The Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC09) kicked off in Los Angeles yesterday. This is a significant event for the Microsoft’s cloud computing strategy since this it marks the official release of the Azure platform and consequently much of the keynote sessions on day 1 was dedicated to this platform as a service.
Ray Ozzie kicked off the keynote session describing Microsoft's three screens and a cloud vision, where user experiences are seamlessly connected across PCs (web and rich client), mobile phones, and TVs, by the –based services.
During the opening keynote, Loic Le Meur (@loic) announced the availability of a WPF and Silverlight client for Seesmic and Matt Mullenweg (@mattmullenweg), announced the availability of Wordpress on Azure. An amusing addition to the fold is the Cheeseburger network hosting oddlyspecific.com on Azure.
A surprise announcement for me was the availability of a marketplace for 3rd party services called Microsoft Pinpoint and a data-as-a-service offering called “Dallas” that provides datasets to developers from sources such as NASA, DATA.gov, Associated Press and CitySearch. During this part of the keynote session Vivek Kundra, CIO for the US Government, spoke about a partnership with Microsoft and an initiative NASA has called Be A Martian.
In between keynote session there was a video roll of a number of customer success stories including those worked by some of my colleagues, including a pretty significant partnership with Dominos, which leverages Azure to offset a 50% spike in traffic for the Super Bowl. Other great local stories include CCH/Wolters Kluwer that leverages Azure for tax calculations and Accenture that has a strategy to port their internal applications to Azure.
Bob Muglia kicked off the next session talking about Microsoft’s strategy for and roadmap for integrating on-premise applications into private, hosted and public clouds. Kelley Blue Book, which maintains an additional underutilized data center for disaster recovery, spoke about their use of Azure. Bob also spoke about Windows Server AppFabric, which is a set of technologies that makes it easier to develop and manage scalable Web and composite applications that span both the server and the cloud. This is essentially the product of the hosting and caching technologies known as “Dublin” and “Velocity”. In addition, .NET Services is rolled in AppFabric Service Bus with AppFabric Control Services.
Bob also announced our plans to offer Windows Server virtual machine support on Windows Azure which will essentially provide customers the ability to move their own custom VMs from on-premise to the cloud. In addition, the official release of our claims-based authentication framework called Windows Identity Foundation (“Geneva”) was announced. Finally, Bob also announced the availability of ASP.NET MVC2 beta – you can download the Tailspin Travel demo on Codeplex.
All in all, a ton of great content - one geek out moment I had was when Don Box was talking about SQL Azure and oAuth – very cool stuff! I know I’ve already omitted some of the announcements in this blog entry - if you would like to view a video stream of the keynote sessions, please visit http://www.microsoftpdc.com.
You can track Microsoft PDC news and customer and partner success stories in the Virtual Press Room. You can also follow PDC09 on Twitter and Facebook. You can watch live video interviews with executives, developers, and partners on Channel 9 Live on microsoftpdc.com after the keynotes each day.