Microsoft refreshes Azure cloud tools

From InfoWorld: Microsoft unveiled on Wednesday refreshed versions of its Windows Azure software development kit and Azure tools for Visual Studio, which support the planned Windows Azure cloud services platform.

The refreshed releases offer improved integration with Visual Studio, performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios and improvements to the storage client and ASP.Net provider samples. Bug fixes are featured as well. Also included is added support to debug Silverlight in a Web role. Silverlight is Microsoft's browser plugin-based rich Internet application platform; Microsoft released the Silverlight 2 beta last year.

A community technology preview of the two Azure technologies had been unveiled at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in late-October. Azure enables hosting of Web applications in Microsoft datacenters. While the SDK is the SDK for the platform, Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio enables developers to use their familiar Visual Studio environment to develop applications for Azure using the SDK.

The two Azure technologies are separate downloads, but they provide a single developer experience, according to a Microsoft representative.

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