New storage features have been released as part of Windows Azure. The Windows Azure storage team announced the update on their blog at New Windows Azure Storage Features – May 2009.

Features described include:

• Entity Group Transactions for Windows Azure Table – It is now possible to perform a transaction across entities stored within the same table and same partition.
• Copy Blob for Windows Azure Blob – We now allow applications to copy a blob from a source blob to a destination blob within the same storage account.
• Get Block List for Windows Azure Blob – We have added the ability to GetBlockList to retrieve the uncommitted block list, as well as the committed block list.
• API Versioning - For all of the Windows Azure Storage solutions we have introduced a new HTTP header called “x-ms-version”.     All changes to the storage APIs will be versioned by this header.

In addition to the above, C# Unicode characters for the property names are now supported for Windows Azure tables.

The team also announced a future change for the max timeout allowed for some of the Windows Azure Storage operations.

For more information, details about these new features can be found in the MSDN documentation REST API Reference for Windows Azure Storage Services.

In addition, May 2009 versions of the Windows Azure Storage Table and Blob White papers, with information about these features, will be pushed on Windows Azure on MSDN soon.

In addition, Steve Marx has published some examples on using the above new functionality on his blog Sample Code for New Windows Azure Blob Features.