Last month we launched our new Windows Azure SDK for Node.js. The release came after months of hard work between Microsoft and Joyent. Since that time we’ve seen a lot of excitement in the Node community around the support for Node.js in Windows Azure. We’re thankful for all the support!

Today at the Node Summit in San Franciso, Scott Guthrie demonstrated the SDK, which provides a streamlined experience for Windows developers to build and deploy Node.js apps to Windows Azure using PowerShell cmdlets and their editor of choice. Scott also showed the “Azure” npm module, which enables developers hosting Node apps in any environment to utilize Windows Azure Storage services like table, queues and blob. You can find out more about the PowerShell tools and the npm package at our dev center.

Additionally,  Scott showed a new way to deploy to Azure, Cloud9 IDE! 

Cloud9 IDE offers a cross-platform, browser-based development environment for Node.js. It is one of the de-facto tools for Node developers today. Cloud9 runs completely in the browser, and it’s available to developers working on any OS. In the second part of his keynote, Scott demonstrated using Cloud9 IDE on a Mac to build and deploy an application to Azure.

With Cloud9 IDE you can easily create a new Node application, connect it to your Windows Azure account, and deploy. Cloud9 makes it easier for you by packaging up source, creating your hosted service, and publishing the package. It supports publishing to Staging and Production and offers Windows Azure portal integration. Combining that with Cloud9’s integration with distributed version control providers like GitHub and BitBucket offers a fantastic experience!

Below you can see a screenshot of the new Cloud9 experience.

Along with the announcement, we’ve published a brand new tutorial on our Node.js dev center to show you how easy it is to get started developing for Windows Azure in Cloud9. In addition, check out these resources from Cloud9 about their Windows Azure support.

We are very excited about the collaboration with Cloud9 and the opportunity to offer both Windows and non-Windows developers an awesome experience developing for Windows Azure.

Read more about this announcement in the most recent posts on the Cloud9 and Interoperability @ Microsoft blogs.

Get started today.