Rackspace Hosting on Wednesday announced the Rackspace Cloud Plug-In for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, a Visual Studio toolkit that enables the 6 million .NET developers worldwide to seamlessly extend development and deployment to Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows. This unique set of tools allows developers to deploy applications written with Visual Studio tools directly to Rackspace's cloud infrastructure. The toolkit significantly reduces deployment and provisioning time and provides users with a single cloud management portal.

With this new Rackspace Cloud Plug-In for Visual Studio 2010, developers will be fully aware of everything going on with their cloud server instances when they are developing or deploying an application, thus reducing overall complexity and errors by providing a layer of automation not possible without integration. The toolkit provides a new level of abstraction, making it easier and faster than ever for .NET developers to create and deploy applications to Cloud Servers for Windows. Additional application programming interface (API) features of the Rackspace Cloud Plug-In for Visual Studio 2010 include the ability to:

• Launch, reboot and fully control all servers
• Rebuild servers from images and create custom images
• Schedule application backups
• Upsize and scale server configurations as needed
• Manage and share IP addresses

Available through a single-download to Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows users, the Rackspace Cloud Plug-In for Visual Studio 2010 provides .NET developers with a variety of templates and plug-ins that effectively make the developer platform a one-stop-shop for total cloud deployment and management. Built by Neudesic, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, the toolkit for Visual Studio 2010 is designed to eliminate the need for managing separate cloud and application environments by providing developers a full view of their environment.

To download the Rackspace Cloud Plug-In for Visual Studio 2010, users need only to establish a Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows account and then follow the steps to download the kit. Cloud Servers for Windows delivers a highly scalable environment ideal for Windows-based hosting, testing and developing of applications, and for supporting the high levels of traffic required for launching online gaming platforms or the next social networking phenomenon. For more information on Cloud Servers for Windows and the new Rackspace Cloud Plug-In for Visual Studio 2010, please visit: http://bit.ly/c7o42C.