 PM