Azure Services Platform Launched

by | Oct 27, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Microsoft just unveiled the Azure Services Platform during the keynote address at the Professional Developer Conference this morning. Windows Azure promises to provide a flexible environment in the cloud for hosting high demand and high availability apps.

You can follow any new developments at the wiki which has been set up here: http://www.mycloudapp.net/

PDC Day 1 – Azure Services Platform, CTP availability and much more!

by | Oct 27, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication


Well, we’re finally here, on the ground in LA at PDC. After months of speculation, chatter and building curiosity about Microsoft’s next move in the cloud space, we’ve officially gone on record with the details.  It’s always interesting to take a quick look back at what’s been said up to this point; I have to say, some folks got it right and some were way off. My hope is that the details Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia provided in today’s keynote kick off a fact-based ’round two’ of these industry discussions.


 


And while we’re all ready to celebrate, I want to take a moment to re-emphasize what a critical day this is.   It’s not just critical for Microsoft, but for partners, developers, consumers, IT Pros and technology watchers alike.  We all know that we’re in the midst of another paradigm shift; it’s time to carve out your place in making it real and to move forward. I’ll start: My commitment is to do my part in helping develop and bring to market the best possible solution in the Azure Services Platform. This means continuing to have conversations with partners and customers early on, and pushing the boundaries of transparency to ensure the feedback we’re collecting is based on a fully informed view.


 


So, let’s start with a few of the most important facts from today’s keynote. There are a host of sources live today that can provide all the nitty gritty details.


 


%u00b7         Ray announced the Azure Services Platform today. The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together.  It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds.


%u00b7         The Azure Services Platform consists of the following components: Windows Azure, Live Services, SQL Services, .NET Services, SharePoint Services, and Dynamics CRM Services.  


%u00b7         There are CTPs available today, as well as other important technologies that will foster innovation in the world of application development and help to bridge on-premise and cloud domains, such as “Oslo” and the “Dublin” app server enhancements I recently detailed in my blog. Folks at the show today should begin taking a look at all of these pieces.


 


My group will continue to work on the .NET Services and Windows Azure, as well as “Oslo” (tools, repository and language for modeling), “Dublin”, BizTalk Server and Windows Communication Foundation,  Windows WorkFlow Foundation.  Thus, we will have our foot in both cloud and premises investments, and those technologies that serve to unite the two: the ’+’ in S+S, if you will.  .NET Services, which was previously the BizTalk Services incubation, includes hosted workflow execution, a service bus for communicating across applications and services, and access control for securing applications. These hosted services allow you to easily create federated applications that span from on-premises environments to the cloud.   “Oslo”, which we recently provided more details about, was highlighted in the keynote today as the core of Microsoft’s modeling investments for both cloud and premises.  We also committed to furthering our interoperability efforts around the declarative language, “M”, by including it under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. “Dublin”, “BizTalk Server” and WCF + WF are also big topics at this year’s PDC, so be sure to check out the sessions to hear more.


 


I look across all these pieces, and I’m incredibly excited and passionate about what’s to come.  I feel confident that our investments in innovation, including both new and existing technologies, are the right ones and will help our customers and partners with more choice, interoperability, better security & reliability, simpler management & planning and truly breathe new life into today’s investments.


 


Now, on to day 2!

PDC Keynote – Windows/.NET platform in the "Cloud" – Windows Azure

PDC Keynote – Windows/.NET platform in the "Cloud" – Windows Azure

by | Oct 27, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

So I’m here at PDC – I plan to post nuggets of data here to my blog.  I am going
to keep a running count of new stuff announced relating to REST thought.

All the APIs for this new platform (Windows Azure): storage, queues for communication
are all RESTful endpoints.

REST FTW!

I’ve been talking about REST  –  and as I’ve been doing it, I’ve been hinting
that more and more stuff from MS would be based on the principles of REST.  9:30
– one hour into the PDC and already a big announcment IMO.


Check out my new book on REST.

Microsoft Cloud Services now has a new name Windows Azure

by | Oct 27, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Today at the Microsoft PDC 2008 Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure, formally know as Cloud Services. Windows Azure is now available as a CTP (Community Technology Preview) just go to www.azure.com to download the SDKs and signup for an Windows Azure account.

Windows Azure will include what was previously called BizTalk Labs / BizTalk Services which in Azure is called .Net Services.

Please go to www.azure.com and signup for the CTP and make sure that you give Microsoft your feedback on Windows Azure.

PDC08 Day Zero – I’m a “Connected Systems” MVP!

by | Oct 27, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I’ve just heard that my MVP status has officially been switched from “BizTalk Server” to “Connected Systems Developer”. I’ve been considering the switch for a while, and the kick off at PCD seems to be perfect timing for this. It will allow me to focus more on WCF, WF, and the Oslo and related technologies, whilst still being involved in the BizTalk Server community (BizTalk is the most connected system there is right?). Over the past few months I have been getting more involved with the WCF/WF side of things, and the imminent (I’ve heard its Tuesday sometime) release of the Oslo bits will mean I can focus on the new technologies.
In a way it’s sad to be breaking one of the strong ties I have had to the BizTalk community, but I’m really looking forward to working (playing) with the new technologies, and working with the development community to help to add some context and public information as to using the bits. It will be like back in the day with BizTalk 2004 beta, where there was no real documentation and all the best information was in the blogs.
PDC registration began at 08:00, and it seemed like quite a lot of the Swedish attendees were there on the dot. This year there are over 300 attending from Sweden, the third highest country after the US and Canada, not bad for a nation of 9 million. (Just to settle any confusion, I am actually English, but living in Sweden.) As I’m not in the “pre-con” I thought I’d hang around the lobby and hook up with people know. I bumped into Kevin Smith, Jon Fancey, Jon Flanders and a few others. The bad news is I could not get into lunch without the “pre-con” wrist band, and all the soda fridges were locked.
Later on I had dinner with Kent Brown and Cliff Simpkins, who both work on the CSD team, and chatted about all kinds of Oslo, BizTalk, WCF, WF & Dublin related stuff. It’s going to be a very exciting few days when this information all goes public.
After dinner Kent and I headed for the Palermo party. When we arrived it was fairly chaotic, with a queue to get in, and very busy inside. I met up with Joao Martins and Yossi, and took advantage of the free beer (the free food and free swag had all run out by then). The QuickLearn team arrived later on, and I had some time to chat with John and Rob, and some of John’s ex-students from Norway.
PDC Top Tip #2: All the best parties are word-of-mouth
There’s the Official PDC Party, and the Un-official PDC party, but there is also a host of other parties, dinners, and social events going on all week. If you have the right connections, you probably know the score, but if not it’s always asking people you are chatting with what their plans are for later on, there’s a fairly good chance that you might get word of one of these secret events, and maybe even get an invite.
PDC FAQ 02: Where are you guys from?

Announcing the WCF REST Starter Kit!

by | Oct 27, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I am pleased to announce the release of the WCF REST Starter Kit today on CodePlex.  The folks on the WCF team have been working hard on this for several months and it is exciting to see it released. 

WCF has always had, and will continue to have, great support for SOAP and WS-*.  But Representational State Transfer, or "REST" is becoming popular these days in many circles and we want WCF to have great support for both web services programming models.  Because of the extensibility of the WCF architecture, it turned out to be fairly straight-forward to support REST-style services as well, making WCF the one-stop shop for building services.

We introduced support for REST in .NET Framework 3.5, and enhanced it in SP1.  But there were still lots of scenarios where we saw opportunities to simplify building REST-style services in WCF and so the team set out to make major strides in this area for WCF 4.0. 

The REST Starter Kit is a preview of features that are being considered for WCF 4.0, released early on CodePlex so you can download it, look at the code, play with it, and give us feedback so we deliver the right REST features in WCF 4.0

We’ve spun up a new area of the WCF Dev Center focused on REST capabilities in WCF and especially the WCF REST Starter Kit: www.msdn.microsoft.com/wcf/rest.  You can find everything you need here to learn about building RESTful services with WCF.  There are links to download the Starter Kit from CodePlex, a White Paper and series of screencasts by Aaron Skonnard from Pluralsight on using the Starter Kit, overview documentation, release notes, and even hands on labs.  We also have links to great background materials on the web for learning the history and motivation of REST. 

In addition to helper objects that provide new functionality (such as caching and help pages for RESTful services) there are project and item templates to make it super easy to create your first RESTful service and get it up and running quickly.  In fact, you can pretty much hit F5 on the auto-generated code and have a running service.  Then you can watch Aaron’s screencasts to understand what the code is doing and how to modify the code to customize the service to your requirements. 

There are also more advanced samples in the kit you can use to learn more about REST.  And this all runs on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, so you can work with the Starter Kit with the bits we ship today.

All right, enough talk.  Go download the WCF REST Starter Kit, give it a run, and let me know how you like it.

Blogical Sftp Adapter – New release

by | Oct 26, 2008 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Johan Hedberg has updated the Sftp adapter with various features such as:

  • Supports file Rename on top of the default Delete behavior for Receive, with macro support – you can specify eg. %SourceFileName%.old for rename name.
  • Support for a temporary filename on Send, with macro support, as well as a temporary folder.
  • Added VerifyFileSize property to Send Adapter – for situations where you have the need to perform an extra check of the file sent, that it is in fact the size you expected.

Download from Codeplex