Rackspace is extending their cloud computing and storage reach by offering a Visual Studio 2010 plug-in specifically developed for their service. With it, developers will be able to seamlessly and painlessly integrate cloud services deployed by Rackspace into their applications. From the press release,

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.

Visual Studio 2010 is a well trod development platform for Microsoft products and Rackspace Hosting is an extremely popular hosting and cloud computing specialist. Tying together these two industries will have broad reaching, but beneficial, implications for them both.

Cloud computing and storage has become a mainstay of social networking and social gaming, especially for mobile devices do to its ease of use. Offloading heavy computation and storage from the device itself—in the case of thin clients designed to run on low powered machines—and thus putting more power in the hands of both developers and consumers. This plug-in will position Rackspace to be a place where Microsoft developers may go first to produce their apps due to the ready access to the API and quicker development cycle.

“This is going to be a boon to usage of Rackspace’s cloud usage,” says SiliconANGLE’s Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins on the subject. “The Microsoft developer community is wide reaching, and other than just the desktop and server environments, includes also the XBox 360 developers as well as the developers for the up and coming Windows Mobile 7 release. Depending on the new WinMo offering’s popularity, Rackspace could see some significant growth thanks to built in support.”

Also from the press release, here’s a small list of useful capabilities the plug-in will deploy for developers,

• 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

For product details and information on how to download this plug-in and its embedded API, please visit its product page on RackSpace Cloud.