As Ray Ozzie was announcing yesterday during the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 in Los Angeles, Windows Azure and all its related technologies will evolve in the coming months, but you can start previewing all these technologies creating applications directly from Visual Studio 2008.

With Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft is making easier for developers to build, debug, test and deploy application for the Azure cloud platform. These tools include a local cloud environment that runs inside the developer machine.

You can download it here

.NET Services for Ruby is an open source software development kit (SDK) that helps Ruby programs communicate with Microsoft .NET Services using plain HTTP. Specifically the SDK includes set of REST libraries, tools, prescriptive patterns & guidance & sample applications that will enhance productivity for Ruby developers. Developers will be able to leverage the .NET Services to extend their Ruby applications by using the Microsoft cloud services platform to build, deploy and manage reliable, Internet-scale applications.

You can find more info here: http://www.dotnetservicesruby.com/

The Ruby SDK for .NET Services includes a set of libraries, tools, prescriptive guidance & sample applications that will enhance productivity for Ruby developers willing to use the .NET Services to extend their Ruby applications by using the Microsoft cloud services platform to build, deploy and manage reliable, Internet-scale applications.

This releases reaches Milestone 1 (Alpha Build) with the following features:

• Access Control Service
• Volatile Message Buffer (interactions)
• Authentication
• Web-style-HttpRelayBinding
• Interactive Credentials
• Notification Service
• ServiceBus Environment Settings

You can find more documentation in Ruby style here: http://www.dotnetservicesruby.com/documentation/