December 9, 2010 News Thursday: Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, Windows Azure platform Client Technology Previews … and more Server and Tools news.

Windows Azure Platform Client Technology Previews Now Available

As previously announced at PDC 2010, this week, Microsoft is making available limited Community Technology Previews (CTP’s) of SQL Azure Reporting and SQL Azure Data Sync. These capabilities make it easier to move to platform as a service and enhance applications and workloads to take advantage of cloud computing. The following limited CTP’s are available this week:

· SQL Azure Reporting: Allows developers to enhance applications and workloads by embedding reports into their Windows Azure applications, including rich data visualization and export of popular formats, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and PDF, enabling users of these applications to gain greater insight and act on their line-of-business data stored in SQL Azure databases. The final release of this technology will be available to customers in the first half of 2011. Customers can register for the CTP here.

· SQL Azure Data Sync: Allows developers to enhance applications and workloads by allowing developers to build apps with geo-replicated SQL Azure data and synchronize on-premises with cloud and mobile applications. SQL Azure Data Sync is another important building block service that helps developers rapidly build cloud applications on the Windows Azure platform using Microsoft’s cloud database. The final release of this technology will be available to customers in the first half of 2011. Customers can register for the CTP here.

For more information, visit the SQL Azure blogs.

Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta Now Available

Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta. Service Pack 1 (SP1) builds on the Visual Studio 2010 momentum of focusing on improving the developer experience by addressing some of the most requested features like better help support, IntelliTrace support for 64bit and SharePoint, and including Silverlight 4 Tools in the box. Some of the additional highlights are:

· Unit Testing on .NET 3.5 – Today all unit tests are run under .NET 4. While acceptable for most users because of the compatibility work we did in .NET 4, this caused problems for some those users with .NET 3.5-specific dependencies.

· IntelliTrace F5 for 64 bit and SharePoint projects – Developers can now more effectively perform unit testing on 64 bit and SharePoint.

· Performance Wizard for Silverlight – Visual Studio performance profiling tools are very useful, but developers want to use them for Silverlight as well. Silverlight projects are included in the Wizard just like other client projects today.

· VB Compiler runtime switch – This switch will enable Visual Basic developers to target their apps and libraries at platforms where the full Visual Basic Runtime hasn’t traditionally been available.

For more information please visit Jason Zander’s blog.