Bob Muglia

President, Server Tools and Business.

First demo with Don Box and Chris Anderson showed some low level programming in Azure with some very humorous examples of C++ coding.

Andy Lapin from Kelley Blue Book was the second demo to talk about how they use Azure.  Using a slick Silverlight app to find that perfect automobile.  

This was followed by a pretty cool video about Domino’s and how they scale for football games. 

Overall there is a heavy focus on ease of use and connectivity to the data store. 

Project Sydney is a project for Azure next year that will help with premise sync scenarios.  Connectivity Agent uses a secure tunnel back to your premise SQL store to enable public portals for on premise data for public access points. 

They will also be launching Azure as a full VM Role that you can remote in, administer, snapshot, and spin up, spin down VM slices.   This will also be available next year.

Announcing the beta of AppFabric, an application server for Windows Server, to be launched on Azure next year.   AppFabric includes caching, workflow, monitoring, service bus and other core services.

The next demo is Cameron Skinner for the rich new features for VS 2010 and how they integrate with AppFabric.  Using Windows Identity Foundation and the Secure Token Service, making an application single sign-on is simple.  Adding client-side validation was also trivial.  IntelliTrace displays all the DB queries and allows direct linking to the code that created that call.  Very slick!  There are also web-based unit testing built into the scenario.   Adding the AppFabric and caching functions were two lines in the web.config.   Added IIS dashboard for .Net 4 apps that allows you to track events within an app to see variables passed back and forth.  Deployment to the stage environment in 2010 contains deep integration of MSDeploy.  Publish automates one click publishing to IIS.   Great demo!

Download AppFabric

Daownload ASP.NET MVC2

Download Windows Identity Foundation

Doug Purdy demos platform convergence and how to bring all these things together.   Doug takes Cameron’s demo and publishes it to Azure with very little effort.   The designer for the application model is pretty slick as well.  Upon publishing, the same app works with single sign on due to federation.  It can also bundle things up into one file and allow PowerShell to deploy the solution into production.  Using SCOM R2 you can see the state in Azure and monitor the application.  SCOM can spin up instances or auto spin based on metrics set by operations.  The integration levels are right where they need to be. 

As for timing, System Center Cloud arrives in 2010 along with the AppFabric. Europe and Asia data centers come online in 2010 as well.

PDC 09 Keynote

Ray Ozzie took the stage and re-emphasized the focus on Software + Services.   The recurring theme of “Three screens and the cloud” will be the common thread through the conference.

The focus today on the backend such as Azure and the cloud, tomorrow the focus will be on the UX side.

Next spring at MIX was the promise of what  Windows Live and the Live platform with Mobile will bring.

Scott Guthrie will present tomorrow with some Silverlight surprises.

Seesmic demo of a prototype for their desktop twitter app built on Silverlight (yes, it has user list support)

The CEO Announced they will ship Seesmic for windows entirely built on windows for Win 7.  Quick, intuitive navigation with drag and drop for user list placement.  They will also allow it as a development platform to develop plug-ins. 

Azure.

Plenty of mentions of PHP and mysql as well as Java and Eclipse for the Azure platform.  

Azure goes “live” and starts billing in Feb 2010.  Inclusion of templates in VS 2010.  Support multiple roles of almost any deployment.  Enabled FastCGI for other language inclusion.

Data center replication pairs.  One of the cloud server containers is here on the show floor.   With SQL Azure it is truly a database in the cloud to be created on demand.  All existing tools work against the cloud database.  A couple vendors will get to go live today on Azure.

Matt Mullenweb, Automattic – WordPress.

Cheeseburger network that runs icanhazcheeburger and failblog.   Launching oddlyspecific.com on the Azure platform using SQLAzure. 

Talked about PinPoint for finding the right application and being found by others.   pinpoint.com.   They are going to integrate the portal into many points of access to help everyone be found.

Announcing CTP of “Dallas” is an open catalog and marketplace for public and commercial data.   Data as a service. 

Dave Campbell demos Dallas and shows off public sources and how to see the data.  PowerPivot Add in integration to Excel allows the data to be popped right into Excel and manipulated.

Vivek Kundra – CIO for the US joined via video conference to talk about the data services in the cloud.  NASA cooperation and usage of the Azure platform is fairly deep.   Encouraged innovation of mobile applications integrating the data from the cloud to solve real problems.

Bottom line message.

Bet on Windows; bet on Windows 7.

Bet on our services; Bet on Azure.

Dream and create!

PDC09

The Keynote for PDC 09 is about to kick off.   It should be an exciting week.  Stay tuned for some fun sights and insights.

Windows 7 RTM

Many are celebrating the newest Windows 7 release by wiping their desktops clean or upgrading this weekend.  If you are a developer, there are several particularly cool things about Windows 7 you will enjoy.   Scott Hanselman has a great post covering these cool new features.   Check them out!

http://ow.ly/jt4V

SharePoint Web Parts

Does anyone have any good recommendations on polished, high value, web part providers for SharePoint/MOSS?

I have taken a look at Dundas and Bamboo Solutions.
Has anyone used either of these and like to share their experiences?

What are others that are out there particularly with charting or BI web parts?

 

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