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The November version of the Windows Azure SDK and Tools
Nov 15th, 2009 by evereq

Download them here.

New in the November 2009 SDK (quote from Microsoft Windows Azure team newsletter):

  • 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 SDK enables the secure automated deployment of certificates to services hosted on Windows Azure.
  • Variable-size Virtual Machines : Developers may now specify the size of the virtual machine to which they wish to deploy a role instance, based on the role’s resource requirements. The size of the VM determines the number of CPU cores, the memory capacity, and the local file system size allocated to a running instance.
  • External endpoints for worker roles. A worker role may now define any number of external endpoints for HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP, and specify the desired port number for any external endpoint.
  • Persistent local resource storage: Developers can now choose to persist data written to a local storage resource at runtime when the role is recycled.
  • Windows Azure Storage Client managed library: The Storage Client library provides a .NET API for accessing the Windows Azure storage services.
  • Improved Development Storage: Development storage provides a high-fidelity simulation of the Windows Azure storage services in the cloud. Tables can now be created dynamically in the development storage Table service and are no longer required to be generated in advance.
  • Updated samples: The samples included with the Windows Azure SDK have been updated to demonstrate new features. The samples now include both C# and Visual Basic versions.

As we can see – a lot of improvements and new features introduced in this release. I will made review of them right after will have time to check (hopefully today later)! In any case, glad that MS improve Azure SDK so quickly!

Update: after installation and first review, I found following:

  • It seems like Microsoft finally have “official” Client library for Azure Storage. The name is same like from samples before, i.e. “StorageClient”, but now it is in “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient” namespace, not like “Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.StorageClient” that was before! It is also VERY extended and improved, so if you going to use Azure Storage, for sure you need to use this library (and I am also going to use it in my EvejobAzNET project) – it give you access to Blob Service, Queue Service and Table Service! Sure like before, it is possible to use simple .NET Client Library for ADO.NET Data Services (and new library use it inside anyway, just check that it reference System.Data.Services.Client library inside)… But with official Azure Storage Client library a lot of tasks become much more simple! You can found this library (*.dll) in “c:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\ref\” folder, together with other useful binaries!
  • It is possible now to use another “official” library to get programmatic access to most of functionality available before only from Azure Developer Portal (and actually I don’t know why, but for some reasons Portal works and looks not best way! You can google, A LOT of people complain about issues with this!).
  • A new Library for Logging and Diagnostic functionality was added to SDK (Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics namespace) - feel free to review samples in SDK (zip archives available in root folder of SDK installation, i.e. in C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0 by default – samples-cs.zip for C# version and samples-vb.zip for VB version)
  • A lot of other improvements / features was added that relate mostly to development / production environment (Visual Studio Azure support, new release of Development Fabric etc) – they not change significantly your code / application design, instead of features described above that I highly recommend to review in case if you develop for Azure!
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