At PDC 2010, we announced the introduction of new diagnostic information in Azure, and remote desktop functionality to make it easier to connect to a running instance for monitoring and troubleshooting. Both will will be generally available later this year.

We look forward to hearing how much these new features improve the remote debugging experience for you.

There are at least three ways to enable e-mail for your Azure applications:

1.Using a custom on-premise Email Forwarder Service.

2. Using Email Server’s Web Services APIs

3.Using a third party SMTP Service

All are described in more depth here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2010/10/08/adoption-program-insights-sending-emails-from-windows-azure-part-1-of-2.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Please help us understand what scenarios (if any) these patterns don’t address for your applications.

At PDC 2010 Microsoft announced the Extra Small Instance, which will be priced at $0.05 per compute hour in order to make the process of development, testing and trial easier. This will make it affordable for developers interested in running smaller applications on the platform. A beta of this role will be available before the end of 2010.

Please let us know if this addresses your needs for a more cost effective Azure offering.