Microsoft has released Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 today.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2008 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 RC to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure. Installation includes the Windows Azure SDK. (For VS 2010 Beta 2 please use the November...

According to a post on the SQL Azure Team Blog you can upgrade your CTP accounts to a paid commercial subscription starting today, below is an excerpt from that post

Starting today you will be able to upgrade your Community Technology Preview (CTP) account to a paid commercial subscriptions. If you upgrade your CTP accounts during the month of January, 2010, all Windows Azure platform usage incurred during this month will be at no charge. You will also have full visibility during this month to your W...

This is the second time that I went to the Enterprise Developer Conference. Due to the downturn Microsoft merged the financial and health/live sciences conferences into one. Last years main focus was High Computing, this years main focus was......tada.....drumroll.....Cloud Computing. No big surprise of course. There were always 5 sessions at the same time so I can only report on the ones that I attended. The SQL Server Data Services session was in my opinion the best one but then again I am biased. You can actually watch all the session at the following site

There are some cool things announced by Microsoft

SQL Server Application and Multi-server Private CTP - Registration



As part of SQL Server “Kilimanjaro", we have announced baseline investments for application and multi-server management. We are recruiting customers to participate in a private CTP with SQL Server Engineering. Registration for the Private CTP will take place until December 15, 2008 and the 4-5 week Private CTP will begin in mid-January. Microsoft is looking for participants in entities with at least 1 DBA, more than 25 PCs, and...

Dare Obesanjo has made an excellent post: Windows Azure from a Developer’s Perspective

To try out Azure you need to be running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista with a bunch of prerequisites you can get from running the Microsoft Web Platform installer. Once you have the various prerequisites installed (SQL Server, IIS 7, .NET Framework 3.5, etc) you should then grab the Windows Azure SDK. Users of Visual Studio will also benefit from grabbing the Windows Azur...