Morning Keynotes

Windows 7

Impressed by Steven Sinofsky's on-stage presence and very happy to hear about the Windows team's plans for Windows 7, which is being distributed to PDC attendees in "pre-beta" form.

Some good stuff:

  • Dramatically better support for connecting/disconnecting to external projectors or monitors. Just use Windows+P to browse through different modes (UI is just like Alt+Tab)
  • Much better multi-monitor support that even works of Remote Desktop
  • Promise of faster boot times, more responsive start menus
  • Claim of much smaller footprint. Sinofsky showed Win 7 running on a 1GB Netbook, and said there was still 512MB free after the OS loaded.
  • Customize the shut down button in the start menu to do what you want (sleep, restart, etc.)
  • Zoom display in and out using Windows++ and Windows+-

Dev 10

Kind of a flat presentation with uninteresting demos, but some interesting ASP.NET tech:

  • Dynamic data
  • Richer REST support
  • Model-View-Controller (MVC) support
  • AJAX/jQuery with Intellisense
  • Velocity Distributed Caching API (My team is rolling out a new version of MSDN forums next month that uses Velocity.)
  • Multiple web configs: debug, staging, release

Visual Studio is being re-written as a WPF app. The current beta has a WPF editor, but the rest of the app is not yet WPF. ScottGu gave a cool demo of a WPF comments control that provided rich formatting and functionality (e.g. pop-up bug info) inside a comments block.

Live

David Treadwell shared some interesting stats about Live.com:

  • 11% of all "Internet minutes" are spent on Microsoft Live apps.
  • Live ID currently has 460 million accounts with over one billion authentications per day.

Don Box & Chris Anderson

This keynote is a "program against the cloud" demo. Pretty fun to watch these guys work. While they're clearly working to a plan, they're also improvising.

They're showing off how to write cloud apps using Mesh, Azure and SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) It's all pretty simple. The points they're highlighting are the ability to have local machines interact with code and data hosted in the cloud using full REST apis, as well as rich Visual Studio integration.

I really didn't follow all the details--they were moving fast, and  I was only half paying attention--but the important takeaway is the writing against the cloud is easy and flexible.

My question is simple: When will Azure and SSDS be ready for prime time? In other words, when will it be ready to host a really large scale app?

Office Web Apps

Tucked into the tail-end of today's keynotes was demo of web-versions of Word and Excel. These were very full featured versions of the apps running inside web browsers (both IE and Firefox) were shown. Even though the apps were in a browser, they still felt like the real thing. Imagine an experience even more complete than Outlook Web Access.

These demos felt out of sync with the rest of the keynotes--not really sure why they were shown at PDC. I'm guessing it was more of a PR move than anything.

I'm curious how Microsoft will distribute the web versions. My guess is that they'll be free if you own a desktop license, or they'll be available via an online subscription. Another idea: Will they be baked into SharePoint?

Another detail they showed was distributed document editing intended to be released in Office 14. The idea is more than one person can edit simultaneously and changes can then be merged.

Velocity

Really like Velocity, which our Forums team is using to improve scalability and perf. This is a simple distributed caching architecture that stores name-value pairs in RAM caches distributed across multiple machines.

Touted benefits are scaling, performance and availability.

The availability point was new to me...one of the nice features they have is that every item is backed up to a different server. When the "primary" server goes down for any reason, the backup data on "secondary" server are promoted to primary. In addition, the cache is redistributed amongst the remaining servers, and any lost backup items are recreated on the remaining servers.

SQL Server Data Services

Azure Storage vs. SQL Data Services: basically Azure is flat ("essential"), while SQL is SQL: relational, query, reports, etc. I missed the exact number, but I think I heard that there are 500 servers currently live.

Three key pillars of SQL Data Servers (SDS):

  1. Storage for all data types from birth to archival
  2. Rich data processing services
  3. Operational excellence (availability, on-demand, fee-based)

Benefits:

  • Scale up AND down on demand. If you scale up yourself, you still need to carry the infrastructure when you scale down.
  • Immediate availability allows great nimbleness.
  • High performance and availability; inherently redundant.
  • Use standard data sources and data binding
  • Continue using existing tools like Reporting Services

SDS data model:

  • Authority (server): unit of geo-location and billiing; tied to DNS name, collection of containers
  • Container (database): unit of consistency, scope for query and update, collection of entities
  • Entity (roles): unit of storage, property bag of name/value pairs, no schema required

Scaling:

  • Master cluster manager used to manage partitioning across data nodes.
  • Additional data nodes added as needed to support busy partitions. NOTE: As SDS user, you are required to specify node...cross-node queries not currently supported. Assures full-consistency by letting you retrieve data immediately upon write.

Other details:

  • SDS has custom query language that is largely typeless.
  • All properties (name/value pairs) are indexed (always btree).
  • SDS co-located with Azure, so there is no over-Internet latency when going between Azure code and SDS.
  • Bulk loading via SSIS will be supported at some point, though not sure when.
  • Full-text searching is not currently supported, but the backend is SQL Server, which supports it. Thus, it's possible the service will support it in the future.
  • No plans to build an RDF layer at this time (I have no idea what this means.)

Public beta begins mid-November:

  • 50GB total data per account
  • 1,000 containers per authority
  • Automatically available with Azure account