Dan Rigsby – Coding Up Style

I arrived at the convention center about an hour before registration for Microsoft PDC 2008 opened.  I enjoy the relative solitude before the storm of people come crashing through the doors.  By the thousands, people came through registration and hit the breakfast tables before lining up yet again for a good seat at the first day of keynotes.

At 8:30AM PST, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, took the stage and acknowledged his role as a Microsoft employee and previously a developer and even competitor. Ray made it clear that it is the developers that make this all possible and it is us that need to be thanked for making the event possible.

It is no surprise, this PDC is about the “cloud” and “Software + Services” (S+S).  Computers are being ambiguous.  From cell phones to laptops to PCs, we need a way to seemly move from device to device.  The line between what is and isn’t a PC is blurred.  The “reach and scope our systems” have expanded.

Customers expect a certain level of data from a website, and that expectation list keeps growing.  The website is the “front door” to many companies today.  The website for any organization is becoming one of their most important assets.  Some sites’ traffic shoots up only during the holidays, or the delivering of new products, etc.  This creates a number of scalability concerns.  Moving a site to a redundant scalable web host becomes ever more important. Have a highly scalable website to meet higher demands creates a kind of “overdraft protection for your website”.

How due we efficiently deploy software to various computers around the web?  What about auto updating apps? Ray proposed 3 major tiers of systems

1. User Tier
2. Enterprise Tier
3. Web Tier (the size of the web and a high level of scalability)

Windows Azure

It was great to hear Ray tip his hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s EC2 offering. However, Microsoft is introducing their own cloud service offering: Windows Azure. This is “Windows in the Cloud””.  It is the service based operating system for the emerging cloud. It offers:

1. virtualized  computation
2. shared storage
3. automated service management system and provisioning of a cloud based service

This is not a personal computer based OS, it is housed in Microsoft’s data centers.  it is being released as a CTP starting today (10/27/2008).  5 major components make up the Azure Services Platform:

1. Live services
2. .Net Services
3. SQL Services
4. SharePoint Services
5. Dynamics CRM Services

Windows azure is:

1. Scalable hosting platform
2. rich developer experience
3. Model drive service lifecycle management
4. Enterprise ready and hobbyist friendly
5. Supports both managed and unmanaged code

Services Requirements:

1. Interoperability, Business Processes
2. Identity & Security (federated)
3. Data management and compliance
4. Services Management

.Net Services

1. Service Bus – allows you to connect your local systems to the cloud in a secure way
2. Access Control – federated and unified security across applications both on premise and out in the cloud
3. Workflow Services – workflow that can scale out to 100s of systems out in the clouds

Identity Services (Geneva)

• Users control their own identities
• single federated identity platform
• Open and interoperable
• Claims based access control

SQL Services Components

1. Database
2. Data Sync
3. Reporting
4. Data Mining
5. ETL – used to bring in and cleanse data
6. Reference Data

On-Premises vs. Cloud Services

There is a need for symmetry between things local and in the clouds  On Premises platform that will have “bridging” support at first will be: SQL Server, Biztalk, Office Sharepoint Server, Dynamics Crm, Windows Server, and System Center. These will be able to integrate with the online services we have in the Azure Service platform.  To bridge these we have Visual Studio & .net, “Oslo”, and partners.  Oslo will bring us a new modeling language called “M” and the ability to build Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to worked between the two platforms.

You can download the Oslo SDK here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/default.aspx and start playing with it now!

Automated Service Management

How do you upgrade an application without bringing it down? How do you upgrade a OS without bringing it down?  One of the main architectural differences is known as “Automated Service Management”. Windows Azure separates the apps from the OS such that either can be shutdown without messing up the other.

Model your service

1. Roles and Groups
2. Channels and endpoints
3. Interfaces
4. Configuration Settings

All four of these make up the “model” of our service and together generate a an xml format called “ServiceModel”.  This appears to be an extension to the Wcf “serviceModel” node in app.config files today.

Windows Azure online management console. allows you to configure the servicemodel configuration.  Today this exists as an xml snippet to edit, but Steve Marx promised an editor to be made available sometime in the future for those who don’t like to manually edit xml.

Visual Studio Development

When developing applications for Windows Azure, how do you test and debug? Visual Studio gives you a “cloud on your desktop” which runs on your local machine and mimics the Windows Azure cloud environment on your local OS.  This features all of the services you would see on the cloud and brings them to your desktop.

There will be an SDK available to develop for the Windows Azure.  This SDK appears to have 4 templates that are known at this time.

The first public demo of Windows Azure development was a “hello world” app done by Steve Marx immediately after Ray Ozzie’s announcement.

Cost and Licensing

There will be a lot more announced as we get closer to release, but Ray did note that cost will be based on: application resources consumption and service level agreements.  However, it will be competitive with other offerings in the market.

Microsoft Online Services

Evidently all of Microsoft’s major offerings will be available online.  The first three being announces are:

1. Exchange Online
2. Sharepoint Online
3. Dynamics Crm Online

All of these services can be accessed via web services to “mashup” the data to create new line of business applications. These will line up with the Windows’ Live and Office Live offerings

The first demo of this was a VSTO application that pulled data from Dynamics Crm Online and allowed the user to format this data into a document which could then be published through Sharepoint Online Service seamlessly.

Software + Services brings together the best of on-premise and cloud computing.  There are a number of challenges with this including Federated Identity and Extensibility.

Keynote Demos

Blue Hoo

The first 3rd party demo of Windows Azure was an application called BlueHoo.  This is a silverlight application that uses REST based services to allow people to socially interact with each other and find other user’s who are in close proximity to each other.

Red Prairie