Geo-Replication for your Windows Azure Storage accounts at no cost!

Amazing news came from the BUILD conference. One such news is the great new feature of Windows Azure Storage – Geo-Replication for your data at *no additional cost*!

Isn’t it great? Out of the box, without additional cost, Microsoft is maintaining additional copy of all your storage data in another data-center in same region. For example if you selected West Europe for your storage account location, the geo-replica is kept in North Europe! Everything is done without breaking the current Windows Azure Storage services durability. Understand that there the multiple (likely 3!) copies of your data at both data centers! Hundreds of kilometers away. At no cost (0 Euro)! So in case a major disaster event happens in your “primary” datacenter, all of your data is recoverable at the second one!

All of this – for durability! Make sure you won’t lose any data stored in Windows Azure Storage!

No, currently you can’t use the secondary copy of your data, you don’t even see this in the management portal. So you can’t use this feature for geo-distributed application! But hey, there is the Windows Azure CDN to fulfill that purpose!

Windows Azure Development Cookbook by Neil Mackenzie

Recently a new book on Windows Azure was published: Windows Azure Development Cookbook! And it’s not yet another book on the subject! The great about this book is that its author is a fellow Azure MVP - Neil Mackenzie and the team of technical reviewers include Brent Stineman, another great name on the Windows Azure arena.  Both of them are amongst the top answerers in the Windows Azure forums, so be sure that this book includes a lot of gems from both real-world Azure application development, and real-world questions and answers. The fabulous world we live in, allows us to get this book in a format for variety of e-book readers so we can have it us wherever we go! Another good reading for any Azure enthusiast!

Windows Azure SDK 1.5 / Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.5

It’s great time, and it will become even greater! The new Windows Azure SDK 1.5 and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 are already LIVE! You can download it directly from the inline link (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27422) or use the Web Platform Installer. Another exciting release is the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK 1.5!

Amongst all the new goodies in Windows Azure SDK are:

• Re-architected emulator, which enables higher fidelity between local and cloud developments.
• Support for uploading service certificates in csupload.exe.
• A new csencrypt.exe tool to manage remote desktop encryption passwords.
• Enhancements in the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio for developing and deploying cloud applications.
• The ability to create ASP.NET MVC3 Web Roles and manage multiple service configurations in one cloud project.
• Improved validation of Windows Azure packages to catch common errors like missing .NET assemblies and invalid connection strings.

Even greater news is the totally new and fresh Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8!

You can read the full story here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/09/14/just-announced-build-new-windows-azure-toolkit-for-windows-8-windows-azure-sdk-1-5-geo-replication-for-azure-storage-and-more.aspx