This week Microsoft released several updates and enhancements to the Windows Azure AppFabric Management Portal and the Access Control service.
An overview:
- Management Portal
- Localization: the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal now supports the following extra languages: Japanese, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese.
- Co-admin support: Co-administrators have finally access to the AppFabric section of the portal.
- Context Menus:the Portal now supports right click menus in the “Hosted Services, Storage & CDN” pane.
- Performance Improvements: Users can expect to see significantly lower initial load times with the addition of a local temporary cache and the optimization of network bandwidth consumption.
- Enhanced Delete Deployment: Developers can now delete running deployments. In earlier versions, developers had to wait for a deployment to stop before it could be deleted.
- Access Control
- Claim rules: The ACS 2.0 rules engine now supports a new type of rule that allows up to two input claims to be configured, instead of only one input claim. Rules with two input claims can be used to reduce the overall number of rules required to perform complex user authorization functions.
- Encoding is now UTF-8 for all OAuth 2.0 responses
- Quotas Removed: The previous quotas on configuration data have been removed. This includes removal of all limitations on the number of identity providers, relying party applications, rule groups, rules, service identities, claim types, delegation records, issuers, keys, and addresses that can be created in a given ACS namespace.
More information:
- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/archive/2011/07/25/new-in-acs-portal-in-multiple-languages-a-new-rule-type-and-wave-bye-bye-to-quotas.aspx
- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/07/18/windows-azure-platform-management-portal-updates-now-available.aspx
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg429787.aspx