Microsoft Extends VS 2010 to Azure Cloud -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Extends VS 2010 to Azure Cloud

By Kathleen Richards
05/29/2009

On Wednesday, Microsoft released the latest Visual Studio (VS) extension preview for building apps that run on its Windows Azure cloud computing operating system and services platform. The Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio May 2009 CTP is the first to support VS 2010 development for the cloud. VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 1 technologies were released on May 18.

The Azure SDK, which is installed as part of the Azure Tools for Visual Studio download, has also been updated. The Azure team announced several new features related to blob and table storage. On Friday, the team is also rolling out some changes to the way alerts, analytics and Windows Live ID integration is handled in the Azure Services Developer Portal. Learn more about the latest updates here.

Azure extends Windows to the cloud with an "operating system" that offers compute, management and storage services and an Azure Services Platform that enables developers to use .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 tooling to build Internet-scale apps that run in Microsoft's datacenters. The Azure technology also requires Windows Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7.0 enabled, and SQL Server 2005 or above.

.NET developer Roger Jennings, who authors the OakLeaf Systems blog, is writing a book on Azure and has downloaded the May 2009 CTPs. He says using Azure tools for VS 2010 does not offer any particular advantages right now. "Windows Azure doesn't support .NET 4.0 and there's not yet a .NET Services SDK that's compatible with VS 2010," he wrote in an e-mail. The most recent .NET Services SDK, to date, is the March 2009 CTP.

That may soon change, although Microsoft has not announced any timeframe for a compatible .NET Services SDK. The Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and Windows Azure SDK May 2009 CTPs follow March 2009 previews.

Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio include C# and VB project templates, service role configuration tooling, cloud service debugging in the local development fabric, and access to the Azure Services Developer Portal. VS 2008 support is updated in the May release, according to Microsoft, offering improved stability and better integration with the Azure SDK development fabric and cloud-based storage services. You can download the May 2009 Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio CTP and the May 2009 Windows Azure SDK here and find Windows Azure code samples for VS 2010 here.

Microsoft is expected to announce the commercial release date of Azure and the Azure Services Platform at its upcoming Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in November. The consumption-based pricing model is likely to be announced this summer. Microsoft's cloud computing initiative, which centers on Azure, is less than a year old and was publicly announced during the opening keynote at PDC 2008.

About the Author

Kathleen Richards is the editor of RedDevNews.com and executive editor of Visual Studio Magazine.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.