Microsoft announces proprietary developer tools

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Microsoft has announced updates to its developer tools, including preview releases of Visual Studio 11, .Net 4.5 and ASP.Net, plus the Windows Azure SDK version 1.5 for its cloud computing platform.

The announcements rounded off the Microsoft Build conference, The INQUIRER's sister IT news web site V3.co.uk reported.

According to V3, Visual Studio 11 provides an integrated environment to allow developers to flesh out the structure of an application or service, as well as write, test and deploy code, all from one screen.

The Windows developer suite is available from the end of this week as a developer preview download.

Microsoft .Net 4.5 adds features requested by developers, such as support for asynchronous programming in C# and Visual Basic, making it easier to create applications and services. According to Microsoft, it can scale to handle thousands of concurrent network connections.

For Windows Azure, Microsoft announced the Azure SDK version 1.5 and Azure Toolkit for Windows 8. The latter allows developers to build Metro-style applications that use Windows Azure for connectivity and notifications.

According to Microsoft, the Azure cloud platform now supports 'georeplication', which provides replication of customer data between two Microsoft datacentres on the same continent as insurance against failure. µ