August 2, 2011 Update: In addition to fixing a variety of bugs, we have also adopted the latest version of the service management API.  For most operations there will be little or no resulting impact from this change.  However, in order to properly account for the latency involved in propagating DNS records, the ‘create’ and ‘delete’ operations for storage accounts will now take longer to complete.

We’re pleased to announce immediate availability of an updated Windows Azure Platform Management Portal.  This updated portal is designed to make the Windows Azure management experience more intuitive and efficient.

Enhancements in this new release include:

Localization:  The Portal is now available in 11 languages; newly supported languages are Japanese, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese.  Users can choose their desired language from the language chooser in the top left pane of the Portal. 

Context Menus:  To drive a more intuitive user experience, the Portal now supports right click menus in the “Hosted Services, Storage & CDN” pane. 

Performance Improvements:  Users can expect to see significantly lower initial load times with the addition of a local temporary cache and the optimization of network bandwidth consumption.  When the new portal is first loaded, it will prompt users to increase the local storage amount. 

To minimize associated security risks, we do not store any sensitive data in the local store.  We do not create the local cache if users are browsing “In private” mode. 

Enhanced Delete Deployment: Developers can now delete running deployments. In earlier versions, developers had to wait for a deployment to stop before it could be deleted. With this new version you can now delete running Windows Azure deployments as well.

We are excited about this release and are eager to hear your feedback.  Use the feedback button in the bottom right of the Portal to send feedback directly to the team.

Thanks,

Bharat Ahluwalia, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft

Tweet