As of today Windows Azure is commercially available in Europe and the United States.

Coinciding with this commercial launch of Windows Azure, a new version 1.1 of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK has been released.

This release supports VS 2008 and the upcoming VS 2010 RC.  For VS 2010 Beta 2 please use the November 2009 release.

This release supports Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 RC.

What’s New

  • Windows Azure Drive: Enables a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure application to mount a page blob as a drive letter, such as X:, and enables easily migration of existing NTFS applications to the cloud.
  • OS Version Support: Allows a Windows Azure application to choose the appropriate Guest OS to run on in the cloud.
  • Bug Fixes:
    • StorageClient: Expose account key from storage credentials, expose continuation tokens for pagination, reduce maximum buffer size for parallel uploads.
    • Windows Azure Diagnostics: Fix path corruption for crash dumps, OnDemandTransfer now respects LogLevelFilter.
    • VS 2010: Improved packaging performance.
    • VS 2010: Support for linked files in Web projects.
    • VS 2010: Support for ASP.NET web project web.config transformations.
    • Certificate selection lists certificates from LocalMachine\My instead of CurrentUser\My.
    • Right click on Role under Roles folder to select whether to launch the browser against HTTP, HTTPS or not at all.

Updated and additional samples are available at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples