New Windows Azure Tools V1.4 For Visual Studio 2010

Introduction:

Microsoft has just released the new Windows Azure Tools V1.4 for Visual Studio 2010 with highly enhanced new features which are very useful from the developer perspective. We can download the kit from the link below:

Windows Azure Tools V1.4
Note: The above link contains the web installer, we need an internet connection to download the complete setup and have administrator rights to run this installer.

Features:

Some of the features of this tool kit are as follows.

1. Multiple Service Configurations
2. Profiling Support
3. MVC3 Web Role Support
4. Package Validation

We can see a brief introduction of each of these enhanced features. Later in our upcoming article we will see to the detail usage of these features with some real-time samples.

Feature 1: Multiple Service Configuration:

With this feature, we are now going to have full control of moving our application across environments like, previously if we need to deploy our application from Local to the cloud we need to do some configuration changes. But with this new feature we have 2 Service configuration files names as:

ServiceConfiguration.Local.cscfg - Can use it locally for debugging

ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg - Can use it remotely in cloud when publishing

Note - We will see in detail on how to use it in our upcoming article.
 
Feature 2: Profiling Support:

This feature is available with only Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio 2010 Premium editions. This tool is going to be one of the most useful across the developers, as the name suggests itself this tool helps to profile our application on the cloud so that we can go over with any Performance issues or any downtime issue which we can get from the cloud.

Enabling profiling is very easy in Visual Studio 2010 specific to a project and while publishing an option is provided to enable or disable the profiler for that project. We can download the profile logs as a report to see the complete details on a day to day basis.

Note - We will see in details on how to use the profiler and analysing the profiler in our upcoming article.

Feature 3: MVC3 Web Role Support:

This enhancement is very much interesting as many might have already started using MVC3 application developement. In windows Azure we have been provided support with MVC2 applications until now and with this new update we have been provided support with MVC3 Web Role to start developing our applications and deploy it to the cloud.

Also the Azure project will take care of all the enhanced support of copying the dlls to the Azure server so our application will be available online as soon as we got to deploy our application to the cloud.

Note - We will see in details on how to use the MVC3 Web Role in our upcoming article

Feature 4: Package Validation:

This is one of the very important update as far as time spent on our deployment process, yes Package validation is now it supports with more enhanced options of providing validation errors or warning when we try to deploy our application to the cloud by publishing it directly or packaging it to upload manually. With this type of validation we can avoid more time for deploying by going over all the validation errors and trying to overcome it without putting more effort in deployment.

Conclusion:

So in this article we have seen the important updates for the Windows Azure Tools V1.4 features and in our upcoming articles we will see the new enhancements in depth.