Downloading and Installing Tools for Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2010 is the ideal development environment for Windows Azure. To enable the IDE, you need to download and install Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010. You can find them at the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/. Click the Get Tools & SDK button to download the installer. This will install tools for Visual Studio so that you can create and manage projects the usual way, and the Windows Azure SDK. If you have also installed Visual Studio 2008, tools will affect this version, too. The Windows Azure SDK is composed by the Development Fabric, a tool that reproduces locally the hosting services on the cloud and that is required for running your applications locally, the Development Storage, which reproduces locally the environment for publishing blobs, queues and messages, and the documentation. The Windows Azure SDK also contains sample applications with full source code for further studies. Also ensure to periodically check out the official Cloud Computing tools team blog from Microsoft, available here: http://blogs.msdn.com/cloud/.