New Windows Azure Features: Mobile services + Web +hdinsight

Today we've released some very powerful enhancements to the windowsazure. These new features include:

• Mobile services: Html5/js (CORS) user + PhoneGap + Windows Phone 7.5 +. NET Portable Library Support

• Site: Mercurial source Control + Dropbox deployment support

hdinsight: Enables you to easily deploy and manage new services for the Hadoop cluster on azure

All of these improvements are now ready for immediate use (note: Some services are still in the preview state). The following are more detailed information:

Mobile Services: HTML5/JS Client (CORS), PhoneGap, Windows Phone 7.5

Now we have added support for pure HTML5/JS users (and PhoneGap applications) and Windows Phone 7.5 users to enable them to use Windows Azure Mobile service as a background. It will be added to the new Android SDK for Windows Azure Mobile Services we released two weeks ago (as well as the Windows8,windows Phone8 and iOS support released earlier).

HTML5/JS Client

Now you can connect HTML5 Web client applications and Apache CORDOVA/PHONEGAP applications to your mobile services and use Windows Azure data storage and validation. They are implemented by providing the following features:

• New mobile Service Web client libraries, support ie8+ browsers, current versions of Chrome,firefox and Safari browsers, and PhoneGap 2.3.0+. It provides the same data query and storage API support as we do in other local software development kits (SDK), enabling users to authenticate to these four vendors through mobile service support: Microsoft customers, Google, Facebook and Twitter.

• Cross-domain resource sharing (CORS) support to enable your mobile service to accept Cross-domain Ajax requests. You can now use the Windows Azure Management portal to set up a white list of allowed geographies for your mobile service.

First, create a mobile service in the Windows Azure Management portal and open the Quick Launch tab. You can now select HTML to find a new html5/js or connect to an existing HTML:

You can then proceed to the remaining steps of this tutorial and create a simple HTML5 to-do list application (running completely in the browser) within 5 minutes.

When HTML5 front-end applications are deployed to a production environment, be sure to add the site host name you use to the cross-domain resource sharing (CORS) whitelist to Windows Azure Mobile services, using the Configuration tab, as shown in the following illustration:

Visit Windows Azure's Mobile Development Center, read this tutorial to learn more about server-side data, or click here for more information about user authentication.