Yesterday evening I was working on a small Windows Azure project. One web role and one worker role with blob storage and a queue. I deployed the app yesterday using the ‘old’ management portal. This evening I had to choose: do you want to continue using the old portal or do you want to use the new and improved Silverlight management portal. That’s an easy choice to make.

At first looks it’s pretty complete. The home page offers some links to help pages in case you don’t know where to find your services. On the left you have a menu and the top contains a ribbon bar.

I’m not really into reading tutorials so the menu item ‘Hosted Service…’ seems the next logical step. It brings you to a window with some new menu options and the top-level one is ‘Deployment Health’. I’m not really a power user but it seems my single deployment is healthy, lucky me!

What’s also cool and what you see in every window is a timer that tells you when the data on the current window will be refreshed. In this case it’s 4 seconds until the next refresh.

As you can see I have one hosted service and one storage account. Selecting my hosted services brings you to the next window that shows my Azure subscription containing one hosted service.

There’s a wealth of information here. The properties pane on the right shows you relevant information for the selected node. You can select additional columns with information like ‘Environment’, ‘Subscription ID’ and others. When you select the ‘Storage Accounts’ menu item you can see the endpoint urls for your blob, table and queue storage and you get easy access to your primary and secondary access keys for accessing your storage.

Although I’m using just a tiny amount of the functionality offered by Windows Azure it seems that this new Silverlight portal is a huge improvement over the previous web-based one. First of all it gives the impression that it’s really fast. Second there’s a lot more information readily available. In the web-based portal this information was usually one or two clicks further away.

Until now I found one thing missing in the new portal and that’s the billing information. I’m not sure they should incorporate this into the Silverlight application but there should at least be a link to the Microsoft Online Services Customer Portal.

As you may have noticed in the screenshot, there’s a menu item in the bottom left corner called ‘Virtual Network’. This is actually the feature I told you about in a previous post that allows you to connect to on-premises machines from Windows Azure services. Unfortunately the beta program hasn’t started yet or my subscription for the Azure Connect has failed so I can give you no more details on that.

Maybe next time more on Windows Azure itself or on one of the new beta features (Extra Small VMs, Windows Azure Connect and VM Role).