Microsoft PDC 09: Day 1
Posted by Dan Rigsby on 17th November 2009
Ray Ozzie
Fashion form and function are changing how we look at PCs, gaming devices, and media PCs. This gives us the ability to look for new innovation on the client. In particular at how cloud computing can bring all of these devices together.
For users…
seamless multi-screen experiencesfor developers and IT…
skills leverage and investment leverage
Microsoft is continuing with the “3 screens and a cloud: Mobile, PC, TV” mantra. All developers need to be thinking about all of these potential devices when developing applications. Ray promises that “IE will be the best browser for Windows”, but it looks like Silverlight will be more and more key for bridging client on each of these devices.
The first 3rd party demo to show off some of the work in the “3 screens” space was given Seesmic. They announced that their Twitter client for Windows rewritten in Silverlight. The difference in this application is that it is more of a platform than other twitter clients out there. There will be an api to write extensions to the client to add new abilities to the client.
Azure Timeline:
October 27th PDC08: Azure is announced
November 17th 2009 PDC09: New Azure announcements and features
Jan 1st 2009: Azure moves into production
February 1st 2009: Azure is open for billing
Some of the new Azure features will include:
- REST based service management APIs
- Multiple sizes of VMs
- Now support any kind of windows code including Java, Tomcat, MySql, Apache, Php, etc
- Now support for any number of roles
- Entity group transactions
- Custom blob domain names
- XDrive: mountable durable virtual volumes
Wordpress Demo:
Automatic, the developer of Wordpress, will be one of the first OEMs to go public with Azure. If you didn’t know, Wordpress is all about php, apache, and MySql. The thought of having all of this running one Azure a year ago was probably unthinkable. However, it really shows how serious Microsoft really is about embracing the non-Microsoft world and helping to include them in their vision.
“I can has cheezeburger” and their sister sites like “FailBlog” run on Wordpress and were eager to show off how Azure under Wordpress could help handle their spikes in traffic. Starting today, November 17th, They are launching OddlySpecific.com which will run on Azure.
Microsoft Pinpoint:
A unificed catagoy of services and businesses to help you grow your business. This will be integrated into Windows Azure and give developers the ability to leverage services against other items on the web. This seems a lot like other Marketplace applications out there, but the idea is to bring a community around extending services the use inside of Azure.
Codename “Dallas”:
An open catalog for and marketplace for data. Its a unified location for accessing all of the data that might be fore sale like customer data, user data, metrics, etc. These vendors of data exist today, but bringing them under a single marketplace allows users to discover data that they may not have known was available.
The Dallas marketplace seems to be running on DataServices and will give you the ability to download proxies for accessing the data. The beauty of this is that it might be easy to find free data by doing some simple web searches, but finding the “for pay” data can be hard. There are many realms of applications that can be built by bridging this data. I immediately think of “Mashups”, but it will be interesting to see what can be developed and what kind of free data will be out there for developers to play with.
NASA Pathfinder Challenge:
The Pathfinder Challenge being put by the US government, users can work with the Mars data and use it to make interesting applications. The website is http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/welcome. I like that the government is working towards service delivering instead of building all of the infrastructure themselves. Seems like a better use of tax payer money. Let the community do the work for you. NASA doesn’t always have the best ideas, and its nice to see this data being delivered to the masses. www.data.gov will bring even more data over time which will hopefully extend much beyond the Mars data.
Bob Muglia
Bing runs across over 100,000 pcs worldwide. It does this through an infrastructure called “Auto Pilot” which allows a few administrators to manage all of these machines. This was a great prototype, but wasn’t something could be easily brought to Windows Server. However, Azure changes all of this and these techniques can be brought to the masses.
History of the server platform:
1970s: Mainframe
1980s: Client / Server
1990s: Web
2000s: SOA
2010s: Cloud
The Cloud brings us us the “Cloud Application Model” through: multi-tenancy, staged production, elasticity, federation, always available, scale out, service orientation, and model driven design.
Connectivity in Azure can be done with Data Services, the Service Bus, Access Control Services, and a new low level tool called “Project Sydney” which gives you the ability to connect your existing internal services with services running on SQL Azure through a tool called teh “Project Sydney” Connectivity Agent.
Next year, you will be able to create your own Windows Azure virtual machine images and mount them such that you can access them via remote desktop and control your environment. Theses virtual machines can then be easily deployed back up to the cloud.
AppFabric was announced which looks to be the official name of “Dublin”. It will give us caching, workflow hosting, monitoring, service bus, service hosting, access control, etc. This will run on both Windows Server and Azure.
We knew that “Oslo” would have a couple of name changes at PDC this year. The “Repository” has been renamed to “SQL Server Modeling Services” and will be a storage mechanism for these models just as the original vision of the “Repository” was working to accomplish. I will be curious if this includes all of “Oslo” or if at least the DSL tools or other pieces will be made to not be so SQL Server specific.
Demos:
Don Box and Chris Anderson jumped in and gave a demo of some of the Azure changes since PDC08 including SQL Azure, OData, and OAuthWRAP.
Another 3rd Party demo was done by Kelley Blue Book showing off how they are making use of Azure and SQL Azure Data Sync. At the end of the data, Kelley Blue Book is a data provider. They have a interesting Silverlight web application today, but getting their data out there in a scalable format will really help them grow.
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