June 2010 release of Windows Azure Tools & SDK

New version of Windows Azure SDK has been recently announced at Windows Azure Forum (download link).

It's a pleasure to see how Azure development gets more and more comfortable in Visual Studio. Here are the highlights:

.NET 4 support

Now we can build services targeting either the .NET 3.5 or .NET 4 framework. With all the nice improvements from the latest framework, it might be worth to upgrade. I definitely like TPL, concurrent primitives and syntax improvements.

Actually, the whole Time Machine for CQRS in the cloud wouldn't have been that simple to implement without Covariance and Contravariance applied to the domain event interfaces.

IntelliTrace for Azure Fabric

Now we can debug 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.

If you ever wanted to debug deployed Windows Azure application (like this guy), then this is the way. Keep in mind the performance penalties, though.

Integrated deployment

I definitely love integrated deployments, since they allow to deploy Azure solutions without even starting Internet Explorer. Just select ‘Publish’ from Solution Explorer (context menu of the Azure package).

Tip: it is still advised to deploy to staging first and then swap with production.

There is some room for improvement for this feature, i.e.: allowing to pick custom CSCFG files instead of the current one, but that's a minor usability thing.

Miscellaneous

There are a few some other features. They are nice to have in VS 2010, but at this point 3rd party software for Azure does the same much better:

• Cloud storage explorer in Visual Stidio - read-only view of Windows Azure tables and blob containers through Server Explorer.
• Service monitoring - keeps track of the state of your services through the ‘compute’ node in Server Explorer

On the overall, this update is definitely worth downloading and installing.