Microsoft has recently released a new Windows Azure Toolkit designed to help developers take advantage of the newly released Windows 8 Developer Preview build. Which means you can now start making cool apps.
Using this toolkit, developers can now make Metro apps that harness the powers of Azure — Microsoft’s Cloud platform.
Developers Receive Azure Toolkit For Windows 8
Windows Azure Compute and Storage is Microsoft’s cloud service and the new toolkit for it allows developers to easily make Metro apps for Windows 8 that will harness the features of Azure. The new toolkit especially designed for this purpose.
Announcing at the BUILD conference at Anaheim California, Microsoft Server and Tools President Satya Nadella said that the new toolkit not only provides guidance for the new OS but also provides templates to help developers start on projects for Windows 8 apps that can connect to and take advantage of Azure.
It includes a special Windows 8 cloud application template for development within Visual Studio, which is aimed at making it easier for developers to make Metro apps that connect to Azure.
Easy App-Making Template Simplifies Cloud App Making For Windows 8 And Azure
The template, include in the toolkit, will generate to projects — an ASP.NET MVC 3 project and a Windows Metro style JavaScript project app project. Right out of the box the client and the cloud projects integrate and enable push notifications via the Windows Push Network Server or WNS. In addition to making this complex procedure much simpler, the project will also demonstrate usages of the WNS and leveraging Windows Azure Blob and Table storage.
The Azure toolkit was announced earlier this year with developmental support for iOS, Android and of course, Windows Phone. This toolkit allows developers to speed up the process of app creation for these major mobile platforms.
Given that it is meant for both Azure and Windows 8 toegther, the toolkit support JavaScript and HTML5 along with .NET, C++, C# and VB (Visual Basic). This gives the developers an array of commonly used languages to choose from when developing for Windows 8 and Azure together.
The toolkit carries more than this though. There’s a dependency checker, WNS Recipe, Dev 11 projects and more. The toolkit can be found here.