Toolkits, toolkits, and more toolkits

July 25, 2011 (Last Modified: July 25, 2011)

I know I missed the original announcement of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games on the 20th, but I wanted to post a little about it and a few other resources.

Want to write a game?

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games includes some accelerators, code libraries and deployment tools to help you write some social based games. There is even some guidance on how to make some money on the games you write. You can read the full blog post intro from the Windows Azure team on their blog. If you want to get an idea of the types of games you can create with this try checking out Tankster. The whole goal of this toolkit is to get you started building these social games by giving you a “leg up”.

More interested in Windows Phone 7 apps?

Wade Wegner released the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 several months ago. If you are interested in getting a jump start with project templates and some code optimized for the phone check out this toolkit. This toolkit inspired several folks from the community to create additional quick start kits for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure. You can several quickstart templates at the Windows Phone 7 Azure Quickstarts project on codeplex.

More of a web developer?

Microsoft has also recently released the Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles. This accelerator is geared to help provide a mechanism that will use web deploy to push your web site code changes out to your Windows Azure web roles without the necessity to do a deployment. The templates provided pull the web code from storage and thus, new instances and healing instances always get the latest version of your application. Really good stuff.

So what are you going to do with all these resources?

If you are using these toolkits, or have feedback about them, please join in the discussion online. A thread has been started to let you share your creations using these toolkits on the MSDN Forums. Join in, give feedback and have fun.

Update:

I completely forgot the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS.