My notes from PDC Session ES 02

Notes from ES 02: Architecting Services for Windows Azure

Presentation will cover how to architect Azure services
Describe the service life cycle management
Show how azure architecture enables automation
Show how developers are freed from cloud platform issues

Main points of the presentation
• Cloud services have specific design considerations
○ Are always on, distributed, large scale, failure is expected so how to handle
• Azure is an OS for the cloud
○ Handles scale out, dynamic and on-demand.
○ Each machine is running its own kernel
○ But all the services sitting on top are what make up the Azure OS
• Azure managers services not just servers
○ Tell it what you want, and it will help automate the details
○ Servers, load balancers, etc.
○ Just describe what you want, and it auto deploys it all
• Azure frees devs from all the underlying stuff
○ Allows developers to concentrate on the business logic instead of cloud logic
They need our help building services. If we build it correctly, MS can help us automate things and make them healthy.Cloud computing is based on scale out not scale up (scaling outwards with lots of parallel computers, rather than scaling up and just beefing up a single computer with more ram)
Automation is the key to reducing costs

My notes from PDC Session ES 01

Notes from ES 01: Developing and deploy your first cloud service

Talk is composed of 90% demos, so noting down what he does

In this session he is aims to create a blog website hosted on Azure using ASP.Net MVC & Azure storage

Azure SDK provides a “consistent, familiar development” environment.

Can use .Net, IIS7, WCF

The ‘cloud on your desktop’ development environment is a lot like cassini. When I develop my website and click run, my webpage is launched. But instead of cassini, the developer fabric spins up instances and runs my website.

Can develop in Visual Web developer Express

My notes from PDC Session ES 16

Notes from ES 16: A lap around Windows Azure

Windows Azure is an OS system for the cloud

Background

“What is the cloud” it is a set of connected servers on which developers can

• Install and run services
• Store & retrieve data

To put it into perspective. Right now if you want to go build and run a desktop app.

• Need to select hardware, find device drivers, write a file system
• Write a job scheduler
• Write an application installer
• Etc.

Why are we all doubling up on this? We’re also replicating the same stuff with cloud services today.

• We need to respond to hardware failures,
• handle increases in traffic
• Increase storage
• Apply OS patches
• Perform live upgrade on our service
• And want to expand

Then we finally write some logic on top of all of this

On the desktop an OS helps abstract some of this away

Windows Azure is an OS in the cloud to help us just concentrate on writing business logic and not how to handle all the other stuff

My notes from PDC08 Day 2 keynote

As i mentioned, i’m going to post up all of my notes from the PDC sessions i watch.

Day 1 keynote was about the cloud
Day 2 is all about client technologies

Summary

• Windows 7 – new UI features, improvements in performance (They demo win7 running on a tiny notepad with 1Gb of ram with ½ the ram still available!)
• WPF Improvements – RibbonBar control, multitouch. New WPF toolkit released today with visual state manager!
• Visual studio 2010 will be built on WPF
• Visual studio – Web.config. Improvement to support set up debug/release/staging config files
• Live Wave 3 – new “Live Framework” wraps around Live services
• Live Mesh improvements – Adding support for win mobiles and Macintosh in the next update
• Office 14 – Is now really integrated into the web with live editing of documents being synced. But now have a fully featured office web, works in IE/firefox and has ribbon bar, looks like same app

My notes from PDC08 Day 1 Keynote

I shared my notes internally at Readify and since there was such a good response to it, i’m going to post the notes online for all the keynotes and sessions I watch.

Summary:

• New “Windows Azure”. Easy to build and debug on our own PCs with VS2008 and provision our apps into the cloud in minutes
• Integration between on premise apps with the cloud, and seeing it more with windows server (on premise with Azure)
• Identity federation. Using “Geneva” to federate from on premise Active Directory with your cloud services.
• ALL of Microsoft products will be hosted online on Azure, being auto updated so we don’t have to worry about it (CRM, Exchange, sharepoint, OCS, etc.)
• I think it is called Azure, because it is a bluish colour (so all of their apps are that colour) and that is the colour of the sky which the clouds are in? Or maybe I’m thinking too much…

Silverlight MVVM + dependency injection

Update 2009/03/04: Here are 2 links that may help you with your understanding of MVVM

first 2 videos about implementing MVVM, one in WPF and the other in Silverlight http://weblogs.asp.net/craigshoemaker/archive/2009/02/26/hands-on-model-view-viewmodel-mvvm-for-silverlight-and-wpf.aspx and an article that delves into creating a fully functional app http://www.codeproject.com/KB/smart/Sonic.aspx

I attended a talk Jonas did last week on MVVM and it got me excited enough to explore it myself. His blog has a wealth of information, and it has all been summarised in his latest post. By reading his blog and many other bits and pieces around the web i was able to get this working myself. I’m going to put it all together into one blog post to give a complete look at how to incorporate all of it together. I aim to show how it all hooks in together and not just show a diagram saying that you should split things out.

Presumably you already have an idea of what Model/View/ViewModel is. The background and reasoning behind it is beyond the scope of this article, but here is an article I recommend. And also all of Jonas’s articles. But basically MVVM + Dependency injection allows your applications to be loosely coupled with the GREAT advantage that all of your code can now be unit tested, since the UI is just databinding to your classes.

Architecture

The application is going to look like the diagram. It will be split up into the usual Model/View/ViewModel components, but I aim to show all of the supporting code that is needed to get it all working.

The application will be a HR system which just show a list of all the employees. I am just going to implement this single method to try and keep this example as simple as possible