I’m really excited about today’s (April 30th 2013) Windows Azure SKD version 2.0 release. I take this as an early XMAS gift for all Windows Azure Developers and above all its got tons of awesome goodness!
The first thing I noticed when I upgraded my projects to use the new SDK, was the speed of the Windows Azure Emulator, it just doesn’t compare. What a time saver!
To upgrade your project download the new Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for Visual Studio 2012. Once you have finished installing the project, you will need to update the Windows Azure Configuration Manager through Nuget. Then right click on your cloud project and navigate to the Application tab. Click on the Update button. If for some reason your cloud services will cycle continuously, it might be because the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime reference in your projects haven’t been updated,. You can do so manually by referencing the DLL typically found in
Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\.NET SDK\v2.0\
Your now ready to take advantage of all these new features:
- Web Sites: Visual Studio Tooling updates for Publishing, Management, and for Diagnostics
- Improved Visual Studio Publishing
- Management Support within the Visual Studio Server Explorer
- Streaming Diagnostic Logs
- Cloud Services: Support for new high memory VM sizes, Faster Cloud Service publishing & Visual Studio Tooling for configuring and viewing diagnostics data
- Storage: Storage Client 2.0 is now included in new projects & Visual Studio Server Explorer now supports working with Storage Tables
- Service Bus: Updated client library with message pump programming model support, support for browsing messages, and auto-deleting idle messaging entities
- PowerShell Automation: Updated support for PowerShell 3.0, and lots of new PowerShell commands for automating Web Sites, Cloud Services, VMs and more.
Notes
A few other updates/changes with today’s release:
- WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.dll no longer depends on WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll. You will now be able to import and use the WindowsAzure.Storage 2.0 NuGet package in your application without introducing conflicts with Diagnostics.
- Windows Azure SDK 2.0 supports side by side with Windows Azure SDK 1.8 and 1.7 while dropping support for side by side with Windows Azure SDK 1.6. Therefore you will not be able to debug an SDK 1.6 service if SDK 2.0 is installed on the same machine.
- WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime.dll, WindowsAzure.Configuration.dll and the caching assemblies are now built against the .Net framework 4.0 runtime. Therefore you will have to retarget your framework 3.5 application to 4.0 after migrating to Windows Azure SDK 2.0.
- They also recently published Windows Azure Cloud Service Support Policy which you can view in detail at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/azure-cloud-lifecycle-faq.
The Windows Azure SDK for .NET 2.0 includes Windows Azure Storage 2.0.5.1, Windows Azure Service Bus 2.0, Windows Azure Caching 2.0, and Windows Azure Configuration Manager 2.0 libraries. You can also download these libraries from their respective NuGet packages.
Alexandre Brisebois ☁ 
Ah!! Cool :-)
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