Microsoft has also released a series of significant enhancements to Windows Azure

This morning we released a series of significant enhancements to Windows Http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13357.html ">azure." New features released today include:

These new improvements are now ready to use (note that some features are just a preview version). The following are detailed information about these improvements:

Web site: Support for temporary release

With today's updates, you can enable the temporary publishing feature on your Windows Azure Web site. This new feature is really powerful and you can use it to deploy updates of your Web application/website to a temporary version of your site, and you can access it using a different URL than your main site. You can also use this temporary site to test your site/application deployment, and when everything is ready, the temporary version and the online site will exchange content and configuration instantly.

This new feature allows you to deploy your updates more confidently. It also ensures that your site will never be in an inconsistent state (where some files have been updated and others are not)-now you can swap all updates for all files at once.

Enable support for temporary publishing

You can set up a temporary publication in the dashboard Options section of your Web site and click Enable Temporary publishing in the Quick scan:

Clicking on the link shown in the figure will create a temporary version of the new site and connect to the existing site. This link will be displayed in the navigation of the Windows Azure Management Portal-the temporary site will appear as a child node of the primary site:

If you look carefully at the name of this temporary site, you will find that its URL is named-staging (for example, if the name of the main site is "ScottGu", the name of the temporary site is "scottgu-staging"):

You can choose any custom DNS name you want to map to a staging site (either C-name or A-record)-just like a normal web site. So your temporary domain does not need to have a azurewebsite.net extension. In the above scene I can remap the temporary domain to staging.scottgu.com, or scottgu-staging.com, if I want to even be foobar.scottgu.com.

Temporary URLs do not change between deployments of a site-so you can configure one custom DNS at a time, and then you can use them on all subsequent deployments. You can also choose to enable SSL in the staging site, or you can upload an SSL certificate to use in a temporary domain (make sure you can fully test/verify your SSL scenario before synchronizing to the online version).

Configuring temporary Sites

You can manage a temporary site by clicking on a temporary site as you would any other site:

The other tabs work correctly in the staging site except for the sizing option and the linked resource option being disabled. You can use the Configuration tab to set configuration settings, such as databases, application connection strings, and so on (if you set up this information at the site level, they will overwrite all your information in the Web.config file).

Another thing you need to be aware of is that when you open a temporary site, a new switch button appears in the command bar at the bottom of the temporary site-we'll discuss how to use it later.