[UPDATE 10:14PM PST]: This release supports VS 2008 and the upcoming VS 2010 RC.  For VS 2010 Beta 2 please use the November 2009 release.

Today, coinciding with the commercial launch of Windows Azure, we have released version 1.1 of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK.

This release supports Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 RC.

What’s New

• Windows Azure Drive: Enables a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure application to mount a page blob as a drive letter, such as X:, and enables easily migration of existing NTFS applications to the cloud.
• OS Version Support: Allows a Windows Azure application to choose the appropriate Guest OS to run on in the cloud.
• Bug Fixes:
  • StorageClient: Expose account key from storage credentials, expose continuation tokens for pagination, reduce maximum buffer size for parallel uploads.
  • Windows Azure Diagnostics: Fix path corruption for crash dumps, OnDemandTransfer now respects LogLevelFilter.
  • VS 2010: Improved packaging performance.
  • VS 2010: Support for linked files in Web projects.
  • VS 2010: Support for ASP.NET web project web.config transformations.
  • Certificate selection lists certificates from LocalMachineMy instead of CurrentUserMy.
  • Right click on Role under Roles folder to select whether to launch the browser against HTTP, HTTPS or not at all.

Updated and additional samples are available at: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples