I had a good time at the “Best of PDC” event in Salt Lake City today. Rob Bagby is a good speaker and he brought out some features of the REST Starter Kit that I hadn’t picked up on.

On one of the breaks I was talking with Rob and Craig Berntson and Craig mentioned a new release of the Azure SDK. I hadn’t heard anything about it. When I got home I had the following message in my e-mail.

Greetings from the Azure Services Platform Team!
We are excited to announce that we have released an update to the Windows® Azure™ SDK and Visual Studio Tools. These latest releases are available here:

• Windows Azure SDK: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=130232
• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128752

These newly released SDK and Tools include:

• Bug and performance fixes
• Improved integration with Visual Studio
• Performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios
• Improvements to Storage Client and ASP.Net provider samples
• Added support to debug Silverlight in a web role

We will continue to release updates to Windows Azure and its tools based on your feedback. Please visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=130231 to share your Windows Azure experiences.
Thank you for your continued interest.
Sincerely,
Azure Services Platform Team

The really nice thing is that even if you don’t have a key to run the Azure developer fabric on your own machine so you can still play with it even if you can’t release your creation on the world.