Microsoft has made publically available the Azure Resource Manager Tools Preview for Visual Studio.
At Build 2014 Microsoft announced the new Azure Portal and Azure Resource Manager. The Azure Resource Manager enables the ability to create reusable deployment templates that declaratively describe the resources that make up an application (for example a website and a SQL database).
This simplifies the process of creating complex environments for development, testing, and production in a repeatable manner. And it provides a unified way to manage and monitor the resources that make up an application from the Azure preview portal.
With the Azure Resource Manager Tools Preview developers will be able to create an application using the Azure Gallery Templates and define and manage Azure resources using JSON templates. This makes it easier to setup the environment needed to Dev/Test an application in Azure. Two key features include the Visual Studio integration with the Azure Gallery and the ability to create and edit Azure Resource Manager deployment templates.
The Azure Resource Manager Tools preview provides the ability to:
- Create an application using the Azure Gallery templates
- Create and edit Azure Resource Manager deployment templates (for example a Web site with a database) and parameter files (for example different settings for development, staging, and production)
- Create resource groups and deploy templates into these to simplify the creation of resources