PDC2009 @ LA – Day 1 Coverage – Keynotes and Announcements Summary
Microsoft kicked off Professional Developer Conference (PDC) 2009 with a keynote by Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia.
· Ray started with the theme for "Three Screens and a Cloud”, with focus on the back end today.
· Expect news on client software (Silverlight and IE) to be covered tomorrow i.e. Nov-18, 2009.
You can visit https://microsoftpdc.com for continuing coverage from the Channel 9 team as well as for Day 2 Keynote featuring Scott Guthrie.
· Starting from 10:30AM PST each day the Channel 9 team will interview conference presenters, technical leaders, industry luminaries, partners and the Channel 9 community. If you or your customers are unable to attend PDC09 in person, please tune in to the live smooth-streaming broadcast (powered by IIS7 and Silverlight) by visiting https://microsoftpdc.com.
Lots of big news and interesting announcements but the big word is “Azure” and "Fabric". First of all, the idea of a fabric for running distributed applications is not new, but its applicability to better explaining the vision of running apps on premises and off premises using a consistent framework is new and is a good step forward. Here are the highlights of the morning's key announcements for Day 1 (Nov 17, 2009), with links to more information in several areas.
· Windows Azure - Microsoft's Cloud Computing platform was officially launched. It will be available for production use beginning January 1, 2010.
· Microsoft Pinpoint - A new online marketplace for Microsoft partners to offer applications.
· Microsoft Codename “Dallas” - A place where developers can find and license commercial and public data from the cloud.
· Windows Server AppFabric - A set of application server technologies including formerly code-named "Dublin" and “Velocity”. These features will simplify and enhance the use of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
· ASP.NET MVC 2 - The first beta release of MVC v2 was announced and made available to developers. – Download from https://asp.net/mvc.
The following are the details:
Windows Azure
· Windows Azure Launch Date: Windows Azure will officially launch 01/01/10 (January 1, 2010) and, as a little sweetener for New Year, the 1st month will be free.
- Nov 17 2009 - Feature complete
- Jan 1, 2010 - Production
- Feb 1, 2010 - Customer billing begins
· Features that go live today:
- Single Sign-on
- Project templates out-of-box in Visual Studio 2010
- Multiple sizes of VMs
- FastCGI (Enabling extremely flexible binding with Zend Framework, MySQL, Java, php, eclipse)
· Entity Group Transactions added to Azure tables, integrated content delivery network
· Support for pushing popular downloads to the edge.
· XDrive - Azure Storage blobs that are mountable as NTFS drives
Landing Site: https://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
SQL Azure
· A true database as a service, simply create a new database when you need a new one (don’t need to think about memory, disaster recovery, etc. It is all automatic)
· Support for ADO.NET, ODBC, JDBC
· Cloud-based authentication service for cloud-leveraged database in SQL Azure, through SQL Server Management Studio.
Landing Site: https://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/developers/sqlazure/
Customers that Go Live today!
Select customers are taken into production starting today, some are
· WordPress running on Azure - Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress (parent company Automatic), shares the story with MySQL and Apache on Windows Azure.
· Kelly Blue Book, running on Azure - Kelley Blue Book demonstrates a Silverlight app for an online car finder. Needs a second data center for failover, "only using it a couple of hours per week," and the cloud model provides a cost-effective, flexible solution.
· OddlySpecific.com (team from https://www.ICanHazCheeseburger.com), launching today; running on SQL Azure and Windows Azure. When it gets popular, Azure specifications can be modified instantaneously.
Microsoft Project Sydney
Announced today Microsoft Project Sydney will enable you to connect existing in-house/on-premise services with those running in the cloud on Azure-based instances. It also allows you to connect direct to on-premise SQL Server from cloud roles. The goal is to make Azure an integral part of corporate/IT environments.
Microsoft Pinpoint
Announcing Microsoft Pinpoint, integrated into Azure Developer Portal, Microsoft Partner Network, in the midst of integrating into Microsoft Portal for IT. The idea here being a sharing of customers searching for services, and searches searching for customers.
"It's difficult for me to overstate the importance of common catalogs...a place where anyone can see some stunning network effects for the things found to be most popular to the community. Online catalogs aren't just about apps, they can be places to discover the most popular and useful data." – Ray Ozzie
Landing Site: https://www.pinpoint.com/en-US/
Microsoft Project Dallas
A CTP of a "game-changing new subsystem" code-named Dallas, an open catalog and marketplace for commercial and public data, with a uniform discovery mechanism, binding mechanism, a uniform licensing model for easy joining and recombining.
"By delivering data as a service, our aspirations are that Dallas could catalyze a whole new wave of experimentation by developers."
It serves as an “information and brokerage service” designed to allow access to commercial and reference data from various entities. The following are among the data providers in the early going:
· Associated Press
· NASA
· National Geographic
· UN
The aim is to create Data As A Service (DAAS) and let data become a commodity that catalyzes a whole new way of remixing and presenting data. There was a public data demonstration from NASA that included 3D images of landscapes taken by the Mars Rovers. Everyone used 3D glasses during the demo.
Dallas data feeds will be discovered through Pinpoint. For example, infoUSA has interesting data about businesses, some of it shows reviews by users.
Key benefits includes:
· Taking the friction out of discovering, exploring and using data
· Subscriptions to data consumption
· Explore the dataset, REST-based data consumption
· Import into Excel through PowerPivot
· OpenData protocol (ADO.NET Data Services = Open Data); Build a service proxy from Dallas
· Apps and innovation around public data
· Eliminate inconsistency in data formats (CSV, XML, etc.); - “Dallas” brings consistency to the data format
Landing Site: https://www.pinpoint.com/en-US/Dallas
Windows Server AppFabric
Announced the release of a new application server called Windows Server AppFabric that goes into Beta 1 today. It is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier to build, scale and manage web and composite applications that run on IIS. It has 3 main parts:
· Caching
· Workflow Management
· Service Management
Muglia announced it as a "platform for building scale-out, high-tier services" enabling developers to concentrate on core functionality, fielding out the failover part of the operation to Microsoft. Database cache is kept entirely in the cloud.
· a set of integrated, high-level application services that enable developers to more easily deploy and manage applications spanning both server and cloud
· a platform for building scale-out middle-tier services such as WCF, WF, database cache, automatic failover and scale-out
· underlying technologies include “Dublin” for hosting and “Velocity” for caching – the combination provides “high-speed access, scale, and high availability to application data”.
· .NET Services is now referred as “AppFabric Service Bus” and “AppFabric Access Control”
You can see more info and some AppFabric samples here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windowsserver/ee695849.aspx
Tailspin Demo
This morning, in Bob Muglia’s keynote at the PDC, Cameron Skinner presented a demo focused on some of the most exciting new features coming in Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4, and the server platform. The demo was built to align with the following release announcements: ASP.NET MVC 2 beta, Windows Identity Foundation RTM, and the beta of the new Windows Server AppFabric.
Do check it out, it is a great way of familiarizing with the new features in VS2010 and our new server wave! You can now download the Tailspin Travel application from Codeplex.
https://tailspintravel.codeplex.com
Miscellaneous Topics
Vivek Kundra speaks live from Washington
Vivek Kundra, speaks live from Washington. He invited attendees to look at https://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov to see the public data collected by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory -- also over 100,000 data sets from the EPA on toxic waste.
Vivek Kundra also demonstrated the Azure-based mobile job finder application this morning running on an iPhone. It enables job seekers to use full data center contents from Microsoft's back end, to find jobs sorted by category, and also by seekers' personal GPS locations. "Data applications for the good of the republic," says Kundra.
C++ and Azure
Developer crowd favorite Don Box demonstrated low-level programming techniques (including assembler macros) that leverage Azure services. C++ demonstration (not C#) to show how standardized this can be.
Seesmic.com
Loic LeMeur, Founder & CEO of Seesmic, took the stage. He demonstrated a Silverlight-based application which collects together feeds from individual users in social networks, plus RSS feeds, plus Twitter feeds..
· Shipping today Seesmic for Windows - very smooth, very fast!
· Taking advantage of Win7; sensor for location
· It is #1 request, Seesmic for Windows will be a platform for plug-in development
· Community needs Seesmic to be available on every device
· It will ship Silverlight version soon
Funny Video
The job of giving identity to the cloud concept has been left to Bob Muglia, whose annual funny video this morning wasn't too far off the mark from reality. In the video, he is serving as a "life coach" for the cloud (a guy dressed in a puffed-up pillow costume), who is suffering an identity crisis and he acts as a kind of personal, spiritual counselor for "the cloud". Here "The Cloud" is trying to find a purpose for itself, and Muglia's advice is that the cloud can be anything and everything it wants to be...whatever that is. Then The Cloud takes Muglia's advice.
Windows Live
Unlike last PDC, PDC2009 Day 1- there was no news on Windows Live. You may have to wait for MIX '10 in Las Vegas.
Articles and Resources
Here is the press releases from today’s announcements:
· Microsoft Cloud Services Vision Becomes Reality With Launch of Windows Azure Platform
· From the Cloud to the Crowd: NASA and Microsoft Ask Citizen Scientists to “Be a Martian”
· On-Premises or in the Cloud, One Consistent Composite Application Experience for Developers
More New Downloads & Resources
· SQL Server Modeling CTP Nov 2009 (Formerly Codename "Oslo")
· Sync Framework PowerPack for SQL Azure
· SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies 2010
· Windows Azure Platform Training Course
Hope it helps if you could not attend or watch/track the developments at PDC2009 in LA.