It's been a interesting week for Windows Azure. Since last Friday (13th of November) the latest Windows Azure Tools was released and strangely the installer was marked to be a 1.0 release although I'm not sure it really is one.
  • Project Dallas has been announced which is a MarketPlace for Vendors to publish their Azure Services for consuming and start making money out of it.
  • SQL Azure Data Sync Beta 1 was released. You can use it to synchronize cached data on your offline client with SQL Azure on the cloud just like using any other Synchronization Adapter/Manager on Microsoft Sync Framework. In order to install it and mess around with samples you need Microsoft Sync Framework 2.0 SDK.
  • .NET Services was renamed to Windows Azure AppFabric to match terms with Windows Server AppFabric which includes former named projects Velocity and Dublin in one single product. .NET Services consist of Access Control (Claims based authentication) and a Service bus to communicate with other applications.
  • New APIs were released to provision and manage Windows Azure Services.
  • There have been various enhancements on the platform and the Web UI like how many seconds does it take to switch from Staging to Production, a TCO Calculator has been introduced on the main website etc.

More to come, stay tuned.