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Windows Azure update: .NET SDK 2.0, new libraries, management tools, diagnostics and adminstrirovaniya, Training Kit

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Windows Azure platform received another major update. Last week, in his blog, Scott Guthrie announced the release of a new version of the .NET SDK 2.0, which includes new tools with Visual Studio integration for managing storage components, diagnosing applications, publishing websites.



This update introduces new features for working with the service bus messaging (Service Bus). In addition, the Windows Azure platform has received a large number of new features for automating administrative tasks using PowerShell. Finally, an updated Windows Azure Training Kit was released, which contains dozens of laboratory work for self-study of the cloud platform.

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Below you will find a brief description of all the innovations. You can download all the new tools at this link . SDK source codes are available on GitHub .



Website Publishing Improvements



The .NET SDK 2.0 update offers deeper integration of Windows Azure tools with Visual Studio. Publishing projects to Windows Azure Web Sites is now more integrated and allows you to register your account subscription in the IDE for quick publication of web applications and access to subscription elements from Server Explorer.



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This allows you to select the required instance of the Web Sites service for publishing without manually downloading the publication profile from the administration portal.



Manage Windows Azure Web Sites inside Visual Studio



The Windows Azure Web Sites subsystem has other new administration features integrated with Visual Studio. Now, using Server Explorer Studio, you can manage instances of Web Sites.



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You can stop and start sites, configure settings that were previously available only through the Windows Azure administration panel or via the command line.



Receiving diagnostic logging data in real time



Another major novelty of the .NET SDK 2.0 update is a new opportunity to obtain diagnostic data of web site logs in real time.



Developers can use the standard System.Diagnostics assembly and the Trace class to register diagnostic messages.



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Using the Web Sites instance management, developers can enable the registration of such logs in the settings of the administration portal or through the new Visual Studio functionality for administering Web Sites.



Then, to obtain diagnostic information in real time, the developer can use the new .NET SDK 2.0 functionality, which allows receiving log events in real time:



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This feature is also available for cloud service roles. The developer can set the parameters for collecting diagnostic data and select which data to collect in the cloud service settings.



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Diagnostics of cloud services can also be configured using the configuration file:



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Then, diagnostic data can be viewed in real time using the new Visual Studio tools, for example, below is a screenshot of SQL Server errors that were obtained from a real-time cloud service:



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To stop receiving logs in real time, a developer simply turns off streaming. The collected data can be stored in the Windows Azure Table Storage cloud storage, from where they can then be queried using the new query building tool:



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The new function of streaming logs in real time is also available for command line tools .



Support for new types of virtual machines for publishing cloud services



Along with the recent announcement of the global availability of Windows Azure infrastructure services, new types of virtual machines were introduced with an increased size of available RAM of 28 GB and 56 GB (for details, please click here ).



With the .NET SDK 2.0 update, developers can deploy cloud services in new types of virtual machines using Visual Studio:



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Increased speed of hosting cloud services



In the past, when publishing an updated version of the cloud service through Visual Studio, the update process occurred sequentially for each application instance in the cloud. For example, if the cloud service was scaled to 10 instances, the update occurred sequentially, instance after instance, in order for the service to remain available to users even during the update.



In the .NET SDK 2.0 update, the ability to simultaneously update (Simultaneous Update) is added, which allows you to specify the process of simultaneously updating all instances of cloud service roles. This significantly increases the speed of updating the entire deployed solution, but for some time leads to inaccessibility of the service.



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Cloud Storage Toolkit



Tools for working with cloud storage Windows Azure Storage previously allowed to work with queues and blobs. In the current update of the .NET SDK 2.0, Visual Studio adds full-featured tool support for working with tables.



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Developers can create and delete tables, populate tables with data, query and filter data in tables.



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Enhancements to the Windows Azure Service Bus messaging library



The most significant innovations in the current update relate to the service of the Windows Azure Service Bus. The .NET SDK 2.0 adds support for the following features in the Service Bus client library:





Links to a more detailed description of each news, see the subsection “Update Details” at the end of this article.



New PowerShell commands to automate administrative tasks



The current update has added a huge number of new commands for Windows Azure cloud resource management tools via PowerShell :





A full list of new PowerShell cmdlets with a description of their functions can be found at the following link .



Update details



The above are brief descriptions of the new features of the current update. For more information on each of the innovations, you can find the following links:



Announcements:



MSDN:



Video Channel9:



New Service Bus features:



Announcements of new Service Bus:

Windows Azure Training Kit Update - April 2013



One week after the release of the .NET SDK 2.0 update, an updated Windows Azure Training Kit was released, which offers dozens of presentations, projects and labs for independent study of all aspects of the cloud platform by developers and IT professionals.



The April update includes the following content updates:





Download the Windows Azure Training Kit at the following link .



Do not miss



Do not miss the previous announcements of updates to the Windows Azure platform, which are released almost every week:





useful links



Below you will find links to resources that will help you in using the Microsoft cloud platform:





And if you are already developing on Windows Azure or want to find the developers of your service, visit appprofessionals.ru .



We will be happy to answer your questions at azurerus@microsoft.com . And we are waiting for you in the Windows Azure Community on Facebook . Here you will find experts (don't forget to ask them questions), photos, and lots and lots of news.



Video recordings of Windows Azure Summit reports and video interviews that were conducted during a large cloud conference.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/178759/

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