November, 2009

Our changes for the Azure Development Portal have gone live.. this will be supporting our commercial release at PDC on Nov. 16th

The new features in this release are the following:

· CDN support

· Custom domains

· Cert management & Configuration

· Estimated times and progress indicators

· New icons (COOOOL!)

· Security fixes

· Additional features for SSL Certificates

Head over to the Portal, and login with your account details to see all the glory!

We have also announced some of the features of the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver Windows Azure Blob content. Windows Azure CDN offers developers a global solution for delivering high-bandwidth content.

Windows Azure CDN has 18 locations globally (United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America) and continues to expand. Windows Azure CDN caches your Windows Azure blobs at strategically placed locations to provide maximum bandwidth for delivering your content to users. You can enable CDN delivery for any storage account via the Windows Azure Developer Portal. The CDN provides edge delivery only to blobs that are in public blob containers, which are available for anonymous access.

Visit the Team blog entry for more details on the CDN.

The November CTP of Microsoft .NET Services has released today, and you can get it from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/developers/dotnetservices/.  

The latest .NET Services CTP includes some key design changes announced previously to the Service Bus (SB) and the Access Control Services (ACS).  
SB and ACS now include the feature set that will be available when we enter commercial availability early next year, and are now the first commercial services to run on Windows Azure.

Updates and changes for the November CTP are:

• Access Control Service: We are focusing on addressing the large, unmet need around access control for REST web services and delivering a robust infrastructure for REST web services authorization and support with this new SDK.
  
• Service Bus: The Service Bus now offers message buffers to support persistent, asynchronous messaging. It also provides for more ‘clients’ and ‘services’ per solution, as well as an increased number of connections per solution.

Based on the fact that REST web services have become increasingly popular with both web and enterprise developers, we received feedback from the community that the lack of controlling access to REST web services is one of the major pain points faced by service developers today. As interoperability remains a goal of ours, this means that we will simplify the approach to ACS so that access control scenarios integrate well with REST. The approach is also designed to continue to appeal to all developers that want an easy way to take advantage of Service Bus and Access Control Service or use these services from non-Microsoft platforms. Meanwhile, we remain committed to our ongoing goals of enabling SSO and authorization for websites, supporting WS-*, and federating with a greater variety of web and enterprise identity providers, in a future release.

You can find out more information on the .NET Services team blog.