April Update for the Azure Services Training Kit & Azure Services management Tools

March came and went, bringing us a new CTP of the .NET Services SDK and a lot of news for Windows Azure & SQL Services. Today we released an updated version of the Azure Services Training Kit and one updated version of the Azure Services Management Tools.
The March CTP of the .NET Services SDK contains a lot of news: the Service Bus has a flurry of new features (Clemens is furiously blogging about it – 12 posts in 10 days after ~4 months of silence! Try to keep up because it’s really worth it), while the Access Control Service replaced all their management APIs with a new AtomPub based interface (you can find ALL the changes in the services & SDK nicely listed here).

As a result, some of the presentations and demos we have in the training kit needed an update; and of course, the ACS management APIs leveraged by the MMC were no longer able to connect to the service. The April update of the Azure Services Management Tool fixed that, in fact I believe it is a beautiful testament to the power of the separations of concerns: the user experience you’ll have in using the MMC is pretty much unchanged, modulo the changes in the services themselves (ie you’ll see in the UI the new URI format with the inclusion of the solution name in the DNS, and similar). We simply changed the underlying powershell commandlets for taking advantage of the new API and everything kept working as originally planned. How cool is that? 🙂

Have fun with the updated Azure Services Training Kit and the Azure Services Management Tools: as usual we welcome your feedback!