Architecture & Stuff

MIX 09 Videos available now

This is Just a quick note to tell you that over 80 videos of the MIX 09 Keynote and breakout sessions can be viewed at http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/

Some key Azure announcements at MIX were:

• Geolocation - The ability to specify the data center that you want your storage and compute units located in.  This also includes being able to specify affinity between your compute and storage units.
• Full Trust/Unmanaged Code support - Relaxes the more limited trust restrictions of the previous CTP and allows you to both include .NET DLLs that were not allowable in the previous CTP trust model and also includes support for invoking non .NET code.  Also supports inter-process communications with unmanaged code via Named Pipes.  This enables you to utilize existing investments in your legacy and native code.
• Fast CGI support - Allows PHP applications and applications written in other languages to run in Windows Azure.
• Single install for both the Visual Studio Tools for Azure and the SDK.

I could go into more detail, but there have been quite a few blog posts about this.  See http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/.

Of course there was also coverage of last weeks announcement of T-SQL/TDS support for SQL Data Services that allows you to leverage all your existing SQL Server, ADO.NET and Entity Framework skills. See http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/.

Bill