Windows Azure™ is a
cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting
and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure
provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and
manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters.

Windows Azure is a flexible platform that supports multiple languages
and integrates with your existing on-premises environment. To build applications
and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft
Visual Studio® expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards,
protocols and languages including SOAP, REST, XML, Java, PHP and Ruby. Windows
Azure is now commercially available in 41 countries.

Windows Azure Tools
for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2010 to enable the creation,
configuration, building, debugging, running, packaging and deployment of
scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure.

New for
version 1.3:

• Virtual Machine (VM) Role (Beta):Allows you to create a custom VHD
  image using Windows Server 2008 R2 and host it in the cloud.
• Remote Desktop Access: Enables connecting to individual service
  instances using a Remote Desktop client.
• Full IIS Support in a Web role: Enables hosting Windows Azure web
  roles in a IIS hosting environment.
• Elevated Privileges: Enables performing tasks with elevated
  privileges within a service instance.
• Virtual Network (CTP): Enables support for Windows Azure Connect,
  which provides IP-level connectivity between on-premises and Windows Azure
  resources.
• Diagnostics: Enhancements to Windows Azure Diagnostics enable
  collection of diagnostics data in more error conditions.
• Networking Enhancements: Enables roles to restrict inter-role
  traffic, fixed ports on InputEndpoints.
• Performance Improvement: Significant performance improvement local
  machine deployment.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio
also includes:

• C# and VB Project creation support for creating a Windows Azure Cloud
  application solution with multiple roles.
• Tools to add and remove roles from the Windows Azure application.
• Tools to configure each role.
• Integrated local development via the compute emulator and storage emulator
  services.
• Running and Debugging a Cloud Service in the Development Fabric.
• Browsing cloud storage through the Server Explorer.
• Building and packaging of Windows Azure application projects.
• Deploying to Windows Azure.
• Monitoring the state of your services through the Server Explorer.
• Debugging in the cloud by retrieving IntelliTrace logs through the Server
  Explorer.

The sdk announced at PDC is now available for download.