In the last several weeks after Microsoft’s partnership with Docker announcement, we have added several features to make it easy to integrate Docker containers with Microsoft Azure including Portal support for Azure extensions to setup a Docker host on Azure Linux VMs and support for private registry on Azure – see Ahmet Alp Balkan’s blog on How to Deploy a Private Docker Registry on Azure.

Today, I am happy to announce that you can now use a Docker client directly from your Windows machine to manage containers running on Linux hosts. For more details on how to build and setup up a Docker CLI – Command Line Interface for Windows, reference: How to compile Docker on Windows. Up till today you could only use Linux based client CLI to manage your Docker container deployments or use boot2docker to set up a virtualized development environment in a Windows client machine. Today, with a Windows CLI you can manage your Docker hosts wherever they are directly from your Windows Clients.

The code for Docker client is integrated into the official Docker GitHub repository and you can follow its active development under Pull Request#9113.

As a bonus, this week, following Microsoft’s announcement of open sourcing .NET core framework and Linux distribution, we have made available a Docker image for ASP.NET on Docker Hub which you can take advantage of to create ASP.NET ready containers from the base image. You can access the ASP.NET image from Docker Hub directly at: https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/microsoft/aspnet/