Highlights

• Scott Gu Rickrolls the entire PDC audience
• Silverlight 4 beta is out now!
• Silverlight can now access local resources on your computer like cameras, filesystem, drag/drop support
• Silverlight has updated WCF support
• IE9 is announced
• Work on IE9 has been going on for 3-4 weeks. Performance and Acid3 results are improving
• There will be videos on http://channel9.msdn.com/

Steve sinofsky comes on stage
Says win7 has been out for a few weeks now, it has been really humbling.
Will discuss what they learnt from Win7
Some people were saying "just fix these few things", but they knew it wasn’t just about solving problem
Their windows 7 blog was useful, there were over 6,000 comments and 10,000 emails with suggestions.
A MASSIVE part of Win7 development was how to handle just the sheer volume suggestions.
The telemetry they built into win7 helped heaps. The hardware reliability, which bits were slow or fast, was the installation of new drivers successful?
The telemetry is like a "black box recorder" of your computer
80% of customers voluntarily opt in to the telemetry feedback.
When applications crash, they send the memory dump via watson back to Microsoft to help sort out issuse.
They showed the "We Share your Pain" video the video where they shock the programmer that wrote the piece of code that is annoying you

• They had ~1,730,000 feedback reports sent back.
• ~91,500 uniqe external devices plugged in
• 14,000 unique PRINTERS plugged in
• 46,000,000 times that areo shake and snap were used
• 55% of people were using 1024×768 as the screen resolution

Talks about UAC, shows a video about it (that we can’t see via streaming due to Intellectual Property issues)
Goes back to him, he says "and when we are trying out other new features like aero snap, we do the usability testing like this" and it cuts to another video that we aren’t allowed to view.
Developing for Windows 7, what are the opportunities?
HD audio/video, new sensors, jump lists

Mike comes up on stage to talk about "new things in the ecosystem" (34 mins)
Shows an eeepc, says it came out 2 years ago. Customers were really interested in the concept.
Netbooks are now the fastest growing category of computers now
Showing a gaming PC that is liquid cooled. Showing off DirectX11
Showing a demo of 10,000 particles doing things, but it is all hardware accelerated. No CPU processing time, it is all being done on the GPU.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/directcompute.html
Showing a "Server replacement laptop". Corei7 raid5 drives, running hyperv with 3 virtual machines.
The ribbon UI feature is built into Win7 so you can use in your apps. Works well with touch
Showing how firefox supports taskbar preview, google chrome supports jump lists (he comments how he changed the default start page to to bing)

Back to just sinofsky (45 mins)
When they were building win7, they wanted to know what is it like to build a new piece of hardware? Trying to understand the flow
They decided to build their own laptop from scratch to test it out. Made a tablet pc with all the cool specs, to see how it all hangs together.
Took them about 3months to put it all together.
They announce it as the "windows 7 PDC laptop", they are giving one to each of the attendees

Internet explorer (48 mins)
I want to talk about four things, show you where we are heading.
They learnt about "responsible engineering, trustworthy experience, real world interop, innovate technologies.
One of the most talked about and liked features is around privacy and trustworthiness
Said that they made a lot of advances around incorporating web standards…
Want to continue to make sure that IE is the best featured web browser on windows.
They are working on IE9.
Standards. Admit that they need to do more around Acid3 test. Want to "be responsible" when looking at new things like HTML5
Talking about the "ACID score", in IE8 they were at 20/100, in IE9 today they are at 32/100
(in comparison, FF is at 70+ and opera is at 100)
Show graphs that there is a lot of work that goes into getting a page on your screen, different sites spend different amout of time in the subsystems (scripts, rendering, etc.)
Show a graph of performance. IE6 was far away. IE8 was still much slower than FF, chrome, etc.
IE9 now is at about the same speed as all the other browsers now.
And these are early builds of IE9 , they have only just started work on IE9 engine for 3-5 weeks
The text rending engine will take advantage of all the clear text technologies, makes it clearer than just straight GDI in IE today
Showing a demo of bing maps. Using GDI rendering they were getting ~13fps. They made the rendering engine now hardware accelerated (as in the screen rendering) and it sped up heaps.
No roadmap for IE9 yet
There will be videos on Channl9 today on IE9

Scott Guthrie comes on stage to talk about Silverlight (1:03)
In silverlight 3 then enabled hardware accelerated video rendering
They shipped blend 3 with sketchflow
Shows a video about rapid prototyping with sketchflow
A bunch of sites have used steaming (mostly sporting websites) in HD
Lots of big name companies are using it to create scientific apps, line of business apps.
Last year they were at 33% penetration, today there are on 45% of internet connected desktops.

Announcing Silverlight 4

• Focusing on 3 things
• Media
• Business apps
• Beyond the browser

• Can access webcam & microphone now
• Supporting DRM now… For some reason that feature didn’t get any applause

Demoing the new webcam stuff.
Can apply pixel shaders over the webcam feed. All the usual distortion effects. They are super fast!
Scott Gu took a random photo and then updated his twitter profile pic as it.
You can get the raw feed of the webcam feed, so they show barcode reading. He scans a copy of the barcode of his ASP.Net MVC book, then it looked it up on Amazon.
Demoing smooth streaming
Demoing other video effects, you can do slow motion, and a few others
Announcing Silverlight media (pack?) that you can use to do those effects
Smooth steaming is available on browsers that don’t have plugins (like iPhone), they enable HTTP streaming and they pick it up
http://www.iis.net/iphone

New Silverlight4 features

• Programmatic printing support
• Clipboard access
• Right click
• Mouse wheel
• Implicit styling
• Drag/drop files into silverlight
• Bidi & RightToLeft text
• Can host HTML as a control inside your app
• Commanding and MVVM!

Shows an app that has English test, arabic, japanese.
Can right click in the app to bring up a context menu.
Copies the text
Pastes in a datagrid control from excel into the silverlight textbox
He drags a word doc from the desktop onto the silverlight app, the app put all the text from the document into the textbox.
He clicks print and the print dialog comes up.
Shows a Silverlight app that has a HTML control, so he has his app with bing.com in a control.
Because it is still a normal control, you can do all the normal crazy things you can do with controls, he makes the control go all about the place, he makes the bing page split up into a jigsaw puzzle and the pieces scatter around the screen.
All the usual plugins work
So he brings up youtube.com and rickrolls everyone
While the video is playing, he makes it into a puzzle again, the video is still playing in all the scattered pieces

• Share assemblies across SL & .net 4.0!!!!
• Data binding improvements
• UDP multicast support
• Peer to peer networking.
• REST enhancements
• WCF improvements (different streaming, up to 400% faster)
• WCF RIA services

• VS2010 support
• WYSIWYG desigin
• XAML intellisense improvements

• Databinding enhancements

• WCF RIA services integration

Scott Hanselman comes on stage to demo how do develop in it (1:30)
His demo is here http://jeffhandley.com/archive/2009/11/18/contososales.aspx
Buliding a RIA services silverlight app inside VS2010
He is using an EDMX data model
Data model has many Stores have many Contacts (so has a join table)
Creates a new Contact Service
All the WCF methods are returning Iqueryable
New xaml page
The data sources window shows his service
He drags it onto his silverlight window and it auto creates a datagrid and binds it.
The Datasources window works as usual, can see all the fields, can set the control type, drag out. Can make them a ListBox
He is using implicit styling so the ListBoxes look good by default.
He can right click controls and tell them to dock fill
He clicks his control, in the properties window there is a new "styles browser"
Dragging on data pagers
The service is saying that one of the data properties is a URL, so scott changes the control to image, drags it onto the page.
Camel case intellisense support (like resharper)
Brings up the data model, shows annotations. Can now enforce rules on the data which are client side and server side validated automatically (like age must be >18)

Rep from Snapflow comes on stage (1:38)
Wants people to be able to create applications without "writing a line of code"
Well actually no, this is a "business logic" mapper.
Workflow foundation on steroids?
Yep it isn’t anywhere near as sophisticated as he claims it is, just a silverlight based workflow creator.

Just scott on stage (1:42)

New Silverlight 4 Out Of Browser features

• Windowing APIs

• Notification popups

• HTML support

• Drop target

You can say that this application MUST run in elevated mode, if the user grants it then you get

• Custom window chrome
• Can access local file system
• Cross site network
• Keyboard in full screen mode

• Hardware device access

• COM automation support

If you had office installed, you could now query outlook for your calendar from silverlight

Access the Win7 sensor information

• Silverlight 4 is twice as fast

• 30% faster startup

• New profiling support! I’m looking forward to this one

Brial Goldfarb on stage (1:47)
Showing a Silverlight 4 trusted application for accessing Facebook
So he has a custom chrome
Can programmatically move the window around the screen because of this, can make it go into "mini mode"
He uses COM automation, brings in his outlook calendar into silverlight.
Reads his friends feeds, can see the embedded videos in his feeds, can play the youtube vids in his app.
Wants to upload new photos, so he drag and drops a bunch of photos on, he can see them in silverlight and starts tagging them
Takes a photo, plugs the camera in. The app pops up a notification that camera was plugged in, and brings in the new photo.
Will be shipped as a reference sample

Just scott (1:56)
You can vote on the next silverlight features using their website.
When is silverlight4 coming out?
Beta: SL4 beta is now available for download
Final release: first half 2010

Day1 is on Azure and backend services
Day2 is on client side, Win7, IE9 and Silverlight

The keynote can be downloaded from http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/KEY01

Highlights of today
• Windows Azure can now have apache, tomcat and others installed
• You can have full control of your instances, install what you want on it, then set that as your new baseline to deploy apps to
• App fabric is a new add-on for Windows Server. Lets you deploy applications to your servers easier. Also lets you easily deploy to either on premise or Azure
• Dallas CTP announce. Is a way of exposing your data feeds in an easily discoverable and consumable way http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/dallas/

Ray ozzie walks on stage
Ray ozzie talks about how Microsoft has been talking about Software + services for the last 4 years, last year they announced Azure.
Goes on about how everything we have is "connected", PC’s, devices, etc.
They want to go towards "seamless multi screen experiences, their "3 screens & a cloud" strategy
The 3 screens are: Mobile, PC and your TV
Today we will hear more about the backend stuff. The services, azure, etc.
Tomorrow, we will hear more about front end stuff.

Software on their "3 screens and a cloud"
In tools, they have visual studio for devs. And expression studio for web
For the "3 screens"(mobile, pc, TC), they have IE + Silverlight.

Silverlight "compliments" javascript by creating highly responsive web controls
Because silverlight is .net it is the premier runtime to develop all of this software


Guy who wrote the seesmic twitter application comes on stage
Talks about how they subscribe to the "3 screens and a cloud" concept. You should be able to get your data from wherever.
They decided to write a version of seesmic using silverlight.
He is showing it using the Silverlight OOB (Out of box) experience.
They are releasing the new version today. *Edit* I installed the windows desktop version, and it is a slow non-silverlight app. Don’t know what happened here
He is saying it is very fast on Silverlight, and showing the scroll speed, etc. It does seem smoother than the bit of jerking i get when i scroll in the Adobe air version.
New features, you can click drag users between groups.
They want seesmic to be THE twitter platform. You can now create plugins for it that do lots of things. Auto tweet people, ask Mr. Tweet for more info about a person, etc.

Ray ozzie comes back
Says that tomorrow Scott Guthrie will talk about IE9. Sinofsky is talking about Silverlight 4
Starts giving the Azure marketing pitch. Made it powerful enough to scale due to all of their backend, yet familiar enough for current visual studio developers to pick it up.
The live stream glitches, then he comes back and is saying how Systems centre allows for seamless control of private clouds, etc.

Azure goes live January 1st. For all of Jan it will be free, will start charging Feb 1st.
New features that are "going live today" in Azure:

• You now have single sign on for Azure portal, Sql Azure
• They offer multiple sized VMs now (see my blog post)
• They now support much more complex service architecture (multiple worker roles, web roles)
• Support for FastCGI (PHP)
• Java running on top of Tomcat

  The Azure CDN datacentres are coming online
  Azures datacentres are built using the "modular container" design. So they can just quickly scale up datacentres. Photos of the Azure container are at http://allyourclouds.stackexchange.com/questions/5/what-do-cloud-computing-data-centers-look-like/7#7

New storage type: Azure xdrive are Azure storage blobs that are accessible using NTFS
SQL Azure It isn’t just sql server that is in VMs that are turned on.
It is a "True database as a service"
You can simply create a new database when you need it.
Don’t need to think about memory, don’t need to worry about replication, data recovery.
It works unmodified against Excel, .net. Is just a connection string.
Although Azure goes into production on Jan, they have allowed a few companies to go into production today. One of them is wordpress!

Founder of wordpress comes on stage
One of his devs at wordpress rang him and said "hey wordpress now supports PHP, mysql, sqlserver"
He logs onto the Azure portal and shows how he has an instance running apache. He only has 1 at the moment, says "what if we get slashdotted? Easy we just scale it up from here"
Says how the 2 most popular wordpress blogs are a "political one" and ICANHAZCHEEZBURGER

ICANHAZCHEEZBURGER guy comes on stage
Shows how he runs ICANHAZCHEEZBURGER, failblog, etc.
They don’t know what is going to be popular, they have MASSIVE spikes in users due to a picture suddenly becoming popular.
They really need a way to quickly scale up and down. They don’t want to have to pay during the quiet times.
Announcing a new website www.Oddlyspecific.com
They are using SQL Azure as the backend, and SQL storage for the blobs.
They have a plugin for wordpress which lets you use the Windows Azure storage platform
Means users now have more storage AND it is served over the Azure CDN!

Ray Ozzie comes back on stage
"having reliable to high scale elastic computer utility is really important"
during the windows Azure CTP, many people asked "how can I use Azure to help build my business?"

Announcing "Microsoft pinpoint"
http://www.pinpoint.com/en-US/Dallas
People wanted an easier way to find things that have already been built so that they can take advantage of it. Here you can search for solutions that already exist, experts, data feeds.
Pinpoint is integrated into the Azure portal
The most powerful place to be if you are trying to bring your services to IT pros
Online catalogues and marketplaces are useful

Announcing CTP of "Dallas" which Ray "believes to be game changing"
http://blogs.msdn.com/dallas/default.aspx
Uniform discovery way of finding data, of uniformly joining it.
Enables an open catalog and marketplace of data.
Believes it will bring in a whole new wave of "remixing"

David campbell comes on stage
Dallas lowers the barrier to finding, exploring and consuming data
Pinpoint is the place where you will find dallas data feeds.
Some are public data sources, some are commercial.
There may be ratings and reviews from people about the data

He logs in and shows how he has subscribed to 2 data feeds, one from NASA and infoUSA
Shows the full list of citysearch.com, US government
Clicks into the InfoUSA datafeed.
The data has already been described, so he can see the parameters he can put into the webform to query it (zip code, etc).
Can see the feed in Atom Pub
Clicks "analyse" and it opens up excel so he can start twisting the data.
Opens NASA feed
He can search for image scientific information, or just get the single image.
He clicks one button, and it generates a C# partial class so he can just consume it right in code!
Has a blank WPF application, he click drags a listbox on, pastes in a codesnippet to consume the data.
Shows an demo app that someone else had already written.
Is a WPF app that consumes the NASA feed and displays all the images, slideshow. Show the images using old school red/green 3D. Tells the crowd to put their 3D glasses on.
This is just a demo of what you could do if data was this easy to explore, discover and consume

Ray comes back on stage and starts a live feed with Washington DC government
Decide to democratise data
They announced health data, and encouraged everyone to use it and lots of innovation happened.
The military did the same thing, and now we have super cheap GPS. It is a great example of what can happen when data is made public.
They need to look out of the 4 walls of government and look for innovation.
http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov/welcome
They started off with 47 datasets. Now they have over 100,000 released datasets. Of environment hazards, of flight paths.
This data is part of the Data.gov platform
Showing an iPhone app called "career finder", shows all the government jobs available near you. App was created in only a few days
He made sure to call it a "mobile device" and not iPhone
They have a bucketload of datacentres now. The CIOs are now focused on serving up new data.
For the 1st time now, they can now focus on "service delivery" instead of worrying about infrastructure.

Live interview stops, back to Ray
When thinking of client, bet on Windows 7
When thinking of the backend, bet on Windows Azure
Think of how Pinpoint and Dallas are going to change the world with just the volume of new consumable data.
Weave together public domain data with your own data to create cool things
Shows a small vidclip.
Has "the cloud" talking about his identity crisis. He has been called a private cloud, a public cloud, he is so confused.
"YOU ARE CLOUD, embrace who you are" "embrace who you are".
WTF this is stupid.

Bob muglia comes on stage (president of server & tools)
The cloud is more than just about infrastructure
It is also about an application model. That is what he is going to talk about.
There is a lot of consistency about how they are talking about the cloud
As attributes "scale and elastic"
As things it provides "software, app platform, services"

Talks about how Bing created a controller called "auto pilot" to run all of their computers in their data centre. Automatically brought up servers to replace dead PCs



What they did was good, but it was very specific, it wasn’t generalised enough to use on their other services. It was kind of a precursor to Azure.
*blah blah, the cloud is good, lets us have resources that work together. Can have ways to deploy, etc. Recaps the cloud for 5mins* Not just me, lots of people online saying "WTF is he actually talking about"
Mentions now how we can describe architecture of a cloud app which you can use to model it. Model driven approach is better.
*waffles on for another few mins*
"take steps to make your application always on, instead of down for maintenance times"

Don Box comes on stage
Last year we showed you Azure
Since then people have said that they want to use Azure to write PHP code, Java, C++
Brings up C++ in visual studio
They are going to write a CGI app, grab the query string and process it.
They are going to use pointers all over the place.
So when they hit the web app, they are going to show the 4 bytes before the query string.
Points out how there is a bug, so he puts in an asm push and pop command
They have a 2nd project, an Azure cloud project, so they are pushing it up into Azure now
Goes into the portal and publishes the Azure app ready
Moves to SQL Azure
Last year they accessed SQL Azure using REST.
Feedback was "yeah REST is great…. But we are used to connection strings and transactions and T-Sql"
They create a new SQL Azure database, now they are going to use SQL Server management studio to connect to it.
They open it up, and start executing T-SQL against it.
creates a table, starts a transaction, pastes in all the rows to insert, ends transaction
Hits execute and it immediately runs against the cloud
Last year talked about Access control Service
Enterprise grade authorisation
Feedback was "we like that… But we want something more lightweight so we can use in web pages, etc"
Worked with google, etc. To come up with a way to do it.
They use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth
Try to hit the data from javascript. Nope can’t get in because they aren’t authrorised.
So in javascript, they request a token, and can then get into it.

Kelly blue book comes on stage
They have 2 data centres, try to get one data centre serving all the customers, so they have a 2nd failover data centre.
They were paying lots for servers they didn’t need… So *surprise* they moved it to Azure to reduce costs since they can elastically scale up and down.
Their data goes through ETL’s and other processes, they can still use the exact same process with SQL Azure
Demoing SQL Azure Data Sync.
They can keep their on premise SQL server and the Azure one in sync. Using Azure as a backup for spikes
They have taken the time down to provision a new server down from 6 weeks to 6mins with Azure

Back to just Bob mulgia, he shows a demo reel
Dominos pizza, they have a MASSIVE spike during superbowls which is expensive to provision for.
Seiemens talking about hybrid clouds. Their on premise data centre combined with offloading to Azure

Back to bob. (1Hour, 30mins)



Access Control System is an important way of saying who has access to your services.
Sometimes you want low level access.

Announcing "project Sydney", available next year
Allows you to connect your existing apps running on your servers with Windows Azure.
Demo of it with one of their apps
They have a charity promotion called "give" which is a charity auction.
Showing it running in the IT datacentre at Microsoft (even if his URL says localhost….)
From Azure, they try to tell it to connect to his SQL server that is running on premises.
He uses the Windows Azure connectivity Agent (project Sydney) to allow "the cloud" to connect to their on premise SQL server.
Now Azure can scale and do all the compute while connecting to their existing data.

New windows Azure virtual machine role

1. Select windws server base image
1. Customised virtual machine role
2. Snapshot virtual machine image
3. Deploy app and target your new VM role

So you can preload Apache on it or whatever you want.
You can remote desktop onto it to configure it.

Announcing Windows "app fabric" (I THINK this is dublin)
Allows you to create highly scalable flexible app platform.
Built on IIS, WCF, workflow, etc. Data caching
Is an add-in for windows server
You can zip up your application, so it can be passed to your IT admins and they can publish it straight into staging. Could also send to your internet hosts and get them to deploy it. Sounds like an easier way to deploy ASP.Net applications
Windows Azure will use it, will allow for the ease of deployment between Azure and your on premise data centres.

Explanation from Mary Jo Foley: The AppFabric technology combines hosting and caching technologies (formerly known as Microsoft code-named "Dublin" and Microsoft code-named "Velocity") with the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control (formerly referred to as .NET Services).



New person on stage demonstrating new features in Visual studio 2010
Demoing new Visual studio 2010 features.
He runs the application, does a few things then closes it.
It shows the call trace of his app so he can see how it works (then he drags the tab to his 2nd monitor and ppl go crazy)
Showing windows federated identity. (Geneva)
AD now has an STS provider in it.
Shows how to get your app to run with authentication by just right click your solution in visual studio and using the wizard (just like adding a WCF reference)
Says his app is running slower than it should be, hitting the DB too much? So he clicks "break all" and intellisense comes up.
Filters just to show the calls to ADO.Net, then he can drill down and see where the calls were made.

Douglas purdy (Data modeling group) comes on stage (2 hours)
Opens up visual studio and an exisiting ASP.Net MVC app, windows identity services
Is going to migrate it to Azure using "models"
In VS he Creates -> New project -> application model project
Shows a blank workspace with a toolbox.
Can see "the web role", "the worker role", "the database" + more in the toolbox
To deploy the application he is going to drag out 3 roles onto the workspace
-Web role
-App fabric
-And database

Then drags the projects on top of the icons he has there for web role, database.
Can say how many instances of each he wants
He wants to just push it out into the cloud now.
Right click, "publish to test environment"
They are shredding it into oslo data modeling (which has been renamed to SQL server data modeling?)
Windows identity services is now just working, still hitting the on premise Active Directory.
Right click, generates app package.
Bundles it up into a single package. Myproject.app on the desktop
So to push it out into production, he opens up powershell
He can run "deploy-application myproject.app https://myserver -whatif"
The whatif will show what will change if he does the deployment. How many instances of each thing.
Shows Microsoft operations manager, shows it connected to Windows Azure
Can see a diagram of the application that was put into SQL server data modeling inside of operations manager. Can see the load in each of the servers for each of those roles in the diagram
They can see that the server in Azure is overloaded, so they tell it to scale up from 2 to 4 from inside Operations manager.
They expand that web role for the ASP.net app, they can see the 2 existing servers and the 2 that are spinning up.

Bob back on stage

Says "see, this is why i was talking about the importance of modelling".
talks about how all of this is in the new server / services stack.
Keynote closes

COMPLETEY demo driven, but I wouldn’t really recommend watching this one

Azure is built using web standards (uri, HTTP, XML)
Exposes functionality so you can use it
Gives you choices/options for how you can take your code and hook your apps into it

Show an application that they built that lists processes on a box via a RESTful service.
Var request = WebRequest.Create(url
Request.getresponse
Showing how to manually call GET or DELETE against a RESTful service to list/kill the processes.

Net services Service bus
Going to host this service so that others can use it

First in their standard application, they edit the app.config
Change the endpoint so that the service is still hosted locally, but expose it online through the service bus.

LOL because it was now publicly available, everyone in the conference centre hit the service and tried to kill processes on their machine
So now he is going to put security on it
Going to put the security and ACL into the cloud

Securing
When you try to browse to the service it asks for your credentials. Either windows cardspace or user/pass
But when an application hits it, we need to the credentials in.
First he goes to get an auth token. It hits access control service
Then they set the request.headers to have the authtoken

Live services – 19minutes
Going to program against the live services
Logs onto their Live mesh desktop.  Can see a number of folders
Everything in live mesh is exposed as resourcesIn Visual studio, they point the URI http://user-ctp.windows.net/v0.1/Mesh/MeshObjects
Change their code to get the authtoken from the live services by handing in their live username/password
Because it is all exposed in standard ATOM/REST can use DELETE to make mesh delete a folder
Can program against the live services without the SDK.
But we can use LiveFx to assist us
Var livefx = new LiveOperatingEnvironment
Livefx.connect(username/pass)

Storage – 29 minutes
Going to put things into blobs on Azure, then put them into SQL Services
Can pump things into azure by using PUT. So they put a .dll file there for fun
Can use a powershell script to hook into your azure store and list things in blob storageThey are now going to extract metadata from the .dll and put it into SQL services
Meh, unintersting. Manually creating a bunch of XML so that they can put it into SQL
Blah blah
10 mins later they’ve put a record in SQL. There’d better be an easier way to do it.
Querying the database by passing in a string which is a LINQ query

Publishing code to the cloud – 47 minutes
Creates a new Azure web cloud service
Pastes in their code, then creates a package, uploads it to Azure

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

Design considerations
Failure of any given node is expected, so be sure to expect it and handle it
State will have to be relicated
There are no install steps. You just deploy your package to the service
Handle dynamic configuration changes in your services
Services are always running, there is no maintenance window…. So what happens when you want to upgrade/patch. So you’ll have to handle rolling upgrades. As well as schema changes
Services are built using multiple nodes/roles. Document the service architecture, & the communication paths of elementsBenefits of adhering to these design points
Azure manages services not servers (so again describe what you want and it will auto provision it)
Can automate service lifecycle via model driven automation.
The goal is to automate lifecycle as much as possibleCoding&modeling: running on the local PC doing the development/debugging
Provisioning: setup the desired configuration. How many instances you want, etc.
From here everything is automated as much as possible:
Deployment: Azure takes your model with desired config and maps it to actual hardware and configure the network for load balancing
Maintain goal state: monitor and react to certain events like hardware/software failures. So if you request 10 frontends they will try to keep you at 10 when things fail.
Automation reduces costService model
Describes service as distributed entities.
It is logical description of the services. The same model is used for testing&deployment
It is a declarative composition language• Service – the service as a whole is all of the next points
• Role – Frontend (web role), backend (worker role)
• Group – groups roles
• Endpoint – role communication point
• Channel – 2 types: logical load balances and switches
• Interface
• Config settings – developer settings & system settingsFault domains
Avoid single points of failure
It is a unit of failure: compute node, rack of machines, an entire datacentre.
The system considers fault domains when allocating service roles (don’t put all roles in the same rack
If you have 10 frontends, and want 2 fault domains, it will distribute over to racks with 5 in eachUpdate domains
Ensures service stays up while updating
Unit of sotware/config update. Will update a set of nodes at the same time
Used when rolling forward or backward
So we can say that we have 10 frontends with 5 update domains.Dynamic config settings
When programming for a single machine you can use the registry to store things. There isn’t one here. So you need a place to communicate and store things.
Communicates settings to service roles
App config settings are: Declared by developer / set by deployer
System config settings. Pre-declared (instance id, fault domain id, update domain id) not in this CTPAzure automation
Fabric controller
• It is the bain of the system
• Consumes the model you specify, the config settings and the payload
• Controls Compute nodes, load balancers, etc.
• Monitors and provides alerts
• The Fabric controller was actually built and defined by a model itself
When you click go
1. Allocates nodes (across fault & update domains)
2. Places OS and role images on the nodes
3. Configs settings
4. Starts the roles
5. Configures load balancers
6. Maintains desired number of roles (auto restarting nodes, or moving to new node)Can add/remove capacity on the fly
Rolling service upgrades. Performed one update domain at a timeService isolation & security
Lots of services running on the same fabric. So need to isolate them all from each other.
Service can only access things it defines in it’s model. Can only communicate with endpoints you define in the model
Autmatic updates of windows security patchesNetwork has redundancy built in. Services are deployed across fault domains load balancers rout traffic to active nodes onlyRoadmap
Today
• Automated deployment from bare metal
• Only a subset of the service model.
• Support changing number of instances at runtime
• Simple upgrades/downgrades
• Automated failure monitoring & hardware management
• Managed code/ASP.Net
• Running in fixed sized VMs
• External virtual Ip address per service
• In 1 USA data centre2009
• Expose more of the underlying model
• Richer life cycle management
• Richer network suport
• Multiple data centres

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

We have a “definition file” and a “configuration file”. Provide metadata about the project

Definition file defines the roles and the endpoints. What configurations are there? How many instances do we want of each role. e.g. 2 web roles and 3 worker roles. Define configutation settings

The config file is like web.config so you can provide values for config settings of your app

Can build and package services using command prompt.

Cspack.exe packages up your service & config file

Csrun.exe can spin the dev fabric up using the command line

So he used those tools to allow eclipse to dev against it. Meh sif use eclipse over VWD express

So what Azure gives us is scalability for free. Zero downtime upgrades, and all works with existing tools and skills

Horizontal scaling. We have one server, so lets just keep on adding more servers to the side to help out. But what does this mean for state?

Separate that state out from the app, and put into the durable store.

Durable storage means: Blobs, tables & queues.

Simple interface, can pull data out via REST and ado.net data services

He opens up an ASP.Net MVC project (have to use their provided sample as there are some tweaks needed to get MVC working on Azure)

He adds a reference to the “storage client” library. It is sample library that is included in the SDK to help you interface with the durable storage.

First you get a container for the blob  – var container = BlobStorage.Create(getBlobStorageAccount….)

Then add things to the container – container.CreateBlob(new blobProperties…, new BlobContents…)

To retrieve, create a container again. Then container.ListBlobs(….

Goes into the service definition file to define the configsettings in the app: AccountName, AccountSharedKey, blobStorageEndPoint

Then goes into the config file to define the values for those config settings. (puts in the BlobEndPoint of the developer cloud instance on the pc 127.0.0.1), and account key.

Defines a global container that is public so that anyone can retrieve data from the storage via a URL

Tables

Now from blobs to tables

Need to create a datamodel first

Is going to use the client .dll of the ADO.Net data services

Makes his datamodel inherit from TableStorageEntity

PartitionKey is how to partition the data in the table (I think for multi tennancy in a table?)

RowKey is like the rowId, so just a GUID will do, unless you want them in order for some reason

Creates a new class that inherits from TableStorageDataServicesContext

NEED to have SqlExpress on the dev machine to use the data storage in the dev tools

Meh, he spends ages showing off his MVC skills. I don’t caaaaaaaare. *wastes another 20mins or so*

Queues / Worker role

Azure isn’t just websites. Can use it to crunch lots of data

Use a worker role to achieve the background crunching of data. Get the web role to pump items into a queue, then get out worker role to loop forever and retrieve items from the queue and process

While(true)

Var msg = queue.GetMessage()

If(msg != null) …..

Queue.DeleteMessage(msg)

Notice that GetMessage doesn’t dequeue and that we manuall delete the message

What getmessage does is give us a message, but then hides it for a few seconds from other workers. This gives us durability. If one of our servers bursts into flames, or crashes, then the message is still there and can be processed by another thread automatically.

Queues are actually data sitting on top of tables

Clouddrive

Is a powershell plugin

Lets you use the storage in Azure as if it were a drive on your system

Can browse queues, the blobs, etc.

Nice for debugging

Debugging

Can debug on the local machine really easily. Set your breakpoint and it all just works

But debugging in the cloud is only available through logging. But there will be a lot more functionality over time

RoleManager.WriteToLog(ErrorLevel: critical error/warning/information

Can get a windows live alert when you get a critical error message.

Can get the logs from your app on the Azure.com dashboard

How to deploy to the cloud

• Write the code
• Get VS to package
• Upload to Azure.com
• Profit

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

What does Azure provide?

• Abstracts the execution environment
• Shared file system
• Resource allocation
• Programming environments
• 24/7 operation
• Pay for what you us

It is a shared model. So as you need more, you just pay for more. We don’t care which server our code runs on, we just chuck it up there and they worry about which computers it is executing on.

Main features

Automated service management: Write the code, define the rules and click go. Azure will auto setup all the load balancers, spin up the machines, etc.

Scalable storage: blobs, tables, queues

A RICH familiar dev experience. They built a complete simulation of the cloud on your desktop.

An example: interact with the web role, the user inserts some data through the web role and it is placed into cloud storage onto the queue. Then the worker role can read them off the queue and process.

When we run it the developer fabric spins up the web and worker roles for us. So we can check concurrency issues locally instead of waiting till we deploy it.

Automated service management

First we develop our code and create a model

The model has: Service topology and size. What does it look like, do we have front end roles, back end roles, do we use storage, etc.

What does it mean for our app to be healthy? We spin up 20 frontends, 5 go down. We need an alert

What things do we want to change at runtime so that we don’t have to redeploy our code to Azure?

Then we deploy and run

Then have to maintain the service health

Once the service is up and running, as things fail (code fails, we upgrade, etc.) our customer should not know or care.

We need to detect failures and notify us when things are not healthy.

MS can transparently fix some issues. If a frontend goes down, they can just start up a new frontend.

So we declare logically how many resources we need. APIs map these logical resources to physical resources (server instances)

So abstraction helps to keep things manageable

Has been designed to handle a full range of scenarios from hobbyist to enterprise

In raw mode you can build your own VM and deploy the bits and manage the service yourself. But MS can’t auto do things

Scalable cloud storage

Simple storage abstractions

Large items of user data: blobs, (file streams coming soon)

Service state: tables, (caches coming soon)

Service communication: queues, (locks coming soon)

It is MASSIVELY scalable 1000s of tables, etc. with geo-distribution and geo-replication

But this is not a database in the cloud, use SQL data services for larger scale things. This is only for simple tables

Familiar dev experience

A simulated cloud environment on the desktop

Supports ASP.Net, .Net languages, (native code and PHP coming later)

Integration with Visual studio & eclipse(coming soon)

MSDN, etc. (since it is just usual .net)

Can use logging & alerts to monitor how things are going. (tracing coming later)

Putting it all together

Using a simple architecture for scalability

A bunch of web roles load balancing the client requests. The requests are dumped into the cloud storage. Worker roles pick the requests off the queue and process.

Commercial release notes

2009 will be the commercial release.

Consumption based billing

They have strict SLAs with FINANCIAL guarantees

Geo-distribution, can say where in the world you want to host it for latency

They have done an initial release

They are going to frequently release more and more features, once we all say that there are enough features, they will release the commercial release

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

Keynote intro video

Keeps showing a new logo of .Net + WPF

Flashing up HEAPS of pretty looking products that are currently using WPF. Roxio, Autocad, blocbuster, etc. nice looking vid clips. Funky music.

Ray Ozzie comes on stage

Talking about what “Personal computing” means. Email, presentation, docs, spreadsheets.

“Without a PC on your desk, what would you do all day?” LOL

As much as we all sit in front of a PC and connect to the net through a web browser. The PC and the web are very separated

How can the web increase the value of our PCs?

We’re all going to have PCs, phones and webs. So how to combine them all to add value.

PC apps are good for: usual rich client reasons. Makes sense to make that app close to the user. By using copy/paste and drag/drop, the users combine all of heir applications. Can manage privacy of files

Web apps are good for: lets us access the world, One common way to access people. The webs sustainable unique value ISN”T the web, it is the ability to enable us all to connect & interact

Phone apps: same advantages as PC apps. Close to users. Always available for spontaneous access, knows your location, time, can quickly take photos/notes

Will advance PC apps in 2 ways: Always have the latest version of windows for us to dev against (Windows 7) & the install base. Will continue to improve the programming model

Advance web: allowing you to create cross browser/platform sites with CSS/ajax. And silverlight. Making web apps installable, offlineable, syncable

Steve Sinofsky comes on stage

Going to show windows 7 and live wave 3 and the integration between the 2

Going to show:

1. win7 client
2. Software & services
3. Transition from windows vista
4. APIs
5. Fundamentals
6. Path to RTM!!!
7. Call to action

1. Win7

New taskbar

Differnt looking taskbar. Apps are auto grouped into a tiny icon (vista app grouping). But can mouse over to see all the apps like the vista taskbar preview, but it expands out all the apps.

Kind of also gone a bit like OSx. How the apps can sit there not open. But you can click to launch. So combination of taskbar & quicklaunch now.

Can FINALLY reogranise things in the taskbar!

Taking advantage of widescreen, can click and drag & dock a window to be “1/2 full screen” so you can dock 2 apps at once.

“Libraries” the flexibility of folders, the power of search. Looks like a standard folder view. Library locations can be anywhere (USB, other drive, a share on another computer). The search box shows keywords, so you can still search but now has highlighting on the filenames.

Home networking

Connect to the wireless home network. You get a unique PIN. So you can access your other PCs, picture frames, etc. Can share resources on your PC simply (music, etc.)

Media player is now more lightweight (FINALLY) but you can use those same libraries.

Can rightclick on a song, and say “play on a device” to play the song on any device on your network!!! Same with videos, pictures. So you can send media to your picture frames

Device stage. All the device you can access, their capabilities are now all grouped here. (mobile phones, pringers, Zunes, etc.)

When you are at work it auto connects you to the work printer, when you get home it auto connects you back to your home printer

Helps to make your desktop clean, gadgets can now stick onto your desktop.

New customisation with your PCs colour scheme. Colouroful. Combination of background photo with a colour scheme. More customisation options with the glass effect

Has stopped the notification popups “you need new defender updates, etc.” now when you have those mini icons (near the clock), they auto go off into a mini tray to keep it all clean, but then you can say which ones you want to show. All of those notifications are now in an “action frame” so you can read all the messages at once

Showing touch multitouch

HP touchsmart in the market today. How they have “augmented” the experience with touch

Repowered ALL of the mouse commands with touch. So in office 2007, you can now scroll, zoom, etc. just like you can on surface

IE knows about the onscreen keyboard. Can browse around with gestures. Can flick the screen to go forward/back

In win7 folder view, can scroll through.

MSpaint has been upgraded with a new ribbon bar. Can draw in mspaint with multitouch

Official screenshots

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31242879@N00/sets/72157608452379413/

2. Software & Services

Core of windows connects to services. Windows update, etc.

Windows live essentials. Optional/downloadable. Can connect to your own services, or use the live services (e.g. IMAP/POP or hotmail)

Nothing was really said except that more will be shared

3. Transition from vista

They got “LOTS of feedback from people about Vista RTM…………” from blogs and ‘some commercials….’ LOL

Vista SP1 brings it to a level that ppl can use

Readiness of the ecosystem. 95% of computers can now get drivers for vista.

Developers have been asking for “standards”. IE8 implements CSS, acid tests, etc. and released the testing framework they used to help other browsers.

Wordpad can use OpenXML and umm that other one.

UAC……. Yeah. How to help protect people from themselves. Said that they went too far with developers. But despite this, most apps now work well in standard user mode.

Home networking is much nicer. Sharing within a home. Realise that only hardcore people could really setup sharing. When you connect to your home, connect to the PCs, devices. When you are at work, realise you probably don’t want to share your music.

Have been sharing their experiences on the engineering 7 blog (I’ve been enjoying it)

4. APIs

Ribbon UI

Jump lists  (the right click thing on the taskbar)

Libraries (as in the new folder library search thing. To bring in files from multiple computers)

Multi touch, speech

DirectX

Future products with mail, etc. will help bring forward Jumplists and Libraries

They have a massive 42” LCD with multitouch in the conference hall to do collaboration, so that on win7 allows one experience. But there is still the surface

DirectX is been for games. In win7 have extended it to 2D and ‘fine looking text’. It is now the “Modern view of GDI”

Shows a video of Autodesk and how they use touch stuff.

Showing a 3D app (Mud box) which has a lizard in 3D. He is manipulating the model directly through touch. Can still zoom in, pan etc.

Well he says that it is a “more natural and intuitive interface” I don’t agree personally… looks awkward IMHO

5. Fundamentals

Decreased

• Memory – Decreased the core footprint of a core vista install. Don’t need to turn graphics stuff off to get a bit more performance.
• Disk I/O  – registry and indexer
• Power -DVD playback(I/O subsystem rejigged to get longer use), panel, timers(redone to take up less power!)

Increased

• Speed -faster boot
• Responsiveness –taskbar. Using less locks and semaphores
• Scale – now supports up to 256 processors

Shows how a tiny netbook (about the size of an eeepc). Has 1gb of ram. Win win7 boots up, half the ram is still free for use. And this is the current build, plan to drive that down

USB memory sticks. He loses them all the time. Can now use bitlocker on your USB sticks. When you insert a USB stick it will ask for a password. Can use group management to say how ppl can use USB sticks

VHDs. Can now natively mount VHDs. Can create & create a VHD directly in the drive manager

Can boot directly from a windows 7 VHD natively! So when you are developing you can keep on mounting and booting from a VHD and have it rollback for you if you like.

High DPI monitor. Much easier to set/work with it.

Managing multiple monitors. Can now set landscape, orientation, etc.

Improved magnifier…. Can press the start button and ‘+’. Is like a native built in zoomit. Ok it is kind of cool

New ways to connect to external projectors. Hold window key. And hit P. and you can now quickly change to do “Clone”, “display diff on each screen”, etc.

Enhanced remote desktop. If you remote into a computer with dual monitors, it will now support multi monitor and display it on both PCs

LOL can now customise the shutdown buttons default option

Can turn messages off for firewall, UAC, etc.

New UAC control panel. Can now slide to set what level of UAC prompts you want to see.

6. Path to RTM

Prebeta released to PDC attendees.

Beta will be released early next year through MSDN

Beta will have a feedback tool. Whenever you get frustrated win win7, double click and it will take the context of where you are and you can comment on. “Focus isn’t working, etc”

Customer experience improvement program. They look at all the data, resource consumption, do things crash etc. (and they talk about it on the Engineering 7 blog if you haven’t read that yet)

If you just use win7 with the experience improvement collection turned on. That is helping them heaps

“3 years from the general availability of Vista”

7. Call to action

• Install and use win7 pre-beta
• Develop for 64-bit  
• Integrate with win desktop (jumplists/libraries)
• Eval the new APIs
• Code to standards with IE8
• Download win live beta from download.live.com (windows live essentials)

Scott Guthrie comes on stage

How can developers take advantage of this.

Can access ribbon, multitouch, search etc. in C++/MFC (pffft anyone still uses that)

Multi core helpers.

.Net .5 SP1 is built into Win7 (40% cold start time improvement on most .net apps)

Streamlining the processs of getting .net onto PCs that don’t have it (is this really relevant anymore? What winPC doesn’t have it)

He jumps into some code

Showing a WPF app which is a photo viewer (he will release the source code in a few weeks)

It is just a standard WPF app, so he now wants to add win7 features

Mainpage.xaml wants to add ribbon by using the new WPFRibbon. Does this by changes <Window> to <WPF:PageRibbon> or something like that

Then adds a <WPF:RibbonGroup> section.

Now has a basic ribbon, with back/forward buttons. Hmm that was easy

Can get the ribbon contextualisation. So get extra tabs to show up when doing something

The ribbonbar is affected by system customisation settings (colour scheme, etc.)

Can add jumplists. So now when he rightclicks the app in the taskbar, gets options to “start a slideshow, etc.”

Can get multitouch stuff into your WPF app. Gestures, etc.

Can do pixel effects on everything easily, so when you click can get an effect like you touch water happening.

Releasing a new WPF toolkit today

• Datagrid
• Datepicker
• Calendar
• Ribbon
• And VISUAL STATE MANAGER!!!

.Net 4.0

WPF impreovements in multitouch, deepzoom

Can have clr 2.0 and 4.0 in the same address space

New component model. Managed extensibility framework?

Can dynamically add extensions. Like silverlight apps in clients. (huh I missed this)

Better databinding improvements

VS2010

Visual studio 2010 will be built on WPF

Multi monitor support

Better Test Driven Development experience

Can use the extensibility stuff to add extra functionality into VS2010

He is now going to demo how to build one of these extensibilities.

Can now add new features into the editior.

Going to show how to visualise comments better (showing a standard source file with XML comments everywhere)

The code will go and look over the sourcecode and look for comments. Can now visualise it differently

To register with VS, need to add a new export attribute (text is too small for me to read it)

Then you just drag the .dll into the VS2010 plugin folder

Then no need to restart VS2010, it is now showing the source code in a much nicer way!

OOOH nice, another extensibility thing. He clicks on the bug ID in the source code, and a popup connects to his bug tracker and brings up the details for that bug

Managed extensibility framework will be part of .Net so you can let people extend your own apps this easily.

Some guy from tesco.com on stage

Tesco is the worlds LARGEST grocery shop

Need to make shopping experience better.

They start with a gadget. Gadget shows how many days until your delivery arrives.

Click gadget to launch it. It is now a family calendar and message board

With the calendar they are going to do “meal planning”. Add some meals, then auto adds the ingredients required into the shopping basket

Can browse through recipes, videos of how to cook it. List of ingredients, can click and drag the ingredients you require into basket.

Products you can buy have the nutritional values on it

Hah, he grabs a product that he wants some more of, uses the webcan to screencap the barcode and auto searches and finds it.

Scott back on stage

Going to update web stuff with IE8

Shipped better ASP.Net stuff in SP1 (dynamic data, REST, etc.)

MVC going to be released in a few months

Adding jquery support in Visual studio 2008. With intellisense can download it today from jquery website http://weblogs.asp.net/mikaelsoderstrom/archive/2008/10/27/intellisense-f-246-r-jquery-sl-228-ppt.aspx

ASP.Net 4.0 imprevements

MVC

AJAX

Distributed caching (shipping a new CTP this week)

Javascript, etc.

Web.config. can now setup debug/release/staging etc. and have rightclick support. And deployment improvements

Silverlight 2

Lots of ppl are using it… yay usual marketing stuff

Silverlight toolkit is being released today

Charting is being included. oooh

VS2010 will have a fully improved Silverlight designer. WYSIWYG editor

Just teased they are going to show how to use silverlight OUTSIDE the browser

Graphic and data support improvements coming

David Treadwell comes on stage (about 1hour 40mins in)

He is going to talk about live services. And that they wit in top of Azure

Live services allow identity management

Allows 3^rd parties to use the login

Customisation of thee LiveID login screen

Active directory integration

LiveID as an OpenID provider

Hook into the ‘social graph’ of each person. You can now leverage this

Can integrate windows live messenger features into your own website

Geospatial features can be integrated

Uses interoperable standard protocols

11% of total internet minutes are spent on live services

Talking about connectivity between devices.

Want to make it easy to integrate client apps with what happens on the web.

Want to make it easy to connect with people

Anywhere/anytime access to data.

This is why we have live mesh

Live mesh is: Users, devices, applications, data sync

Can be used to help support S+S applications

He is now announcing the “Live Framework” wraps around Live services

Works on PC/Phone/Web

Ori Amiga comes on stage

Showing how to connect into Live framework into a windows app.

Going to add 3 new functionalities.

Going to let it easily access all of his data

Then allow it to synchronise the user settings across mesh

Then tap into the social graph

First he just enumerates his folders in his live mesh by using a foreach(var m in livefx.Mesh.Meshobjects.Folders)

Now all his foldrs are being shown.

Can do a foreah to get all devices Foreach( in  livefx.mesh.devices.entries)

Is now using LINQ to get stuff out of live services

Gee that was REALLY easy

Now he has the app running on 2 PCs. And using mesh synch, is sharing data with the user on the other PC

He updated a photo and saw it get updated automatically on the other PC.

He took a photo on his mobile phone, the phone synced it back to his mesh. Which then went and updated his friend’s pc and was auto displayed in the application live

Ori leaves and Anthony Rose comes on stage

How to enable Live framework in a web app.

Going to update the BBC iPlayer

Shows a silverlight app running locally

WTF He just glossed over it. Just double clicked on a desktop icon to launch it.

Can use the app to sync media from the BBC mesh into your folder that you want across which devices you want.

Since it hooks into your social graph. He is on the website, can see that all of his friends have been watching a certain show. Kind of like facebook what have ppl been doing. But just auto there because they are in your social graph (msn contact list)

Seamless connectivity. He was watching a show on the PC, he walked off and started using his phone, but since it was automatically synced to his device, he was able to continue playing from where he left off.

Live framework ctp released (should be on www.azure.com )

Adding support for win mobiles and macintosh in the next update

Takeshi Numoto on stage to talk about office 14

http://www.winsupersite.com/office/office14_web_preview.asp

people want to share and collaborate on documents

announcing office web applications. Works in IE/firefox. If silverlight is installed has a nice rich UI

people can now view edit and collaborate directly in the browser for: word, excel, powerpoint, onenote

Onenote 14 demo

Notebook sharing, he has it open in office 14. The other guy has it open in a web browser. Like a live wiki update. That was very cool

One note mobile now syncs to office live.

Word 14 demo

2 people are editing a document independently. You are getting presence info about where the other person is updating the document, can click to IM them.

Can click to accept their changes and sync it in as you are editing.

Can open and edit fully online

Excel 14 demo

Using the web stuff. Opens it in IE and firefox and looks the same

Have the ribbons, etc. looks the same as the desktop app

2 people are looking at excel and as they are editing, is updating the other guys straight away.

Clicks publish, to publish the graph straight into windows live spaces

The graph is on windows live spaces, but still linked to the excel doc. So he updates the excel doc, clicks save. And the graph is updated next time it is loaded. nice

Ray Ozzie back on stage and closes the 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…

Ray ozzie on stage

Why people have been able to bet on Microsoft’s platforms previously

• “Microsoft always builds it’s own key apps on their own platforms”
• “Sheer scope of Microsoft’s reach. So their apps are able to reach critical mass”

Today, they’ll talk about servers, and services in the cloud, Tomorrow they are going to talk about frontends in the client on PC/phones

“Is the cloud overrated?”

Previously we kept IT in house, have our servers and networks. Now we are externalising it, and delivering it to our customers.

Customers first expected to just interact with us. Now the customers want to interact with each other through wikis, etc. want richness

Software dev and operations are becoming more and more intertwined.

Due to ‘peak capacity’ they need to overspend on hardware/capacity which usually goes wasted and idle

Are at risk to diastaers such as data cables being cut/earthquakes etc. So if you try to duplicated datacentres then even more cost. Latency is an issue also.

Ok you are talking about problems, I read “the big switch” shush now.

Conclusion. Yes cloud makes sense

20 mins in, he still hasn’t said anything…

Moving to clouds make sense…

• Tier 1: you on your PC
• Tier 2: Enterprises datacentres
• Tier 3: Web tier. Externally facing IT to the customers. This is the cale of the web. Needs computation/storage every explicitly targeted to scale

Microsoft wanted to build a new way to build a platform for Tier3 (the web)

Then EC2 jumped in before Microsoft, so they hope to learn from EC2’s learnings. But Microsoft want to be on an even LARGER scale and vision than EC2. They have been working on it for years.

Announcing a new “Microsoft windows in the cloud” Windows Azure

• Tier 1:Windows Vista/Mobile
• Tier 2: Windows Server
• Tier 3: Windows Azure

Will handle provisioning and geo-locational issues.

Previous stuff were built for “Scale up” situations

Need to build a new platform for the next 50 years of apps on the cloud. Need to worry about how to auto scale, model deployment, etc.

Windows Azure is NOT a piece of software you run on your own servers, but is run/housed on a bunch of Microsoft data centres

Windows Azure are being released into CTP today. Only a fraction of features are being shown.

Is being built to be able to quickly release new and many features from here on. It will be their highest scale, most economical way to host things in the cloud. Allows us to reach out to clients with sync, etc.

Live services, .net services, Sql data services, sharepoint services, CRM services (all sit on top of)
Windows Azure (the bottom layer)

30mins in. he’s finally said “enough with the high level stuff, lets go into some real stuff”

Amitabh Srivistava comes on stage

“Windows Azure is a scable windows environment for you to host things in the cloud”

Each processor is virtualised with a really efficient hypervisor

Employ LOTS of security: Code security, hypervisor, IP filtering, etc.

Desktop OS’s abstract away the complexities of control of the hardware

Azure abstracts away the complexities of running things in multiple virtual PCs

“Fabric controller manages services, not just services”

Model your service

• Roles and groups
• Channels and endpoints
• Interfaces
• Configuration settings

Can use this to construct complex apps

Shows a diagram which looks like a screenshot of VS2008 Architect. Shows a service model of how the interfaces are being exposed through endpoints.

You get the fabric controller to automatically control your app

High availability

Built to be fault redundant, etc. no single CPU failure will bring it down

Load balancing etc (duh this is the cloud and what EC2 are doing)

Azure services

• Service management
• Virtualised compute
• Blobs
• Tables
• Queues
• Locks

Rich developer experience

Can use VS2008 to run and debug on our own desktops without having to initially deploy it to the cloud!!!!

*brings Steve marx on stage*

He is going to demo “Hello World” on Azure

Uses a computer which has the Azure SDK installed

Clicks the cloud template

Gives him 2 project

Top project is info about his cloud app with configuration settings

The 2^nd app is a standard ASP.Net web app

Puts a label onto the Default.aspx

Goes into the codebehind to change the label at runtime

Hits debug, casinni spins up and you can debug it like usual

“Cloud on the desktop”

To deploy to the cloud, all he does is rightclick the top project and select “publish” it packages it up and takes him to the azure servies developer portal

Then he just uploads the package file, the configuration file and create with a URL

Uploads it into production. Then it takes a few mins to provision everything

http://hellocloud.cloudapp.net/

Bluehoo

New software app that runs on windows mobiles

Uses Bluetooth to connect to other people

Software shows you who is around you, what they are interested in.

Since this is something that can be used by heaps of people they chose Azure to host it

Bluehoo is running in a silverlight app, showing you the people around you that are discoverable.

Mobile app talks to a REST interface hosted in the cloud.

The silverlight app shows the info on your PC, web, mobile, etc.

The architecture: The messages go into queues, worker processes take them off the queue to process. This allows it to scale

To scale up, he just goes into the config screen, and tells it to scale up from 2 to 20 servers. “Azure is wonderful as it helps start-ups be able to compete”

Amitabh Srivistava comes back on stage

Is an open system. XML,REST. Eclipse will be able to hook in. Starting off with just .net apps. Will move onto native code.

Bob Muglia comes on stage

We are in the “5^th” generation of computing

Monolithic -> something, something -> SOA(nowish) -> Services(futurish)

We are now having to worry about apps that will scale out from the start

Services requirements

• Interopo, business process
• Identity & security
• Data management & compplience
• Services management

“We live in a world of federated identities that need to be rolled in”

Another 5 mins of talking about how we need to do this at lower cost

.Net services:

• Service bus – lets you connect your on premises applications with the cloud
• Access control – allows federated identity providers in AD, etc. both on premises and into the cloud
• Workflow services – taken from WF and putting them into the cloud

Identity:

• Every app requires identity
• Single, federated identity
• Oh a new codename “Geneva”. Enables federation between AD and the cloud

SQL Data services:

• Data syncrhonisation to sync from on premise into the cloud
• Geospatial, and other analytical stuff
• Reporting
• ETL
• (sounds like the entire SQL server feature set in the cloud)

Shawn Davison comes on stage

Is going to show how he built a “Product recall website” for manufacturers (when you have bad toys that are defective)

Legacy – lots of point to point and VPNs, etc.

Going to be working with 1000s of customers that have their own proprietary systems we need to hook into and their own identity/authentication

Showing the services bindings between us and the other partners. The “Access control rules” between him and the partners. The partners can use their own identities!

show the XOML that is being hosted inside the workflow services through the Azure web interface

Shows the application he built (an asp.net app) and puts in a product recall due to battery issues. It then went through a workflow, and into the .net services bus. Then all of the partners were notified

Flicks to a silverlight app. And shows how the partners are getting the messages. Is querying SQL data services.

Bob is on stage by himself (we are now over 1 hour in)

Talking about System Centre. It collects a lot of data.

People using it want to share the data and learn from others.

“Atlanta” is an app that uses Azure. New frontend for Systems Centre, can access info about things that are happening in their own environment “DHCP issues inside our network”, “CPU usage is down”. But now lets you compare against others

Service bus is used to connect the on premise stuff up into the cloud through firewalls.

He is now using Linq to query data from SQL data services. Looks like he is passing a string into SQL server which is the LINQ query. I THINK he is using LinqToEntities

Is pulling the data out into ASP.Net. then shows in silverlight, then uses SQL Report services

Know that everyone will still use on premise stuff. So windows server will be using a lot of things that are hosted on Azure moving forward and integrate with it (“Atlanta” is a good example of connecting on premise with the cloud)

Dave Thompson comes on stage

Problems with our customers are that they only update every other release. So we have problems with them upgrading (Think MYOB V1, v2, v3)

“Microsoft Online Service”

Exchange online, CRM online, sharepoint online, etc.

ALL of Microsoft products will be available through online

Easier to stay up to date because Microsoft does it for them.

Can provision and use in MINIUTES not weeks/months

Coca-Cola & Energizer have both entrusted their operations with Microsoft.

Talks about how federation works  (meh some pic of AD pointing to the cloud)

Talks about extending cloud apps (CRM, etc. by using web services)

Federated Identity control allows people to be in control of their own identities.

First he is  going to be an IT administrator, then a developer, then a project manager, then a customer.

Is the IT guy

• Shows how to use the services connector
• Is a simple wizard the IT guy uses on the computer. Select the URL, say who can access it. And that is it! Just 2 screens
• Communicates with the federation services.
• He now has federated identity.

Is now the developer. Now he just opens up CRM online

• Auto authenticated for him, no logon screen
• It has been customised and it is showing us the CRM customisations
• Can download the WSDL files to develop applications to interface with it.

Is now a product manager

• Looks through some orders
• Clicks approve on the order, kicks off workflow. And auto creates time sheets
• They customised version of word. With a customised ribbon control. It connects to CRM, shows all of the projects. Shows the data, selects it. And auto insterts it into the status report. Then he clicks submit to publish it to sharepoint.

Now he is the customer

• Goes to the portal to see how his project is going
• Has scorecards, etc.
• Can see how much it has cost them so far because of the timesheets/orders, etc.

In summary, showed how CRM & Sharepoint were connected.

The identity management from the company and the customer allowed a seamless integration

Ray Ozzie comes back on stage to close and give a summary

“When it is released commercially, costs primarily derived from apps resource consumption and a specific service level we agree to provide. Competitive with marketplace and variety of service models.”

Will be intentionally releasing a restricted number of services. And then bringing in more and more.