Today we’re rolling out a set of changes in the Azure Services Developer Portal to alerts, analytics, and Windows Live ID integration.  The following changes will go live tonight:

Alerts

A number of CTP participants told us they wanted greater opportunities to customize the way their application sends critical alerts.  To that end, we’re in the process of building a new platform for alerts that will give developers the ability to choose how alerts are sent.  The current alerting system based on Windows Live Alerts will go offline today and will be replaced by this new pluggable platform this summer.

Analytics

When we announced our first preview last October, we wanted to make sure that CTP participants could get a feel for their usage, so we provided the simple analytics you’ve seen displayed in the web portal to date.  As we move towards commercial availability, we’re continuing to refine this metering.  The analytics view in the web portal will be removed today, and it will be replaced with the new metering system this summer.

Windows Live ID Integration

Until today, when you created a Windows Azure hosted service, you also saw an Application ID and secret key that you could use to perform Live ID authentication.  We’re now decoupling the two, so you’ll see a separate Live Services project in the Azure Services Developer Portal that contains the same information.  For new hosted services, if you want to use Live ID authentication, you’ll need to create a separate “Live Services: Existing APIs” project and configure it to point to your <app name>.cloudapp.net domain.  This change makes the process of using Live ID authentication with a Windows Azure application the same as for any other application.