It turns out the Microsoft Windows BUILD event this week held more Microsoft Windows Azure PaaS cloud announcements than just the toolkit for Windows 8, as Redmond rolls out international availability for Bing service APIs (including translation) on the Windows Azure Marketplace, a new Azure SDK and more.
We have a lot to go over and a little time to go over it, so let’s go bullet-point style:
- International availability: Microsoft announced the Windows Azure Marketplace will soon be available in 25 new countries, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Singapore. Users in those regions will be able to purchase data and applications for Azure, app store-style.
- Bing Services: Soon, Windows Azure developers will be able to grab Bing service APIs from the marketplace, including Microsoft Translate API, which powers the translation engines in Microsoft Office, Bing and other Microsoft products. Down the line, Microsoft expects to charge for higher-thoroughfare versions of the API, but currently it’s running a promotion in which the premium version is free.
- Windows Azure SDK 1.5: Downloadable here, the new SDK adds a re-architected emulator for ensuring better collaboration between local and cloud deployments/developments, performance boosts and usability tweaks across the board, bug-fixes and “support for uploading service certificates in csupload.exe and a new tool csencrypt.exe to help manage remote desktop encryption passwords.”
- Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio: Available at the same link as that SDK, Visual Studio gets better tools for Windows Azure developers, including adding Azure projects from the “web application” menu, profiling of applications running in Azure, creation of ASP.NET MVC3 web roles, multiple service configuration profiles, and improved Azure package validation.
- Azure Service Management APIs: Microsoft has released service management APIs for the following scenarios — “Rollback an In-Progress Configuration Update or Service Upgrade,” “Ability to Invoke Multiple ‘write’ Operations on an Ongoing Deployment,” “More Descriptive Status for Role Instances,” and “New API Method: Get Subscription.”
As always, this is just the high-level overview. If you’re a cloud ISV and your interest is piqued, I suggest you look here for Windows Azure Marketplace technical details and here for the rest — that’s where I got the details from.
I’m pleasantly surprised that Microsoft didn’t let Windows Azure fall entirely by the wayside, even as the BUILD event focused on the new hotness that is Windows 8.
Keep watching TalkinCloud and The VAR Guy for updates on all of Microsoft’s Windows product line.
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