Love it! Get it!
Update: I guess words were in order (doh!). The fine print:
This application brings together the many compelling platform capabilities of Silverlight 4 into a rich out-of-browser application in the familiar context of Facebook.Enjoy the photos, feeds, events, friends’ walls, and inbox mail from your Facebook account in an appealing and user-friendly environment.
Note: Silverlight Client for Facebook is a Silverlight 4 developer preview application. When Silverlight 4 is finally released you may be required to uninstall and re-install the plugin. In order to install Silverlight Client for Facebook, you will need to install the Silverlight 4 beta first. After installing, return to this page.
I updated the links to get the application from http://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/apps/facebookclient/.
At every Silverlight major announcement, I camp out at Tim Heuer’s blog to learn more about what just happened. This was true for Silverlight 3 and when we announced the beta of Silverlight 4. Tim offers his perspective of what architects should know about Silverlight as a platform in this ARCast .TV special and includes a bunch of cross cutting concerns.
Check it out! Got a cool Silverlight Application? Let me know!
The Microsoft Business Integration Road Show is coming to New York and Boston and I’ve got permission to invite folks who care about enterprise integration. These are architect and technical leader focused, in-person events:
January 19, 2010 in New York, NY
January 21, 2010 in Waltham, MA
Follow the links above for details and maps. The session abstracts can be found here. If you plan on attending shoot me an email: allandcp AT microsoft DOT com
Here’s wishing the readers of this blog and the random passers by a fantastic and prosperous 2010. I took a mini vacation from blogging and I’m back – it’s a compulsive habit and hopefully I’m able to help you in some small way.
I thought I’d start out by letting you know that there are but 3 days left for the Windows Server 2008 R2 Haiku contest. Go, Go, Go!
Enter or vote or just download the free eBook on Windows Server 2008 R2 (there will be a quiz on what’s different in IIS 7.5!)
I’ve made no resolutions this year, other than finally losing this baby weight ;) Talk to you soon.
Ready for a geometric progression of your application’s usage? How’s this for a fan curve?
This was one of the data points (details here) I heard while catching up on a session from the recent Microsoft PDC: Lessons Learned: Building Scalable Applications with the Windows Azure Platform. The session is about 46 minutes long and contains 2 Windows Azure success stories.
Success Story 1 – Thuzi (minute 4 to minute 20)
The first centers around a Facebook application built by Thuzi.com for Outback Steakhouse as part of a marketing promotion – the graph above is part of this story. Jim Zimmerman, CTO/Lead Developer of Thuzi discusses what to watch out for when going live and why a cloud back end was chosen (viral nature of the application, unpredictable and potential geometric adoption). “We don’t know much about running data centers…besides we didn’t want to purchase extra servers ‘just in case’.”
Jim shared the decision tree used to pick Windows Azure over Google and Amazon. Of particular interest to me as I talk to architects looking at Windows Azure are the lessons learned:
Nice work, don’t forget to become a fan and enjoy some Blooming Onions!
Success Story 2 – RiskMetrics (minute 20:30 to minute 44:30)
The second story is very intriguing to me as I ponder scenarios of “hybrid” workloads - sharing work across on premise and cloud infrastructures. RiskMetrics detailed what they have accomplished and what they continue to work with Microsoft on.
While the actual session is very short, I’d encourage you to download the slides that accompany the video to review some of the architectural patterns followed and the choices/compromises RiskMetrics had to make. I particularly liked the mind bending observation at around 27:20 minute mark – they only had to change 10 lines out of 50K lines of code to enable it on Windows Azure. Say what???? Watch the session!
Related Sessions
Recommended during this session…
Catch up Part 1 and Part 2 of my Azure stories from the Microsoft PDC.
If you are reading this blog, consider yourself invited to these invite only webcasts in the next 2 weeks. Timely sessions around developing and architecting with Visual Studio 2010.
Space is limited, so click to register yourself a spot.
Painless SharePoint Development in Visual Studio 2010
Date: December 9, 2009, 10-11:30am US Eastern Time
This session will provide an overview of the new SharePoint tools that will be shipping in Visual Studio 2010. Specific topics covered will include an overview of the project and item templates, a discussion of the different features in the SharePoint tooling experience, areas of extensibility within Visual Studio 2010 that can enhance the SharePoint development experience and a demonstration of these tools in Visual Studio 2010. This session is ideal for the developer who is familiar with SharePoint 2007 and wants to understand how they can use Visual Studio 2010 to begin developing for SharePoint 2010.
Target Audience: Developers, Architects, Web Designers and technical managers and stakeholders who wish to gain a better understanding of the benefit of developing for SharePoint using VS2010.
Developing Quality Applications in Visual Studio 2010
Date: December 16, 2009, 10-11:30am US Eastern Time
Visual Studio 2010 introduces a slew of remarkable tools that can improve software quality. Learn about the IntelliTrace and how it can help finds that would otherwise go undetected or be flagged as “not reproducible”. The Code UI Test feature can help automate GUI testing saving hours of time and effort. The improved reporting and charting of the profiling tools will display memory, CPU and threading bottlenecks. Test Impact Analysis suggests the subset of unit tests that need to be run when code is modified. Learn about the new Test Elements toolset that enables test case management, defect submission & reporting, manual testing and automated test record & playback. And the Lab Management tools will make it easier than ever to cost effectively maintain a test lab. See how all of these tools take application quality to the next level.
Target Audience: IT Managers, IT Professionals, IT Directors, Solution Architects, Product Managers, Software Developers, Developers, Architects
See you there!
I thought you may like the look of these fireside chats – topics ranging from SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft’s Online Services. First session is on Tuesday, December 1st. See you there!
The whys and registration details are here.
Get part 1 of this post, here. If you are a customer, partner or competitor of Microsoft, you’ll want to review Windows Azure Platform Business Model “Transforming to a services business” by Dianne O’Brien, Sr. Director of Business Strategy at Microsoft.
The Session
In just 32 minutes, Dianne details the business specifics of Windows Azure including workloads that make sense for Windows Azure…
Optimal workload patterns for cloud computing.
…and the tools to help in business case justification to move workloads to Windows Azure. These include a TCO Tool (TCO Tool screen shots by Bill Zack) and pricing…
Windows Azure; priced to move
As part of the pricing review, Dianne mentioned various purchasing models (e.g. Consumption, Subscription, etc.) and talked about promotional offers and programs (development accelerators, MSDN Ultimate, off-peak ingress discounts until 6/2010, 5% discount for partners and more!).
Dianne rounded out the Windows Azure Platform story with a business roadmap:
Windows Azure the road ahead
What about the Q&A?
Good use of a clock for a session like this. With 30 minutes to go, she left plenty of time for questions that included…
Did she do a good job of answering the questions? You make the call. Watch the video!
Some final thoughts
As part of her session, Dianne mentioned Persistent Systems and RiskMetrics who represent the public sector and the financial sector respectively. It is great to see these early success stories. If you’d like more, check out the Evidence section of the Windows Azure site.
This is a great start with exceptional support (Microsoft is offering Microsoft Premier Support for Windows Azure) and a focus on customer/partner satisfaction (Microsoft PinPoint is the marketplace to make connections and discover new services). It is also good to know that what differentiates the Windows Azure Platform from its cloud competitors is the focus on service lifecycle management to reduce complexity and cost. And as Dianne reminded us, there is zero cost to you for this on Windows Azure!
On a time budget and looking for a great video that gives you a vantage point of what is Windows Azure and what’s next for it? I’d like to suggest this 1 hour session from the Microsoft PDC: Windows Azure Present and Future (SVC13) by Manuvir Das.
As part of this session, Manuvir described Windows Azure “bit by bit” and the available, shipping feature set (e.g. secure certificate store, logging and diagnostics system, service management API, in-place rolling upgrades)…
Windows Azure - flexible application hosting, lights out service management and storage at massive scale.
…while highlighting a great brand like Coca-Cola Enterprises doing real world Azure today…
"The resilience and reliability of this platform is some of the benefits that we are seeing." – SVP & CIO, Coca-Cola Enterprises
…and showed what’s next for Windows Azure – a great set of features (e.g. Administrator privileges, user-driven VMs and terminal server access) – that many enterprise development and IT shops have asked for.
Windows Azure Futures – you ask, they listen.
What is great about this session is that Manuvir doesn’t overwhelm with nitty gritty details but defers those to other sessions, which (imho), are required viewing for platform architects and technical decision makers of every persuasion:
P.S. The slides/videos for all these sessions can be found here. Got another hour? Check out this session also from Manuvir Das entitled: Lap Around Windows Azure Platform which talks about SQL Azure, AppFabric (nee .NET Services) and the new project codenamed “Dallas” (aka information as a service).
Up next, the Business of Windows Azure!
eek! Finally the wait is over and the Microsoft PDC gets into full gear next week in LA. I’m one of the fortunate ones able to attend in person – meet new folks, rekindle old friendships and forge partnerships with the various Microsoft product teams. I plan to attend as many sessions as I can but plan not to miss the Birds of a Feather session at Lunch: Will Cloud Computing Change Your Life?
See you there! Oh, and the answer to the question is a resounding YES…now the trick is whether the change will be positive :)
eek! I stumbled upon this neat mind map of the SharePoint 2010 developer platform:
From the website:
The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform wall poster shows a colorful view of SharePoint 2010 developer tools, community ecosystem, execution environment, Sharepoint Server 2010 workloads, and target application types.
Great learning resource for folks architecting/developing for SharePoint. For example:
- Under execution environment branch, you have the option to run SharePoint on Premise, Hosted and/or via SharePoint online.
- For application types, in SharePoint 2010, you have multiple targets (I’ve seen great demos using Visual Studio 2010).
Hey Erika, I want the 2010 version of this 2007 coolness. I said Tree of Life; but somebody said the poster looked like dandelions…oh well, perhaps it is the product’s team subtle way of getting folks to read the docs on Governance :)
Resource Round Up
Happy SharePoint!
eek! Say hello to the Windows Management Framework starring our dear friend PowerShell 2.0. Read more here. Why is this cool/important? You now have the power with PowerShell to manage all your favorite Windows flavors (XP to 7 to Server 2008 R2) and (wait for it)…the Cloud! Yes, with the Windows Azure Service Management CmdLets, you can start to exert service management control on your Windows Azure assets.
In the screenshot below, I’m using the built in - on Windows 7 - GUI for PowerShell aka ISE to run these new CmdLets. Break, Debug and Run…effortlessly!
These CmdLets are using the RESTful Service Management API under the covers (I used the makecert business from that blog post to test the Get-HostedServices CmdLet which requires a cert).
Happy Day! PowerShell to the People as I always say!
eek! I really dig Scott Guthrie’s latest blog post on the WPF 4 Improvements and Lighting Up Windows 7 applications planned for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. With all the excitement around Windows 7, its time to jumpstart that killer application and now you have the tools – the Ribbon, Multitouch support, UI shell integration, and more with Visual Studio 2010.
So what will you build? Let us know we’d love to show it off at the Innovation Showcase (because customers make it real)!
eek! A couple of local (from my perspective) community run events that are usually a good deal in terms of mind expansion. Got a Saturday to get smarter? Join your peers for the 3rd annual Fairfield/Westchester Code Camp on Saturday November 7, 2009. 24 sessions, 4 tracks at the unbeatable price of FREE!
Registration and other details here.
Also, the next CT .NET Developers’s meetup is on November 10, 2009 with a session on the newest language in the Visual Studio 2010 box – F#. This is a great venue to meet new and old friends.
eek! You know I’m a fan of the Training Kits – neatly packaged smarts across an array of Microsoft technologies – Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, ASP.NET MVC, etc. The latest revision to the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 beta training kit does not disappoint. For all the details on what’s inside, I’d check out the Managed World blog from one of the heroes behind the Training Kit(s). Also there is a Training Course that complements this kit.
a good starter for what’s new
For me, this is a great way for developers and architects to quickly get a 200-300 level understanding of what is new/changed and allow them to focus on areas that may hold promise for their next great thing. Focus areas include:
Get it!
