Hello and welcome back to the links of the month. The last time I have introduced you to some enhancements to Windows Azure. I thought March was a big month for Windows Azure, but … what was April for an amazing month! We had the AzureConf the Windows Azure Global Bootcmap last week and some awesome enhancements to Windows Azure. Some of them will be covered in this article.

Windows Azure

• Windows Azure: Active Directory Release, New Backup Service + Web Site Monitoring and Log Improvements – Announcement #1 of the month.
• Windows Azure: General Availability of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Announcement #2 and the biggest one. Scott Guthrie gives an introduction to the awesome capabilities of Windows Azure.
• Windows Azure: Improvements to Virtual Networks, Virtual Machines, Cloud Services and a new Ruby SDK – Announcement #3
• Announcing the release of Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET – Announcement #4 was just made today and should the most interesting one for .NET developers.
• In-App Purchase and Mobile Services – An awesome post made by Josh Twist how you can implement in-app purchases on iOS in combination with the Windows Azure Mobile Services.
• How to use Windows Azure Table Storage in Windows Azure Mobile Services – A great sample written by Paolo Salvatori how to use the Windows Azure Table Storage in the Windows Azure Mobile Services to store data in place of Windows Azure SQL Database.
• Fetching Windows Azure Mobile Services Data in XAML based Windows Store Application – A simple example how to fetch data from the Windows Azure Mobile Services from Windows Store applications.
• Deploy a Secure ASP.NET MVC app with Membership, OAuth, and SQL Database to a Windows Azure Web Site – A new sample posted on the Windows Azure Developer Center for implementing a secure ASP.NET MVC application.
• Global Render Lab at the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp – An extended explanation of the Global Render Lab made by Alan Smith. The Render Lab was part of the Windows Azure Bootcamp last week.

Windows Phone

• More Dev Center features – we’re listening – Announcement of some improvements to the dev center, f.e. the ability to cancel submission and automatic screenshot resizing.

Other stuff

• 10 things you might have missed about MVVM Light – Do you like MVVM Light? Than you should read this post. There could be something you have missed about MVVM Light.
• Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Now Available – The announcement of update #2 for Visual Studio 2012.
• Json.NET 5.0 Release 1 – Another announcement. Not for a Microsoft product, but for a library most developers are using.

Like you have seen, a lot of announcements in April. Let’s wait and see what will be going on in May.

– Jan (@Horizon_Net)