Windows Azure has continued adding features since the last major update at MIX.

Additional features and SDK updates will continue to roll out in the coming weeks and months.

Cool New Feature #1:  Geo-Location support

Starting in May, a new option was added to the portal to support geo-locating your code and data.  In order to use this most effectively, the idea of an ‘Affinity Group’ was created.  This allows you to associate various services under an umbrella label for the location.

Geo-Location is an important aspect of “Web 2.0” applications.

Read more about this feature here and see a complete provisioning walk-through.

Cool New Feature #2:  Storage API updates

Last Thursday (5/28), new features were released to the cloud for Windows Azure storage.  The long awaited batch transaction capability for tables as well as a new blob copying capability were released.

Additionally, the GetBlockList API was updated to return both committed and uncommitted blocks in blob storage.

Also new versioning mechanism has been added.

New features will be versioned by a new header (“x-ms-version”).

This mechanism is in place to prevent breaking changes from impacting existing clients in the future.  It is recommended that you start including this header in all authenticated API calls.

Rounding out these updates were some changes to how property names are stored in table storage as well as the size for Partition and Row keys.  Unicode chars and up to 1K key sizes are now supported, respectively.  Finally, the timeout values for various storage operations were updated as well.

Please note:  There currently is no SDK support for these new storage features.

At this point, you need to use the samples provided on Steve Marx’s blog.  A later SDK update will add these features officially.

Windows Azure SDK Update

The May CTP SDK update has been released to the download center.  While this release does NOT support the new storage features, it does add a few new capabilities that will be of interest to the Visual Studio 2010 beta testers.

· Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (templates, local dev fabric, etc.)

· Updated support for Visual Studio 2008 – you can now configure settings through the UI instead of munging XML files.

· Improved reliability of the local dev fabric for debugging

· Enhanced robustness and stability (aka bug fixes).

Download the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio (includes both SDK and tools).

New Windows Azure Applications and Demos

Windows Azure Management Tool (MMC)

The Windows Azure Management Tool was created to manage your storage accounts in Windows Azure. Developed as a managed MMC, the tool allows you to create and manage both blobs and queues. Easily create and manage containers, blobs, and permissions. Add and remove queues, inspect or add messages or empty queues as well.

Bid Now Sample

Bid Now is an online auction site designed to demonstrate how you can build highly scalable consumer applications.  This sample is built using Windows Azure and uses Windows Azure Storage. Auctions are processed using Windows Azure Queues and Worker Roles. Authentication is provided via Live Id.

PHP SDK for Windows Azure

As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, this open source project is an effort bridge PHP developers to Windows Azure. PHPAzure is an open source project to provide software development kit for Windows Azure and Windows Azure Storage – Blobs, Tables & Queues

Relevant Blog Postings

http://blog.smarx.com/posts/sample-code-for-new-windows-azure-blob-features

http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2009/05/28/may-ctp-of-the-windows-azure-tools-and-sdk-now-supports-visual-studio-2010-beta-1.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2009/04/30/windows-azure-geo-location-is-live.aspx

http://dunnry.com/blog/CreateAndDeployYourWindowsAzureServiceIn5Steps.aspx

So you have built yourself an Azure worker process to crunch through your work, but how do you keep an eye on things? Facing that question The great people at soul solutions built the world’s first Vista / Win7 Gadget to monitor your Queue size.

Really cool too.

http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/Blog/tabid/73/EntryId/560/World-rsquo-s-first-Azure-Vista-Windows7-Gadget.aspx

Azure Team just announced that they released an update to the Windows® Azure™ SDK and Visual Studio Tools. These latest releases are available here:

• Windows Azure SDK: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=130232
• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128752

• Bug and performance fixes
• Improved integration with Visual Studio
• Performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios
• Improvements to Storage Client and ASP.Net provider samples
• Added support to debug Silverlight in a web role

Keep them Coming Guys!

Mickey Williams of Neudesic talks about cloud computing and what it takes to get off the ground as small start up with Techzulu’s Geoffrey Emery. Azure Microsoft's cloud computing platform is on the horizon for bringing a huge leap forward for startups in instant scalability at a fraction of the cost that you incur if you were to build your own datacenter. One of the things that Mickey brought up was Microsoft .NET services in the sky which hasn't been talked about as much. BizTalk another Microsoft product that Mickey brought up is a technology for connecting multiple interfaces that don’t have a inherent communication protocol. There are now offering this in form in cloud and calling a service bus. The Microsoft .NET services (or the BizTalk Services as it was previously called) allows enterprises to expose their services to the internet from within a firewall without having to setup a DMZ or allow explicit inbound access to the machines. It used the concept of Relay Binding (extension over the existing WCF) to allow access to the services. Allowing disparate systems to be interconnected through the internet, the .NET services sets up an internet service bus in the Microsoft cloud.  See image Below

Getting interfaces to talk to each other through firewalls using the internet and secure socket layer alone is really powerful.

Azure Resource Video

Links in Video

Mickey’s Blog - http://blogs.neudesic.com/blogs/mickey_williams/default.aspx

Azure - http://www.microsoft.com/azure/

BizTalk - http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/default.aspx

WCF  - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa663324.aspx

What do you get when you cross a Language Geek with BI (Business intelligence) guru and put them in front of a surface? Lynn Langit talks with Geoffrey Emery at The PDC Underground about this and more. The talk of the town at PDC has to be the launch of the azure platform and all the Live Services. Lynn dives into what this all means to to the developer community and how it can help you with the horizontal scale and doing data analysis through BI. One thing that cloud computing brings to the table is that you can bring up as many servers that you need for data analysis. What most people don't realize yet is that it takes a ton of servers to do long term financial projections. These projections model can take hours and hours to run over a server farm. By putting this kind computational intensive applications in the cloud you can save your self huge amounts of money as these servers usually sit idle during the day and only come on at night to crunch new numbers. This can all be pushed to the cloud so that you can concentrate on the analysis and let the infrastructure cost and worry be hosted.

We then dive into some of the really cool ways to do design of these new modeling paradigms using Microsoft OSLO and how you can all these pieces and put them together on a surface!

Check out this and more on this great video.

To Learn more about surface check out this video below

Links In Interview

Lynn’s Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/

Microsoft Surface - http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

PDC - http://microsoftpdc.com

PDC Underground – http://underground.socalcodecamp.com

SQL Server BI - http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/business-intelligence.aspx

Oslo - http://www.microsoft.com/soa/products/oslo.aspx\

Today at microsoft PDC the lunched their cloud computing platform Azure. Think of it as software and services, but it seem like many more exciting things to come on this. Think of this as a operating system on the cloud.