In case you missed it (and are interested) there is an update (came in June) for Windows Azure dev tools. It’s version 1.2 and is supported in VS2008 & VS2010.
Most important to me is the .NET 4.0 support: now I can use EF4 in Azure services.
Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.2 (June 2010)
Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2008 to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running, packaging and deployment of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure.
New for version 1.2:
- Visual Studio 2010 RTM Support: Full support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM.
- .NET 4 support: Choose to build services targeting either the .NET 3.5 or .NET 4 framework.
- Cloud storage explorer: Displays a read-only view of Windows Azure tables and blob containers through Server Explorer.
- Integrated deployment: Deploy services directly from Visual Studio by selecting ‘Publish’ from Solution Explorer.
- Service monitoring: Keep track of the state of your services through the ‘compute’ node in Server Explorer.
- IntelliTrace support for services running in the cloud: Adds support for debugging services in the cloud by using the Visual Studio 2010 IntelliTrace feature. This is enabled by using the deployment feature, and logs are retrieved through Server Explorer.
As a test, I just built a new WCF Service Role (verifying that it is, indeed, a .NET 4 project), added a EDM to it (it’s not architecture, it’s a proof of concept) and pointed my EDM to one of my SQL Azure databases. I created a simple service operation to return data via the EDM. Then I created a client app which retrieved the data through that service operation. Easy-peasie.
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Ok. Now you need to write a book on Azure Table storage 🙂
I just picked up the final copy of EF from Safari. Looking forward to it.
-TF
I just picked up the final copy of EF from Safari. Looking forward to it.