Microsoft recently announced some new additions and updates to the Windows Azure services offerings, including general availability for BizTalk Services, Traffic Manager, and Active Directory Application Access. In addition the Windows Azure Monitoring Service Library was released in Preview.
If you've been following along, you've seen a new round of updates announced almost weekly.
Here's a rundown of what's new this time:
- Windows Azure Active Directory updates: As applications are increasingly cloud based, IT administrators are being challenged to implement single–sign-on (SSO) against SaaS applications and ensure secure access. This offering enables easy management of user access to hundreds of cloud SaaS applications like Office 365, Box, GoToMeeting, DropBox, Salesforce.com and others.
- General availability of Windows Azure BizTalk Services: While customers continue to invest in cloud based applications, they need a scalable and reliable solution for extending their on-premises applications to the cloud. This cloud based integration service enables powerful business scenarios like supply chain, cloud-based electronic data interchange (EDI) and enterprise application integration (EAI), all with a familiar toolset and enterprise-grade reliability.
- General availability of Windows Azure Traffic Manager: With the load balancing capabilities of this service, customers can now create highly responsive and highly available production-grade applications.
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Mobile Services updates: Enterprises are increasingly going mobile to deliver their line of business apps. Today Microsoft introduced a number of exciting updates to Mobile Services that make it even easier to build mobile LOB apps, including:
- Preview of Windows Azure Active Directory integration with Mobile Services: Using this support, mobile business applications can now use the same easy Mobile Services authentication experience to allow employees to sign into their mobile applications with their corporate Active Directory credentials.
- Cross-platform connected apps using Xamarin and Mobile Services: Earlier this year Microsoft partnered with Xamarin to deliver a Mobile Services SDK that makes it easy to add capabilities such as storage, authentication and push notifications to iOS and Android applications written in C# using Xamarin. Since then, thousands of developers have downloaded the SDK and enjoyed the benefits of building cross platform mobile applications in C# with Windows Azure as their backend. Today’s release includes two updates to Mobile Services:
- An updated Mobile Services Portable Class Library (PCL) SDK that includes support for both Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android
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New quickstart projects for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android exposed directly in the Windows Azure Management Portal
- Optimistic Concurrency Support: Today’s mobile services release also adds support for optimistic concurrency. With optimistic concurrency, your application can now detect and resolve conflicting updates submitted by multiple users.
For complete details, check out the Windows Azure blog and Scott Guthrie’s blog.
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