January CTP of Windows Azure SDK Released!

Yesterday we released the January Community Technical Preview of the Windows Azure SDK.  You can read the official announcement on the Windows Azure blog.

This is in line with our commitment to make regular updates to Windows Azure.  Inside the cloud, we’re continually making improvements to the system internals.  These are invisible to developers, as they don’t change functionality.  The same holds for this SDK release.  The January CTP isn’t about rolling out new features; it’s about improving stability and performance, as well as fixing bugs that have been found since our initial CTP.

My personal favorite change is a bugfix that addresses the “sometimes it takes several minutes for the dev fabric to start up when I press F5” issue.  A number of people (myself included) were annoyed by this issue, and I’m pleased to say that everyone I spoke with who tried out the January CTP found the issue to be resolved.

I’d encourage everyone to pick up the January CTP of the core SDK and the Visual Studio tools today!