Saturday, March 28, 2009

Azure Storage Explorer 2.0 Now Available

I'm pleased to announce the availability of Azure Storage Explorer version 2.0. binaries and source code are downloadable from CodePlex.

Azure Storage Explorer is a useful GUI tool for inspecting the data in your Azure cloud storage projects including the logs of your cloud-hosted applications. All three types of cloud storage can be viewed: blobs, queues, and tables.

What's New?
Improvements over the original version include the following:

1. New WPF-based UI with Outlook-style navigation and more polish.

2. Support for multiple storage projects, and the ability to configure projects directly in the tool instead of forcing you to edit the configuration file.

3. Ability to view pictures in blob storage as images.

Viewing Blob Containers and Items
You can see what your blob containers are, the items in each container, and view the contents of individual blob items.




Blob items can be viewed as text, bytes, or images.






Viewing Queues and Messages
You can see what your queues are, list up to 32 peeked messages from each queue, and view the contents of individual queue messages. Queue messages can be viewed as text or bytes.




Viewing Tables and Entities
You can see what your tables are, list the entities in each table, and view the contents of an individual entity as text, bytes, or entity properties.



View Your Application Logs
Since Azure hosted application logs are copied to cloud storage, Azure Storage Explorer is a convenient way to view your logs.



Work with Multiple Accounts
You can work with up to 10 storage projects in Azure Storage Explorer, including your local developer storage. Endpoints, account names, and keys can be specified in the tool's configuration file or you can configure them directly in the tool as shown below (administrator privileges are needed to save changes).



Limitations and Future Plans
Azure Storage Explorer 2.0 does not presently allow you to act on storage items or import/export data to and from cloud storage. These capabilities are being considered for the future.

A Community Donation from Neudesic
Azure Storage Explorer is a community donation by Neudesic, a Microsoft Gold Partner and National Systems Integrator.http://www.neudesic.com

5 comments:

Shawn Cicoria said...

Nice tool David...

Unknown said...

Hi

Thanks for this tool, is really useful.

I miss a couple of features from V1 though.

The ability to delete queues was really useful.

I tried to download the code using SVN but I couldn't.

Thanks again, keep up the good work

David Pallmann said...

Hi Will. We'll be making add/change/delete available in a subsequent 2.x release, we wanted to do all three at the same time. The source code is available as a zip file on the downloads page, we aren't making use of the source control in CodePlex.

Unknown said...

I have problems with Azure Storage Explorer 2.0. I don't know what things I have to change of app.config.

When I choose the storage account there is an error. If the storage account is in local I can see the storage but if it is on cloud I can't.

Could yoy help me? Thanks in advance!

David Pallmann said...

Hi Sergio. If you'll email me your configuration file I'll be happy to take a look for you. Send email to dpallmann at hotmail.com. Slightly change your storage key values please so you're not sharing sensitive information.