This is the first part of the blog series of introducing some of the exciting new features of Windows Azure SDK 2.0. In this series I’ll take you on a tour of new Windows Azure SDK 2.0 features and experience them firsthand. You can find the SDK 2.0 announcement here. You can acquire SDK 2.0 through Web PI, or you can download it Windows Azure .NET Developer Center.

Server Explorer Improvements

In the past releases, Windows Azure SDK has been steadily supplementing Visual Studio Server Explorer with more and more productivity features. These features put the ability of provisioning and managing cloud resources at the fingertips of developers. Developers don’t have to leave Visual Studio if they found they needed to get some cloud resources provisioned, or to get connection information to a resource. And they can use data manipulation capabilities to quickly test their code while programming. Here are some new features that got added with Windows Azure SDK 2.0.

Table Storage Tooling Improvements

  • Now you can directly create new storage Tables within Server Explorer:
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  • Now Table explorer provides complete CRUD support of table entities. The following screenshot shows the Add Entity window, which is quite self-explanatory:
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  • There’s even a nice Query Builder that allows you to build up table queries without needing to understand Data Service Queries:
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Cloud Service Diagnostics

Throughout the SDK versions Cloud Service diagnostics has been becoming easier and easier. Now with the improved Server Explorer, you can view diagnostics data and modify diagnostics settings direct within Visual Studio. If you had used diagnostics.wadcfg, or had tried to configure performance counters in code, you’d be delighted to find out the rich editing features provided by diagnostics settings dialog.

  • View diagnostics data in a combined view in Visual Studio. Now you can request diagnostics logs at any time from Visual Studio and view them in an intuitive, combined view:
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  • In the combined summary view, you can view Windows Azure application logs, Event logs, Windows Azure infrastructure logs, as well as contents in Windows Azure log directories at the same time. This view allows you to view all log sources at the same time so that you can easily discover correlations of these entries from different sources. This is  definitely a very powerful tool to enable more efficient troubleshooting processes. The following screenshots shows the testing diagnostics data one of my test applications generates:
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  • You can remotely change diagnostics settings from Visual Studio using diagnostics configuration dialog. For instance, you can change data transfer schedules and filters, and you can modify what performance counters to be collected.
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  1. Haishi, when I right click on the Web Role node in Server Explorer, I don't get the "View Diagnostics Data" option. Any idea as to why?!

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    1. If the menu is disabled this could because diagnostics is not enabled on the service; if the menu is not visible at all probably you are still using older version of tools.

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When we learn classic compute algorithms, we don't start with learning how a computer is built. We don't start with how a transistor works or how to build integrated circuits. Instead, we go straight with the abstraction - bits, commands, programs and such. I think we should take the same approach when we learn quantum computing. Instead of trying to understand the bizarre quantum world, we should take some quantum behaviors granted and go straight with higher-level abstracts such as qubits and quantum gates. And once we grasp these basic concepts, we should go even a level higher to use a high-level language like Q# and focus on how quantum algorithms work, and how we can apply quantum algorithms on practical problems.

Bono is an open source quantum algorithm visualizer I'm building in the open. This project is inspired by a few existing systems such as Quirk, IBM Q Experience, and the Programming Quantum Computers book. Bono is a Javascript-based visualizer that features:

  • Drag-and-drop quantum circuit editing.
  • Dynamic circuit evaluation.
  • Works offline in a browser. No server is needed.
  •  Generates Q# code.
I've also created a YouTube channel dedicated to quantum algorithms. My goal is to create an easily digestable course for regular software developers to learn about quantum computing without needing to understand any underlying quantum physics. 

Bono is at its infancy. And I'm still a new student in the quantum world. I intentionally develop both Bono and the video series in the open. I hope the early results can inspire collaborations so that we can explore the quantum computing world together.

Last but not least, you can find more Q# related contents at the Q# Advent Calendar 2019.
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