Developer Platform Product Management - Development Unfiltered: From code, to cloud to comedy. : S+S

TechEd USA 2009 wrap up

stevemar — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:13:00 GMT

Friday concluded this year’s TechED: North America. We were delighted to have thousands of developers, IT professionals and technology decision makers in attendance, gaining insights into how to make their applications, infrastructures and businesses more innovative and cost effective. Both continue to be core priorities in today’s economy.

Bill Veghte announced the availability of the Windows Server 2008 R2 release candidate, which includes some great new features for improved web experiences, scalability, hardware utilization and virtualization. We also continued to talk about the recent WebSphere Loves Windows campaign emphasizing significant cost savings, better efficiency and improved performance when customers run Websphere on Windows Server or take advantage of the .NET Framework for application development. Last, we demonstrated ways in which our customers could unlock the hidden potential in their existing technologies today by leveraging current versions of Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server, BizTalk Server and Visual Studio together.

So where do we go from here? Well, whether you’re a developer, an IT Pro or a decision maker within your organization you should be thinking about a few key things. Darryl Taft put it perfectly in this article when he called out the fact that IT can be a competitive differentiator in today’s economy. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need new features or technology. Think about harnessing the power that lives within your infrastructure today by taking advantage of tools that make it easier to spin up a new web presence, like the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) . Second, keep your skills fresh by leveraging resources like the Ramp Up program at MSDN. And last but not least, speak up! Engage in community dialogue and as always, tell us what you think!

Two flavors of cloud computing – Public and Private

stevemar — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:27:00 GMT

Six years ago we announced a multi-year, multi-product vision for the Enterprise which we called Dynamic IT. The principles were simple - virtualization, model driven, services oriented and user centric. Shortly thereafter, we began to conceptualize a services-based offering in the cloud which culminated in our Azure Services Platform announcement last October. These two initiatives might seem distinct, but they are in fact highly related. Simply put, this is the continued evolution from physical to logical to virtual.

In addition to the interest in cloud computing, there is even more interest in the application of cloud computing principles in the enterprise data center. As I have mentioned previously, at some point in the future, the Azure Services Platform and an enterprise data center will be, technically speaking, largely indistinguishable. Both will:

· Be highly virtualized and elastic

· Be managed in a consistent manner within and across the firewall

· Hide the complexities of hardware infrastructure from the applications they serve

We are learning a lot from the investments that we are making in Azure and will use these learnings to drive additional benefits for customers not just in the cloud but also with our premises technologies. One of our primary objectives is to deliver the technology that empowers Enterprises to build private clouds within their existing datacenters.

While there are a lot of vendors talking about private clouds, let’s think this through a bit. Would you buy beef from a vegetarian? I digress… here’s the point – the knowledge that we gain from running a public cloud will yield better technology for the private ones that we help customers deliver.

How does Microsoft deliver this today?

· Hardware Abstraction: Delivered in Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V

· Logical Pooling of Compute: Delivered through management tools like VMM, you can connect the compute power from your servers into a single, logical resource

· Automated Provisioning of Resources: Delivered this with tools like Intelligent Placement in VMM allowing you to expand and contract workloads across your fabric

With Windows Server 2008 R2 our fabric capabilities become even stronger. In this release, we deliver enhancements to the native virtualization capabilities:

· Live Migration

· Larger VM Support: 32 and 64-bit VMs, with up to 64GB memory per VM

· Boot from VHD & Clustered Shared Volumes (core enhancements from Windows Azure)

To net this out, we’re bringing the lessons learned from our public cloud to the places where they will likely deliver the most benefit in the near term – right in your data center. As we evolve the technology that drives Azure, you can count on continued innovation and evolution of our premises technology that will make private cloud computing a reality.

Walking the Walk – the Cloud and Standards

stevemar — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:50:00 GMT

Earlier today, the DMTF announced the creation of the “Open Standards Cloud Incubator” group which will specifically focus on developing a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management. This is one of what will probably be a number of important efforts to drive additional value and choice for customers. This particular effort may catch the eye of folks on the enterprise side, as managing applications and infrastructure that spans premises and cloud is a very real topic of conversation. In the end, success in the cloud for most enterprises will include the ability to utilize a broad and diverse set of computational resources, some of which may be implemented very differently from others. A sensible goal of the DMTF is to reduce the friction across different vendor offerings in these datacenter scenarios.

As we have said previously, Microsoft will approach cloud standardization from multiple angles:

· Practical interoperability – Microsoft-based services should be easily interoperable in practice with a diverse set of applications, platforms, and other clouds. We envision that our customers will integrate applications across multiple data centers, for example, having some of the component services running on Microsoft technology while other components run on Amazon, Google, Salesforce, or other data centers. Microsoft will work with other cloud vendors to produce guidance on building applications, to define the interoperability protocols, and to test real-world interoperability.

· Standards--Microsoft will continue to invest in organizations, like DMTF, that help push the interoperability state of the art forward. Management is a great example of this, as there will likely need to be further evolution of the management protocols, such as WS-Management, to add cloud-specific extensions.

· Data portability -- Microsoft believes that our customers own the data that they have entrusted to our applications and platforms, and the applications they build on our platforms. Microsoft will work with other datacenter and cloud vendors to make this bi-directional, customer-centric approach a more common industry practice.

While it's still very early to talk about elaborate technical standards for cloud computing, establishing the conduits for the conversations and outlining a collaborative approach is critical. Projects like the DMTF incubator will develop requirements and use case scenarios to allow all the participants to better understand where standards for communication with cloud services can create the most value.

As always, we pledge to be open, collaborative and transparent about our efforts in the cloud standards space. If you have thoughts on where we should focus additional attention, please let us know!

.NET Services - Cloud Interoperability

stevemar — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:02:00 GMT

Speaking of standards - I’m thrilled to report that we will release the “M5” (Milestone 5) CTP (Community Technology Preview – think Beta) for .NET Services (part of the Azure Services Platform) tomorrow! For those who aren’t familiar with this effort, here’s the primer… Almost two years ago, we introduced these services – Service Bus (secure messaging across networks and firewalls), Access Control (user access to web apps and services across multiple standards-based identity providers), and Workflow (for orchestrating and routing Service Bus messages). From the beginning, .NET Services was designed for multi-cloud, multi-platform use. Developers can use the .NET Services in conjunction with ANY programming language (using support for industry-standard protocols, or via available SDKs for .NET, Java and Ruby) on ANY platform to create or extend federated applications. A good overview of .NET Services is available here.

This milestone contains enhancements to all of the services including expanded support for standards like REST, ATOM, SOAP and HTTP. As I mentioned previously, we demonstrated at MIX cloud to cloud interop in action. Specifically, we showed how the Access Control Service and Service Bus could be integrated with a Python Application deployed into Google App Engine using just two lines of code. As always, feedback from developers is critical to us. So, please take time to sign up for the CTP, and tell us what you think. We’re on our way to commercial availability later this year and we need your help to get there.

If you haven’t already, you can follow our cloud efforts by adding @Azure on Twitter.

Moving beyond the “Manifesto”

stevemar — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:52:00 GMT

As you might expect, several of us spent most of Thursday and Friday last week in conversations with developers, standards body members and other vendors regarding open standards for cloud computing and how we get there collaboratively. Being in this industry for so many years, I remember a time when new technologies and platforms did not produce much interest in standards and interoperability. It was great this time around to see broad support for openness in the cloud and transparency on the approach to interoperability. I was also happy to see a number of community-driven efforts spin up last week, which will provide enormously valuable feedback in defining the desired end-state. It’s important for everyone to take a step back and remember this isn’t about vendors; it’s about developers and end-users.

As I indicated on Wednesday night, Microsoft welcomes the opportunity for open dialogue on cloud standards. To that end, we have accepted an invitation to meet on Monday at 4pm in New York at the Cloud Computing Expo with other vendors and members of standards bodies. From our perspective, this represents a fresh start on the conversation – a collaborative “do-over” if you will.

Moving Toward an Open Process on Cloud Computing Interoperability

stevemar — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:28:00 GMT

Moving Toward an Open Process on Cloud Computing Interoperability

From the moment we kicked off our cloud computing effort, openness and interop stood at the forefront. As those who are using it will tell you, the Azure Services Platform is an open and flexible platform that is defined by web addressability, SOAP, XML, and REST. Our vision in taking this approach was to ensure that the programming model was extensible and that the individual services could be used in conjunction with applications and infrastructure that ran on both Microsoft and non-Microsoft stacks. This is something that I’ve written about previously and is an area where we receive some of the most positive feedback from our users. At MIX, we highlighted the use of our Identity Service and Service Bus with an application written in Python and deployed into Google App Engine which may have been the first public cloud to cloud interop demo.

But what about web and cloud-specific standards? Microsoft has enjoyed a long and productive history working with many companies regarding standardization projects; a great example being the WS* work which we continue to help evolve. We expect interoperability and standards efforts to evolve organically as the industry gradually shifts focus to the huge opportunity provided by cloud computing.

Recently, we've heard about a “Cloud Manifesto,” purportedly describing principles and guidelines for interoperability in cloud computing. We love the concept. We strongly support an open, collaborative discussion with customers, analysts and other vendors regarding the direction and principles of cloud computing. When the center of gravity is standards and interoperability, we are even more enthusiastic because we believe these are the key to the long term success for the industry, as we are demonstrating through a variety of technologies such as Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8, and the Azure Services Platform. We have learned a lot from the tens-of-thousands of developers who are using our cloud platform and their feedback is driving our efforts. We are happy to participate in a dialogue with other providers and collaborate with them on how cloud computing could evolve to provide additional choices and greater value for customers.

We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the Cloud Manifesto. What we heard was that there was no desire to discuss, much less implement, enhancements to the document despite the fact that we have learned through direct experience. Very recently we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed "as is," without modifications or additional input. It appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an “open” process. An open Manifesto emerging from a closed process is at least mildly ironic.

To ensure that the work on such a project is open, transparent and complete, we feel strongly that any "manifesto" should be created, from its inception, through an open mechanism like a Wiki, for public debate and comment, all available through a Creative Commons license. After all, what we are really seeking are ideas that have been broadly developed, meet a test of open, logical review and reflect principles on which the broad community agrees. This would help avoid biases toward one technology over another, and expand the opportunities for innovation.

In our view, large parts of the draft Manifesto are sensible. Other parts arguably reflect the authors’ biases. Still other parts are too ambiguous to know exactly what the authors intended.

Cloud computing is an exciting, important, but still nascent marketplace. It will, we expect, be driven in beneficial ways by a lot of innovation that we’re dreaming up today. Innovation lowers costs and increases utility, but it needs freedom to develop. Freezing the state of cloud computing at any time and (especially now) before it has significant industry and customer experience across a wide range of technologies would severely hamper that innovation. At the same time, we strongly believe that interoperability (achieved in many different ways) and consensus-based standards will be valuable in allowing the market to develop in an open, dynamic way in response to different customer needs.

To net this out… In the coming days or weeks you may hear about an “Open Cloud Manifesto.” We love the idea of openness in cloud computing and are eager for industry dialogue on how best to think about cloud computing and interoperability. Cloud computing provides fertile ground that will drive innovation, and an open cloud ecosystem is rich with potential for customers and the industry as a whole. So, we welcome an open dialogue to define interoperability principles that reflect the diversity of cloud approaches. If there is a truly open, transparent, inclusive dialogue on cloud interoperability and standards principles, we are enthusiastically “in”.

Here are some principles on the approach we think better serve customers and the industry overall:

· Interoperability principles and any needed standards for cloud computing need to be defined through a process that is open to public collaboration and scrutiny.

· Creation of interoperability principles and any standards effort that may result should not be a vendor-dominated process. To be fair as well as relevant, they should have support from multiple providers as well as strong support from customers and other stakeholders.

· Due recognition should be given to the fact that the cloud market is immature, with a great deal of innovation yet to come. Therefore, while principles can be agreed upon relatively soon, the relevant standards may take some time to develop and coalesce as the cloud computing industry matures.

What do you think? Where do you think this best lives? An open Wiki? A conference? A summit where a lively give-and-take can get all the issues recognized in an open way? What elements of an open cloud are most important to you? Let us (all) know…

Windows Azure and Windows Server - Licensing Model

stevemar — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:09:00 GMT

Press and blog coverage over the last few weeks spurred several folks to ask questions about our licensing model for cloud technology - specifically Windows Azure.

I posted a blog last week which covered a variety of topics related to Azure (Microsoft’s Cloud Services Platform). It’s clear from the feedback that it addressed a variety of issues but spawned some additional questions. These are really important topics and something I’d like to share broadly rather than answer in email. The most popular follow up question was “Are you going to license Windows Azure to 3^rd parties for them to run on their own?” While the answer to the question in pure terms is no, the approach regarding innovation is the more interesting question to answer. Why? Many of the innovations we make in Windows Azure will become available through Windows Server and System Center.

First, a little background… As I have indicated previously, Windows Azure is an extension to the Windows Server code base. We are building a ton of new IP, which takes advantage of the Windows Server and System Center codebases, and provides a cloud compute fabric as well as an extensive set of management technologies that help us run the service. This is an instantiation of our Software + Services vision as we evolve technology to meet the needs of customers across cloud and on premises.

Windows Azure innovations are being shared with the Windows Server code base. Down the road, many features that drive our cloud fabric in Windows Azure will land in our premises technology, including Windows Server and System Center. You could imagine that at some point a “cloud” and an enterprise data center will share a lot of the same attributes in terms of the functionality it delivers and the way it runs. There will be places where Windows Azure features will make good sense for customers across multiple segments, and we want to make sure that functionality is offered to them as broadly as possible for their on-premises solutions.

We don’t envision something on our price list called “Windows Azure” that is sold for on-premises deployment. Some implementation details aren’t going to be practical for customers, such as our global data-center hardware design and large scale multi-tenancy features which are integral to Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform. Why? We will continue to evolve Windows Server and System Center focusing significantly on technologies like virtualization, app and web server capabilities, single-pane management tools for managing on-premise and cloud in the same way, etc. which extend the enterprise data center in significant ways. We’ll continue to license Windows Server and System Center (and therefore the shared innovation derived from Windows Azure) to hosters through our SPLA program.

Here are some scenarios which may further clarify:

Scenario	Our approach	What you consume
You’re an enterprise who wants to get more capacity and flexibility from your datacenter.	We are working night and day to expand the virtualization and management capabilities in Windows Server and System Center to meet this need.	Windows Server System Center Virtual Machine Manager
You’re an ISV who wants to build an application in the cloud to get geo-scale without geo-cost.	We are working hard to make Windows Azure and the broader Azure Services Platform the most compelling option to host and scale this application.	Windows Azure – via consumptive business model (cloud hosting)
You’re a mid-size business and want to consolidate your server environment and outsource some pieces.	We offer Exchange Online and more for hosted email both directly as well as through partners. We continue to build on core app server and web server capabilities in Windows Server to help customers stretch their capacity.	Exchange Online Windows Server Windows Server Hosting Partners who offer Windows Server as a service
You’re a small business with no IT experience and prefer not to manage a local server for your application that drives your business.	This customer would license an application experience (SaaS) through an ISV or CRM provider that runs on Windows Azure or Windows Server Hosting partners.	Windows Azure – via consumptive business model (cloud hosting). Windows Server Hosting Partners
You’re a hoster / IT Outsourcer and want to increase your hardware utilization through Virtualization.	Virtualization will continue to be a key area of focus for the next version of Windows Server. Future versions of Windows Server (licensed directly and through SPLA) and System Center will reflect innovations from Windows Azure.	Windows Server System Center

So, to net this out… While Windows Azure isn’t something we will license for premises deployment, we will license many of the innovations via future versions of Windows Server and System Center. As always, your comments, questions, thoughts, suggestions are much appreciated.

Anyone know who is going to win the NCAA tournament?

Web Computing - Premsises, Hosting and Cloud

stevemar — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:56:00 GMT

I had the privilege of talking to a number of customers, members of the community and reporters last week about our web / cloud technologies. In those conversations, a few things became clear. First, there is a ton of interest (in general) about cloud computing with folks wanting to understand what it is and how it will ultimately impact IT. Second, IT organizations want to better understand specific scenarios that might be more favorable for cloud computing. Third, as you might guess, there is a lot of interest in understanding how Microsoft will approach the business model for cloud.

First things first… Microsoft thinks about the web workload (including cloud computing) holistically. There are tools and technologies that help developers build interesting web based applications (Visual Studio, Silverlight, ASP.NET, WCF, IIS, etc.). Separately, we think about running and scaling these applications using Windows Server & Internet Information Server (IIS, our web server) on local machines, clusters in a data center, capacity from a hoster and more recently through Windows Azure. Lots of the conversations this week focused on the differences between enterprise datacenters, hosters, and the cloud and SaaS. It’s important to note that Microsoft has thousands and thousands of hosting partners and we support all of them. Hosting is a critical service for many companies and one that will to add value for customers for years and years to come. We license technology like Windows Server to them through our Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA). We use SPLA to license Windows Server to partners like Amazon.

Here’s a way to think about it:

· Enterprise IT – I buy the server and the software (CapEx).

· Hoster – I rent the use of hardware and potentially software (OpEx)

· Cloud – I pay for the consumption of a compute fabric as my app needs it (OpEx as my app demands)

· Software as a Service (SaaS) – I pay to use an app which is hosted by the ISV directly, or the ISV uses capacity from a Hoster or Cloud provider.

I also like the way GigaOm put it in this post. The features and engineering that Microsoft is driving with Windows Azure powers this computational fabric – that’s what makes Windows Azure different from the technology we license to hosters and businesses. Over time, the innovation in Windows Azure will be cross-pollinated with our on-premises server products and Windows Server, offering increasing capability to transition workloads between on-premises and the Azure cloud. Driving a consistent approach across both premises and cloud technologies ensures that developers and IT professionals have the power of runtime choice and the freedom to change their minds between running workloads on-premises, the cloud, or a hybrid of both to best fit their needs.

Second, people are beginning to speculate on the types of workloads that might be best suited for cloud computing. While the list is hardly definitive, there are some uses that seem to resonate:

· Workloads that are highly elastic. We see examples in the insurance business on a regular basis – policy calculation and risk analysis. Many companies update their premium tables on a quarterly basis. This means we have an app that is computationally intense but only runs for a few days / weeks per year.

· Revenue generating applications that need to scale linearly with demand. Going back to my insurance company example – let’s say we have a web app that allows prospective customers to get an insurance quote and potentially begin service all through the web. Instead of having idle capacity and managing to peak loads, I could use a cloud model and pay for consumption on a near real time basis. That allows me to look at that app as a profit center.

· Though not really an app type, the third example is helping our customers and partners accelerate their innovation and improve time to market. Think of this as pilot or skunk work projects you want to kick-start or scenarios in which you want to minimize upfront investment. A lot of the conversation on cloud computing has focused on start-ups that are eager to minimize their CapEx and want to get to market quickly. The same logic applies for pilot projects in an enterprise. Examples here abound – just about any app type or scenario. a key consideration here is whether or not you will continue to run this app in the cloud or will, at some point, run it on premises. More on this one in a later post…

Third – on to business model. People continually ask why we haven’t yet announced pricing for the Azure Services Platform. There are a couple of reasons for this:

· It’s early. We’re still in feedback collection mode with commercial availability targeted for the end of 2009. Right now we are focused on getting feedback on the services and making improvements where needed.

· We want to encourage development free from economic constraints. The moment you introduce an economic model, developers begin architecting around it based on what they perceive to be most cost effective. We just want folks to build architecturally sound applications and tell us what they think.

What can we say about our business model? Three things:

· First, we’ll have one. We see this as a business and will run it like one. We’ll provide a reliable service and ensure that it is compelling for our customers and reflects the feedback that they have given us.

· Second, as always, we will be competitive with market pricing. Microsoft has a long history of being a high volume, high quality, low cost provider and this will be no exception.

· Third, we hear from developers that there is a strong preference for simplicity and consumption-oriented pricing. Still more work to do here, but we hear that and tend to agree that it makes the most sense for our platform services.

On to MIX… sessions I’m especially excited about are the .NET Services talk with John Shewchuk (Day 2) and Doug Purdy’s session on RESTful Services (Day 3). See you there!

Microsoft's Annual SOA and BP conference - SOA meets Cloud

stevemar — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:52:00 GMT

Today we wrapped up the 6^th annual SOA and BP conference here in Redmond. This was the 14^th stop on the tour which continues around the world thru April. Yesterday, I had the privilege of delivering the keynote to kick off the conference and took that opportunity to talk about both the last few weeks and the road ahead.

As we talk to customers around the world, it’s clear that the message on SOA being a “how” rather than a “what” is really sinking in. Now we spend more of our time talking about extending Service Orientation than we do defining it. I took a very non-Microsoft approach – instead of blathering on about technology, I instead spent time debunking the myths (which still pervade the space) and connecting customers with their peers to share what they have learned and best practices.

One thing that was clear from talking to customers this week is that the SOA landscape continues to evolve. As I wrote months ago – the convergence of key technologies like Virtualization, Cloud, Modeling, SOA and SaaS continues at a rapid pace. It’s clear that cloud computing will have a significant impact on SOA moving forward. So much so that one might argue that sooner rather than latter, the app pattern which is Service Orientation will be a given - much the same way that no one refers to Object Orientation as a "feature" of an app anymore. Service Orientation will be the flour of the composite app cake.

While many have taken time to question Microsoft’s strategy with Service Orientation, what we have always said still rings true – it’s about web services, starting small and being pragmatic. We are taking Service Orientation (and as much Architecture as is needed to solve the problem) to the masses by making key components available directly in the .NET Framework. Our investments in cloud computing will only help as developers will have additional options for instantiating services in a geo-scalable way.

Thanks to all who attended and watched it live all over the world! As always, tell us what you think…

Ring in the New Year with the SOA & Business Process Conference – goes great with Eggnog…

stevemar — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:57:00 GMT

We had our first real snow last week which means that ski season is finally upon us and everyone in Seattle must relearn how to drive in slightly awkward conditions (again). This is a great time of year as work tends to slow a bit, winter sports heat up and you can still log plenty of miles on the bike as long as you pay attention to the drivers on the bottom of the learning curve. While 2008 is a year that few are likely to forget, most people are already getting ready for 2009. With the new year coming there is one more thing I am excited about – and that’s the upcoming SOA and Business Process Conference on January 28-29, 2009.

Given the current economic environment, we know that many of our partners and customers are cutting back on travel. Thus, we are trying out a completely different format –we are still holding an event in Redmond (dates mentioned above) though the format will be a new, concentrated, two-day version that will provide our customers and partners with the most relevant information possible. We’re also taking the conference on the road. Some of you have already attended events scattered around the globe. Why are we doing this? First and foremost, a geographically distributed schedule allows us to interact with far more people. Second, making the event itself more specific will maximize time for those who make the investment to come.

During the conference, attendees will see and hear how customers and partners are using real-world SOA to drive business results, and will also have the opportunity to hear from customers and partners who’ve successfully implemented real-world SOA solutions, Microsoft execs and Gartner analyst Nick Gall on maximizing current SOA investments. For those of you who can’t make it out, we’re planning to provide new SOA and BPM content via the web toward the end of February.

Feel free to visit our site to see the full session list and other information. Hope to see you all there.

TechEd Developer 2008

stevemar — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:43:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of being in Barcelona this week for the TechEd Developer conference. Highlights – getting to talk to several hundred developers about WF / WCF / Dublin /Oslo. Lowlights – it’s Barcelona, what could be a lowlight? TechEd capped off the most interesting 8 weeks I’ve ever had in software. In under two months we’ve had major iterations on virtually all the technologies that we drive in CSD. It started out with a roadmap update on BizTalk Server where we provided some more detail on BTS2009 and also talked about the next two major releases.

Next, we announced major updates to WF and WCF and introduced “Dublin”. After that, I hit the road with Robert Wahbe, VP of CSD, our fearless leader. We talked to several RDs and various members of the press about Oslo – and progress we’ve made in the last year. We were getting ready to ship the Oslo CTP and wanted to give folks a sense of how it had developed and what they’d see at PDC.

Two weeks ago at PDC we made good on the promise to provide CTPs on WF, WCF, Dublin, and Oslo (including “M”, “Quadrant” and the Repository). For those scoring at home that’s a promise kept – one year from the Oslo announcement to code. For those of you who didn’t make it to the conference, take a look at Oslo at the new Dev Center or www.modelsremixed.com. Going further, we announced the Azure Services Platform and opened it up to attendees for an early CTP. As a company we’ve spent the last 20 years democratizing the desktop, we’ll spend the next 10 democratizing the cloud.

Last week we kicked off a new “Real World SOA happens {here}” theme. This features a new online video portal that will showcase the successes of our customers around the globe. This update to the web also highlights a set of events that we’re running to broadly connect with thousands of customers worldwide as part of a 20+ city road show. If you’re interested in learning more about SOA and how you can be successful – check out the new site at www.microsoft.com/soa/launch.

PDC Day 2 – "M" Under OSP, "Lap Around Oslo" & More Services

stevemar — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:36:00 GMT

Day 2 of PDC started off with another fantastic keynote address, thanks to Ray Ozzie, Steve Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, and David Treadwell. They gave some additional details about Windows 7 as a platform for developers, and then passed the torch to Chris Anderson and Don Box for a live coding session. Of course this was very popular, as the pair demonstrated how a developer could build an application and deploy it to the cloud, using Azure Service Platform, including Windows Azure, SQL Services and .NET Services.

We’ve also continued the drumbeat of education on Oslo today. Doug Purdy and Vijaye Raji presented to a packed house their “Lap Around Oslo” session this afternoon. This was the first public demo of the Oslo components, including the “M” language, “Quadrant” visual toolset and repository. Judging from the enthusiastic response of the audience, the initial impression was great. Doug also talked about a few very important next steps for attendees and those interested in Oslo: learn more here at the show, download the CTPs or Oslo SDK and check out the new resources at the Dev Center and GIVE US YOUR FEEDBACK. At this stage, we’re proud to have delivered on our commitment to come to PDC with code, and it’s all about refining it based on the needs and thoughts of developers.

Doug also officially announced some news today—we’re proud to be including the “M” language under the Open Specification Promise. Placing “M” under the OSP makes it possible for third parties, including open source projects, to build implementations of "M" for other runtimes, services, applications and operating systems.

So once again, please check it out, and give us your feedback!

PDC Day 1 – Azure Services Platform, CTP availability and much more!

stevemar — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:10:00 GMT

Well, we’re finally here, on the ground in LA at PDC. After months of speculation, chatter and building curiosity about Microsoft’s next move in the cloud space, we’ve officially gone on record with the details. It’s always interesting to take a quick look back at what’s been said up to this point; I have to say, some folks got it right and some were way off. My hope is that the details Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia provided in today’s keynote kick off a fact-based ‘round two’ of these industry discussions.

And while we’re all ready to celebrate, I want to take a moment to re-emphasize what a critical day this is. It’s not just critical for Microsoft, but for partners, developers, consumers, IT Pros and technology watchers alike. We all know that we’re in the midst of another paradigm shift; it’s time to carve out your place in making it real and to move forward. I’ll start: My commitment is to do my part in helping develop and bring to market the best possible solution in the Azure Services Platform. This means continuing to have conversations with partners and customers early on, and pushing the boundaries of transparency to ensure the feedback we’re collecting is based on a fully informed view.

So, let’s start with a few of the most important facts from today’s keynote. There are a host of sources live today that can provide all the nitty gritty details.

· Ray announced the Azure Services Platform today. The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds.

· The Azure Services Platform consists of the following components: Windows Azure, Live Services, SQL Services, .NET Services, SharePoint Services, and Dynamics CRM Services.

· There are CTPs available today, as well as other important technologies that will foster innovation in the world of application development and help to bridge on-premise and cloud domains, such as “Oslo” and the “Dublin” app server enhancements I recently detailed in my blog. Folks at the show today should begin taking a look at all of these pieces.

My group will continue to work on the .NET Services and Windows Azure, as well as “Oslo” (tools, repository and language for modeling), “Dublin”, BizTalk Server and Windows Communication Foundation, Windows WorkFlow Foundation. Thus, we will have our foot in both cloud and premises investments, and those technologies that serve to unite the two: the ‘+’ in S+S, if you will. .NET Services, which was previously the BizTalk Services incubation, includes hosted workflow execution, a service bus for communicating across applications and services, and access control for securing applications. These hosted services allow you to easily create federated applications that span from on-premises environments to the cloud. “Oslo”, which we recently provided more details about, was highlighted in the keynote today as the core of Microsoft’s modeling investments for both cloud and premises. We also committed to furthering our interoperability efforts around the declarative language, “M”, by including it under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. “Dublin”, “BizTalk Server” and WCF + WF are also big topics at this year’s PDC, so be sure to check out the sessions to hear more.

I look across all these pieces, and I’m incredibly excited and passionate about what’s to come. I feel confident that our investments in innovation, including both new and existing technologies, are the right ones and will help our customers and partners with more choice, interoperability, better security & reliability, simpler management & planning and truly breathe new life into today’s investments.

Now, on to day 2!

Video Clip on Convergence - SaaS, SOA, Virtualization, Modeling

stevemar — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:10:00 GMT

As I have written previously, convergence is a major theme in distributed computing. Darryl Taft (eWeek) recently wrote an article on the topic which was followed up by an article by Loraine Lawson (IT Business Edge). At Tech Ed, I did a quick video to talk about convergence and what it will mean for distributed computing and the role Modeling will play moving forward. Here’s a snip from my previous posting, if it’s interesting, check out the video.

Looking into the future, we see a perfect storm of productivity and application richness brewing. Specifically, SOA, SaaS, Application Virtualization and Modeling will collide and spark a wave of application creation that we haven’t seen since Al Gore invented the Internet. Let me paint you a picture - developers will compose business critical applications from services they didn’t author, run them in datacenters they don’t own, manage them at a policy level, and pay for them by the drink.

BizTalk Services “R12” Release – Workflow

stevemar — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Drum roll please….for those of you are as interested in the advent of cloud services, this is big. Today, we released BizTalk Services “R12” Community Technology Preview (CTP). Just as a refresher: “BizTalk Services” is the code-name for an incubation for our SOA platform-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft. BizTalk Services provides Messaging, Identity and Workflow (our latest addition) enabling developers to extend existing premises applications and build new composite applications. See my previous post for additional information.

While the BizTalk Services “R12” CTP includes a variety of updates, the piece that stand out is the release of the anticipated Workflow capabilities. The new cloud-based Workflow capabilities enable ‘service orchestration’ from the cloud. This functionality is based on the Windows Workflow Foundation (.NET Framework component) and can orchestrate services that connect to systems in your enterprise, or to systems running anywhere on the Internet via Web services messages. Using this service, you can define the interaction of any web-addressable services.

In addition to the Workflow functionality, the BizTalk Services Identity Service has been expanded and enhanced to enable more flexibility for scenarios demanded by our customers. R12 introduces a new approach for creating, viewing, and managing access control rules.

The new BizTalk Services “R12” CTP is online and available now for your use and the SDK is available at http://labs.biztalk.net. Whether or not you currently have an account, now’s the time to try it!