More PDC Announcements: Azure Turning On, Azure AppFabric, and Dallas

On the cloud side there were also a variety of announcements coming from PDC as to future products and plans. Here's a few of them.

The .Net Services offerings I've talked about several times in the past, currently the service bus and access control services, is the start of a set of web-based developer services that simplify connecting and integrating applications through the cloud. The collection of services is being called Windows Azure platform AppFabric. Note the similar naming to Windows Server AppFabric that I wrote about yesterday.

Dallas is a newly announced service for discovering and subscribing to online data and image sources. The Dallas service gives publishers a unified way of provisioning and billing subscriptions while giving developers a consistent set of APIs for accessing the subscribed data.

Finally, the transition plans for the Azure platform itself have been announced to switch from being a preview service to a production service. Azure officially turns on at the beginning of 2010 while billing for the service starts the following month.