January 2009 CTP of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK released

We're excited to announce that we've released an update to the Windows Azure Tools and SDK.

• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio
• Windows Azure SDK

What's new in the Tools?

• Addressed top customer bugs.
• Resolved hang and performance issues on run and debug.
• Fixed issue with "Publish" of large projects.
• Fixed issue with "Create Test Tables" when both the web and worker role reference the same assembly
• Added support to debug Silverlight in a Web Role.
• Better storage services integration
• Error messages when there are Service Configuration or Service Definition errors

What's new in the SDK?

• Addressed top customer issues
• Space in user name
• Development storage may fail with a fatal error if the user name includes a space character.
• Concurrent GetMessages requests to the Queue service may return the same message.
• The DevTableGen utility may fail when passed the same assembly name on the command line more than once.
• Development storage may fail to update or delete entities that contain special characters like these: '- $ & + , : ; = @'.
• The Windows Azure SDK offers improved support for the integration of development storage with Visual Studio, including enhanced performance.
• The StorageClient sample includes the following improvements. For more information, see the StorageClient Sample topic in the Windows Azure SDK help file.
• The StorageClient sample now offers an optional exponential backoff retry policy.
• The StorageClient sample now supports production endpoints that include the account name.
• The ASP.Net Providers sample now supports a search syntax similar to the ASP.Net SQL-based providers. For more information, see the ASPProviders Sample topic in the Windows Azure SDK help file.

I'll be drilling in to some of the details of how we've made things better in this release in future blog posts -- stay tuned!