Today's Buzz in the Clouds

Mike Brown — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:41:00 GMT

Well it looks like there is significant buzz about Azure and other tech announced/demoed at PDC.

Enabling the new superbar in Windows 7

Technically Windows 7 is related to Azure, seeing that Microsoft says they will be leverage Live Services within Windows 7 to better connect the PC. So this isn't too far off topic. At PDC, Microsoft demonstrated the new Windows 7 superbar. After installing Windows 7 into a Hyper-V VM (works splendidly by the way), I noticed that the taskbar looked just like the Vista Taskbar. Thanks to Tweetdeck, I found someone's tweet about enabling the new superbar on the PDC bits. Now you can play with the new Superbar and its context sensitive menus.

Windows Azure from a Developer's Perspective

If some of the content at the PDC Keynote was too abstract for you to really nail down what Azure is all about, and you don't have time to watch all of the sessions that go into detail about Azure, your saviour has come! Dare Obasanjo, has written an EXCELLENT post called "Windows Azure from a Developer's Perspective". It does a great job at nailing down the concepts and giving a good overview of Microsoft's Cloud offerings so that you can spend your time deciding which area you would like to tackle first.

What Ray Didn't Tell You About Windows Azure

Ted Dziuba at the Register gave a tongue in cheek jab at Microsoft for dumping a metric ton of stuff on the IT community last week. In the end, he gives a highly logical reason for choosing Azure over Amazon Webservices or Google App Engine.

Let's say you're a business decision maker, and you got yourself on this cloud computing kick. Who would you rather buy your cloud resources from?

1. A company whose main business is books
2. A company whose main business is text advertisements
3. A company whose main business is business software

Oslo and the Open Source Community

Another good article at the Register discusses how Microsoft is courting the greater development community to "embrace and adapt" Oslo.

Long Zheng On Windows 7

Over at "I Started Something" Long Zheng has been posting furiously on all things Windows 7. I guess my head is stuck too far in the clouds to think about a desktop OS right now. One of his posts exhorts his readers to submit issues to the Windows 7 Task Force because Microsoft really is paying attention there.

Microsoft Communities Sites

There is almost too much to bring it all in, but there is a ton of content on the Microsoft Communities websites on Windows Azure. Starting with the Azure Services Developer Center on MSDN, you can reach more information on Azure than you can shake a stick at including:

The Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services team blogs
The Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services MSDN Forums
Developer Centers for each of the respective technologies
Getting Started links
Downloads and Registration links for the services

Don't forget, you can go straight to Azure.com to learn more, register, and download the SDKs as well. You can also visit Channel 9 for videos and interviews about the Azure services (among other things). And you can download PDC session recordings at the PDC website.

Windows 7 in the Cloud

Here's a big surprise! You can download the Windows 7 PDC bits using your favorite bit torrent client. Of course, I'd personally just find a friend who went to PDC and get the Bits from him. You never know what you'll be running when you get it from bit torrent. And no I'm not providing a link for you...do a simple search if you want it that bad.

ASP.NET MVC in the Cloud

Jim Nakashima (formerly on the "Cider" team but now with the Azure tools team), has a post about running ASP.NET MVC on Azure. He cautions that it's not fully supported but likely will be in the future.

Biztalk Services

Well here's a rare case of Microsoft giving a more palatable name to a product than its code name. Clemens Vasters, the Technical Lead for the Service Bus functionality of the .NET Services Team, posted back in July about the BizTalk Services R12 Release. Now there's a way for Microsoft to keep a technology secret...put Biztalk in the title. I'll be honest though...I DID try to get into that preview. Imagine that running Workflow services in the cloud...He also reminds us that there are Java and Ruby SDKs for Azure.

Take Me to Your Pointy Haired Bosses

Forbes has a nice article discussing Windows Azure in non-geek speak. This is the quickest way for Azure to get acceptance in the business community.

Nothing but Cloudy Days Ahead

Redmond Channel Partner Online gives a quick discussion of SQL Services along with a prediction that it will only get more comprehensive (perhaps they were using the Hosted SQL Analysis Services).

Well, not that I'm out of stuff to write about here, but I'm sure I've given you enough links to last a few days. I'll be back tomorrow with the latest buzz on Azure.

Brownie Points : PDC, Oslo

Today's Buzz in the Clouds