Martin has been trying to keep up with Microsoft's new developer-oriented releases, and having a tough time of it. He's made some progress with Windows Azure, and started to look at the jQuery IntelliSense support for VS 2008 and the new Chart controls. Over the last week or two I have been trying to keep up with all the new Microsoft releases of interest for developers in my alleged spare time. The operative word here is “trying.”I don’t think I’d know where to start without the helpful blog postings by Scott Guthrie and Brad Abrams. Thanks, guys!One of my problems is that I didn’t go to the PDC. I was invited, but it didn’t work out. The good news about that is that I got billable work done for my clients that week; in these trying economic times, paying the bills is important. The bad news is that I’m having to figure out Windows 7 and Windows Azure at something of a disadvantage, since I wasn’t there to hear the talks, do the labs, and bring home the DVDs and other media.I’ve managed to make progress with Windows Azure by going through the normal signup process for what’s easily available, and asking for a little help from Microsoft’s PR firm to get on the most restricted beta, the Windows Live Services CTP. I have to say, the need for three different tokens to activate all the services confused me no end, but now that I have them all I think that I can make progress. I’ve already installed all the necessary SDKs and tools, built some samples and test applications of my own, and run them locally.Today I finally have collected and redeemed enough tokens (which sounds like I’ve been eating cereal for them, but I can’t help that) that I can actually deploy what I’ve built in the Azure “cloud.” This first image is my “Getting Started” screen for the part of the Azure Services Platform that contains .NET Services and SQL Services.Oddly, that’s on a different server from the Azure Services Developer Portal, which contains Windows Azure storage accounts and hosted services, as well as Windows Live Services. This is in the second screen shot. To deploy something simple, I’ll have to use my Hosted Services project. For more complex applications and services, I’ll have to use the other projects as well as my existing solution. There’s a lot of mash-up to do to tie them together, but none of it looks too hard.I wish I knew what these services were going to cost. The beta is free, but I have no idea how the production cost and performance will stack up against other Cloud Computing platforms. My first service is basically a cloud version of “Hello, InfoWorld!” That’s so trivial that I won’t even post a screen shot. I’ll have more to say when I’ve explored Azure in some depth and built some meaningful applications and services for myself.I’ve downloaded and installed the jQuery IntelliSense support for VS 2008 and the new Chart controls, both well described by Scott Guthrie in his blog. The installations were straightforward, but broken into multiple steps instead of chained together, which I find a bit annoying. Again, I’ll have more to say when I’ve used them myself for real Web pages and Windows Forms. Software Development