Announcing Casablanca, a native library to access the cloud from C++

Our devices are becoming increasingly connected, and at the same time our customers expect the applications running on those devices to be fast and fluid. Asynchrony is important on the client for responsiveness and on the server for scalability.

Today we are announcing Casablanca, a Microsoft incubation effort to support cloud based client-server communication in native code using a modern asynchronous C++ API design. Casablanca is a project to start exploring how to best support C++ developers who want to take advantage of the radical shift in software architecture that cloud computing represents.

If you are a developer writing a responsive client app, or a scalable server-side solution, where asynchrony goes hand in hand with parallelism, you should give Casablanca a try.

Here’s what you get with Casablanca:

• Support for accessing REST services from native code on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview by providing asynchronous C++ bindings to HTTP, JSON, and URIs
• A Visual Studio extension SDK to help you write C++ HTTP client side code in your Windows 8 Metro style app
• Support for writing native-code REST for Azure, including Visual Studio integration
• Convenient libraries for accessing Azure blob and queue storage from native clients as a first class Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) feature
• A consistent and powerful model for composing asynchronous operations based on C++ 11 features
• A C++ implementation of the actor-based programming model inspired by Erlang.
• A set of samples and documentation

We have released Casablanca on devlabs to get feedback from you on what you think your needs are and how we can improve. Please use the forums to give us feedback.

We are also releasing a survey to learn more about you and get feedback from you on how we could improve Casablanca. Please help us out by filling the survey link here: http://bit.ly/casablancacpp

Here are a few links

• Soma’s announcement on his blog
• Casablanca on DevLabs
• Casablanca forums

Thanks,

The Casablanca team