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Windows Azure AppFabric CTP February release now available

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Today we released the Windows Azure AppFabric CTP February release which introduces updates to the Caching service, and a new and improved Silverlight based portal experience.

This release builds on the prior Caching CTP October release, and introduces the following improvements:

  • Ability to choose from a set of available cache sizes and provision a cache of the chosen size
  • Support for upgrading or downgrading between caches from the available sizes dynamically based on your requirements
  • Added client side tracing and client request tracking capabilities for improved diagnosis
  • Performance improvements

In addition, we released a new Silverlight based portal which provides the same great experience as the Windows Azure and SQL Azure portals, and we have deprecated the old ASP.NET based portal.

Another enhancement we introduced in the new portal experience is to enable you to specifically choose which service namespaces get created. You can choose to create one or any of: Service Bus, Access Control or Caching.

To learn more about this CTP release read Wade Wegner's post on Windows Azure AppFabric CTP February, Caching Enhancements, and the New LABS Portal, and Vittorio Bertocci’s post on New Portal for the ACS Labs: Fewer Clicks, Happier Carpal Tunnels.

The updates are available here: https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/, so be sure to login and check out the great new experience and capabilities. 

The usage of the LABS CTP environment is free of charge, but keep in mind that there is no SLA.

Like always, we encourage you to check it out and let us know what you think through our Windows Azure AppFabric CTP Forum.

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2011
    Alas, the Silverlight client starts up with an exception. It doesn't finish loading the plugin manifest, just throws up an error a second or two after going to the portal and sits there, unusable. It's a Win 7 machine, with Silverlight 4 developer runtimes on it. Also happens on a ton of lab machines (with similar specs). I wish I could give more info, but the error message contains no details and is the same on every browser (IE9 beta, FF, Chrome etc).

  • Anonymous
    February 11, 2011
    Please use our Windows Azure AppFabric CTP Forum to find help and provide feedback: social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../threads.

  • Anonymous
    February 14, 2011
    When will this CTP go into production? Is there already a release date set?

  • Anonymous
    February 15, 2011
    Our CTPs are intended to give our customers a preview of the services and capabilities that we plan to release in upcoming releases, and gather feedback regarding these. Both the new portal UI and the Caching service will be released to our production environment in the near future, but we have not disclosed the final dates yet.