Microsoft vice president Scott Guthrie today announced Windows Azure SDK for .NET 2.0, what he calls a “major refresh” in his blog post. The update of the open-source SDK, which can be downloaded here, includes Visual Studio updates for publishing, management and diagnostics, which are designed to make it easier to publish Azure-based websites, manage them and monitor their performance.
Another key enhancement is Storage Client 2.0, which is included in new projects, according to Guthrie. He also noted that Visual Studio Server Explorer now supports Storage Tables.
The announcement comes on the heels of Microsoft’s release of Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Azure, Guthrie told me in an interview last week, started out as a pure Platform-as-a-Service play, but the IaaS release enabled users to create virtual machines or virtual networks in the cloud. As part of today’s SDK announcement, he pointed out that developers can now deploy cloud services to those same VMs.
