AppFabric Service Bus on NuGet and CodePlex

Today, the Service Bus team is happy to announce a couple of initiatives to make it even easier to get started learning and using the Service Bus: the AppFabric Service Bus NuGet Package and the Service Bus Samples CodePlex Site. Both our Samples and SDK are still available as a download from MSDN, but we're hopeful that these new choices might be simpler and more convenient.

Service Bus on NuGet

NuGet is an open source package manager for .Net which is integrated into Visual Studio and makes it simple to install and update libraries. While traditionally you would need to download an install an SDK before using it within your projects, NuGet adds a new 'Add Library Package Reference' option to Visual Studio which downloads, configures and updates the references you select automatically. The Service Bus NuGet Package contains two DLL files and configuration information needed to use the AppFabric May CTP - you can use this package instead of needing to download and install the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK v2.0 CTP May 2011 Update. Give it a try and let us know what you think in the AppFabric CTP Forums.

Service Bus Samples on CodePlex

We're also excited today to offer you a new way to find and browse our library of sample code at our new CodePlex site. We'll be using the CodePlex site to help get more samples, tools and utilities out into your hands early and often. You can Browse the Source Code online or Download a copy if you prefer. Our CodePlex site licenses sample code to you under the open Apache 2.0 License - we're hopeful that makes it easier to re-use, re-distribute and share our sample code and tools. We'll be adding more code to the site regularly and would love to hear your feedback on the things you'd like to see us share.

As always, we're constantly hoping to hear from you about how we're doing - are CodePlex and NuGet useful delivery vehicles for you, or do you prefer to download and install the SDK and Samples? Please let us know on the forums!