The Windows Azure SDK for .NET includes the following new
features:

• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010
  • Streamlined publishing: This makes connecting your environment to
    Windows Azure much easier by providing a publish settings file for your
    account.  This allows you to configure all aspects of deployments, such as
    Remote Desktop (RDP), without ever leaving Visual Studio.  Simply use the
    Visual Studio publishing wizard to download the publish settings and import them
    into Visual Studio.  By default, publish will make use of in-place
    deployment upgrades for significantly faster application updates.
  • Multiple profiles: Your publish settings, build config, and cloud
    config choices will be stored in one or more publish profile MSBuild files. This
    makes it easy for you and your team to quickly change all of your environment
    settings. 
  • Team Build: The Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 now offer
    MSBuild command-line support to package your application and pass in
    properties.  Additionally, they can be installed on a lighter-weight build
    machine without the requirement of Visual Studio being installed.
  • In-Place Updates: Visual Studio now allows you to make improved
    in-place updates to deployed services in Windows Azure. For more details visit
    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/10/19/announcing-improved-in-place-updates.aspx
  • Enhanced Publishing Wizard: Overhaul of publishing experience to
    sign-in, configure the deployment, and review the summary of changes
  • Automatic Credential Management Configuration: No longer need to
    manually create or manage a cert
  • Multiple Subscription Deployment Management: Makes it easier to use
    multiple Windows Azure subscriptions by selecting the subscription you want to
    use when publishing within Visual Studio.
  • Hosted Service Creation: Create new hosted services within Visual
    Studio, without having to visit the Windows Azure Portal.
  • Storage Accounts: Create and configure appropriate storage accounts
    within Visual Studio (no longer need to do this manually)
  • Remote Desktop Workflow: Enable by clicking a checkbox and providing
    a username/password – no need to create or upload a cert
  • Deployment Configurations: Manage multiple deployment environment
    configurations
  • Azure Activity Log: More information about the publish and virtual
    machine initialization status

For more information on Windows Azure Tools for Visual
Studio 2010, see What’s New in the Windows Azure Tools.

• Windows Azure Libraries for .NET 1.6
  • Service Bus & Caching: Service Bus and caching client libraries
    from the previous Windows Azure AppFabric SDK have now been updated and
    incorporated into the Windows Azure Libraries for .NET to simplify the
    development experience.
  • Queues:
    • Support for UpdateMessage method (for updating queue message contents and
      invisibility timeout)
    • New overload for AddMessage that provides the ability to make a message
      invisible until a future time
    • The size limit of a message is raised from 8KB to 64KB
    • Get/Set Service Settings for setting the analytics service settings

• Windows Azure Emulator
  • Performance improvements to compute & storage emulators.

Click here to
download the Windows Azure SDK via the Web Platform Installer.