Today we are excited to announce the release of the Windows Azure AppFabric June CTP which includes capabilities that make it easy for developers to build, deploy, manage and monitor multi-tier applications across web, business logic and database tiers as a single logical entity on the Windows Azure Platform.

This CTP release consists:

• AppFabric Developer Tools - Enhancements to Visual Studio that enable to visually design and build end-to-end applications on the Windows Azure platform.
• AppFabric Application Manager – Powerful, yet easy way to host and manage n-tier applications that span web, middle and data-tier through the entire application lifecycle including deployment, configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting. The Application Manager includes a comprehensive application management portal that is powered by a REST API for monitoring the health of your n-tier application and performing management operations on the running applications.
• Composition Model - A set of .NET Framework extensions for composing applications on the Windows Azure platform. This builds on the familiar Azure Service Model concepts and adds new capabilities for describing and integrating the components of an application. The AppFabric Developer Tools leverage the composition model to create an application manifest that is used by the AppFabric Application Manager at deployment time to understand the application structure and metadata.
• Support for running Custom Code, WCF, WF - Formal support for executing Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) on Windows Azure and the composition of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and WF services, as well as custom code, into a composite application. In addition, it provides enhanced development, deployment, management and monitoring support for WCF and WF services.