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Microsoft Keynoting at JavaOne...That Just Happened!

stevemar — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:25:00 GMT

While the idea of Microsoft giving a keynote address at JavaOne – the Java community’s biggest conference of the year – has probably raised a few eyebrows, it really shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise at this point. Not only have we been involved in JavaOne for the past few years, you’ve also heard me talk many, many times about the importance of interoperability: most recently in the context of cloud computing and often as it relates to Web services. The latter has been a heavy focus for my team – and Microsoft in general – for a number of years. In fact, sometimes folks are caught off guard at just how active Microsoft has been in driving better interoperability via Web services and through our work with W3C, WS-I, WS-*, OASIS (e.g., the recent announcement regarding WS-RX, WS-TX and WS-SX), DMTF and more.

As we look at our latest research numbers, we see that 73% of professional developers rely on .NET or a combination of .NET and Java. In that sense, both Java and .NET have won in the enterprise and it is incumbent on both Microsoft and Sun to ensure that interoperability for the platforms is real, available and as easy to implement as possible. It’s a responsibility that we both share and customers tell us loud and clear that they expect innovation to accompany interoperability. I’m proud to say that this is something we take seriously and are executing against.

Along these lines, some of you may recall that last November we announced our participation – and the contribution of our StockTrader 2.0 code – to the Apache “Stonehenge” project. Stonehenge was formed to deliver a set of sample applications that demonstrate interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols. This is helpful for a number of reasons. While industry efforts like WS-* define approaches to enable interoperability, products may still need to be configured by customers before the benefits of interoperability can be realized. In fact, we’ve had a number of customers tell us they need better examples and more guidance on how to realize the built-in interoperability of applications across multiple vendor platforms. Stonehenge addresses this by providing customers with best practice guidelines and actual code that illustrates precisely how to achieve this in real world scenarios. To put it a little more poetically, Stonehenge will help us complete the “last mile” of interoperability between today’s standards-based infrastructure and tomorrow’s service-based applications.

So what exactly does this have to do with Microsoft – and specifically me and Dan’l Lewin – keynoting at JavaOne? A great deal actually, since during our keynote, Sun Vice President Aisling MacRunnels, Dan’l and I will announce that Sun has also now agreed to participate in the Stonehenge project and will be contributing the Metro-based StockTrader application code. This is important for two reasons. First, it means that Stonehenge will deliver even more value by providing best practice guidelines and reference implementations across an even broader range of scenarios and platforms, including Java, .NET, PHP, etc. The more samples and real world guidance we can give the community the better since it gives customers the ability to choose the best ones for their specific business requirements. It also makes it easier to pinpoint potential interoperability problems.

In addition, it represents another step forward in our ongoing work with Sun. As we all know, today’s IT environments are heterogeneous; whether it’s a single organization that runs both.NET and Java apps or multiple organizations that seek to collaborate with each other. To that end, we’ve been working closely with Sun on a number of interoperability initiatives over the past five years to help customers leverage their existing investments in Sun and Microsoft technologies. Some of the best examples include our work on Web Single Sign On, the Interop Vendor Alliance, our collaboration on virtualization and, of course, our recent agreement to use the SAML federation standard in both the Sun OpenSSO Enterprise federation solution and the forthcoming Microsoft “Geneva” Server federation solution.

Looking ahead, our work with Sun (or perhaps I should say Oracle?) becomes even more important in the context of cloud computing. Success in the cloud for most enterprises will hinge on the ability to utilize a broad and diverse set of computational resources, some of which may be implemented very differently from others. Interoperability protocols are the key to this. Thus, it’s important for us to continue to work together to ensure platform interoperability through these protocols, especially as it relates to Web service interoperability standards. The work that we are announcing today with Sun around Stonehenge is a great step in the right direction since it helps demonstrate seamless interoperability across application platforms – whether those applications are implemented on premises and in the cloud – and whether those applications are implemented on J2, on .NET or on something else.

With that in mind, I’d encourage everyone to take a look at the Stonehenge project and download the StockTrader sample app on one of the many supported platforms such as .NET, Java, PHP, WSAS, Sun Metro, etc. If you are interested, you can also read more about what Microsoft is doing around interoperability in general or watch Dan’l’s and my full JavaOne keynote. The keynote focuses specifically on the work we are doing with Sun to deliver interoperable application platforms that span on-premises and cloud computing, and help our customers leverage their Java and .NET investments.

Azure Dev Challenge Questions Tackled

stevemar — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:33:00 GMT

Last month Microsoft announced its first-ever Azure Developer Challenge. Since then, we’ve received strong interest and several questions about the competition.

The question I most frequently receive is, “Why is the Azure Dev Challenge open to US residents only?”

I am pleased to announce that starting today the Azure Developer Challenge is open to developers outside of the US. Without starting to sound like a lawyer, there were legal and regulatory considerations that took us a little bit longer to resolve for international. We now have those worked out and can’t wait to see your applications. See my previous post for more info on getting registered.

Seperately, we received questions about interopoerability and the use of existing code. Specifically... “Can we use jQuery?” the answer is yes.

Experiment, have fun, and send us feedback about your experiences during the process of submitting an entry for the competition.

Remember, the deadline to submit contest app entries is June 18 for US developers. Developers outside the US have until July 9^th to submit their application. So hurry up and go to www.newcloudapp.com to get started today! To follow the contest chatter on Twitter, search for “#newCloudApp”.

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.

MIX 09 - Return on Experience

stevemar — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:17:00 GMT

Posting from The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas where I’m taking part in Microsoft’s 4^th annual MIX event, where the crowd is a sea of red… red shirts that is, in honor of Scott Guthrie’s style.

Looking around I see a diverse group of web designers and developers eager to learn how businesses can achieve a ‘return on experience’ by using a new generation of development tools, web platform technologies and software plus services to better engage their customers. Web 2.0 technologies have become a business norm and an essential customer interaction point for most businesses.

So what does this have to do with MIX? Well, MIX provides a forum for developers to learn about Microsoft’s newest technologies and developer tools -- whether they be on the web or in the cloud, so that they can engage their customers and forge deeper connections through rich online experiences that deliver a better experience.

From the Web to the Cloud

Developers using the web as a key access point to build rich content, social media applications and innovative business application isn’t new. In fact, Microsoft has, and continues to provide the tools and technologies to enable web developers to build these rich applications, including Web App Gallery, Silverlight 3 Beta, Expression, etc.

With changing economics and technical innovations, we are taking this opportunity to extend the web workload into the cloud helping developers harness the power that they want and need, at scale without having to manage the complexities of hardware. Moving beyond hardware, Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform helps developers focus on their applications and user experiences.

When Microsoft began thinking about its software plus services vision over three years ago, we knew that in order to help our customers solve their business problems, they would need a balance between on-premise and cloud solutions, and the choice to determine which workloads they moved in and out of the cloud. We’ve created a dynamic internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a broad set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Today, I’m happy to announce the roadmap updates with the SDS relational database capabilities, Windows Azure updates (including FactCGI, .NET FullTrust & Geolocation), and the .NET Services interop enhancements.

For those who weren’t able to attend MIX in person – here are few things to consider.

Get Involved

· Visit the MIX 09 website and check out the latest innovations on the web and cloud, or stream the keynotes from your desk.

· Begin leveraging Microsoft’s cloud, visit the Azure website and register for the Community Tech Preview.

· Download the Silverlight 3 beta and take advantage of the newest tools outlined above.

· Check out the WebPI and the App Gallery.

For those of you who made the trip to MIX, I’ll see you at tonight’s party at TAO!

Bring back the red shirt

stevemar — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:25:00 GMT

Sign the petition here! See you at Mix.

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!

Higher Standards for Web Standards

stevemar — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:25:00 GMT

Since the emergence of web services in the 90s, we’ve seen an explosion of standards and standards bodies. Sometimes, they emerge based on new innovations, other times they’re created to unblock a stalemate on a similar standard or organization. Occasionally they are created simply to change the technology landscape in a way that is more favorable for certain vendors.

A question that I am asked over and over is – “Does Microsoft support standard X?” or “Is Microsoft going to join standards body Y?” The question we should spend more time debating is “What are the key technology or interoperability gaps and how do we fill them?” As new initiatives emerge, we research the business and technical need before taking action. We do this by putting ourselves in the shoes of actual developers and IT Pros and asking “what are the barriers I’m facing today, and what do I need to solve them?” Pragmatism over theory, always.

In many cases, the right answer isn’t necessarily to define something new, but to instead carefully consider whether technology or initiatives already exist to solve the problem. In the end, we should judge the strength of standards on industry and customer adoption alone. As an example, IBM recently announced a consortium called “WSTF”: Web Services Test Forum which leaves us a tad puzzled.

As of today, the WS-* standards are largely complete within W3C, OASIS, WS-I, DMTF, etc. and are widely implemented in infrastructure products and used by organizations all over the world. We were thrilled to participate in the Oasis announcement just last week on WS-RX, WS-TX and WS-SX. With regard to testing, we think it is critical that customers be able to propose scenarios that match their real-world interoperability needs. Equally important - both successes and failures must be made public. This is why we’re still evaluating our participation in WSTF.

Microsoft and other vendors have been participating in a variety of forums for quite some time to help crack the interoperability code. A few examples of forums that have yielded real world results for developers over the years are:

- WS-* specification development at W3C and OASIS. This formal process defined the protocol specifications for enabling service composition through addressable, secure, transacted, reliable, policy-based, end-to-end messaging.

- WS-I is the base layer process for integration and interoperability, upon which other, more domain-specific or scenario-specific tests, profiles, and guidance are built and the primary WS-* interoperability testing focus for Microsoft.

- Interoperability Plug-fests are more informal events at which multiple vendors get together to test interoperability against all other interested attendees, using agreed-upon scenarios for current and forthcoming products. The test tools that Microsoft developed remain available at http://131.107.72.15/endpoints/Default.aspx. These endpoints (and similar endpoints from other vendors) implement dozens of scenarios that customers and vendors can use to validate interoperability.

- Greg Leake runs one of the largest interoperability labs in the world and publishes results and guidance on WS* / WebSpehere / .NET interop. Stay tuned for more here – Greg is just completing his work on WebSphere 7.

Separately, but potentially equally interesting… An interoperability project that Microsoft recently joined is the Apache Stonehenge incubator effort. We look forward to expanding our efforts in partnership with other vendors on this front. Here’s the latest.

Do we need additional standards? The answer is almost certainly yes. But before touting a new standard or standards organization, vendors need to be clear about what specific issue is being solved and hold all parties accountable for doing so. Public access is a key criterion we have in mind as we think about WSTF. So what can you do? Continue to contribute at all levels; standards are only as good as the community formed around them. As always, let us know what you think.

Know SOA or No SOA?

stevemar — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:13:00 GMT

You’ve probably seen the chatter as a result of Anne’s recent post. So, the question on all SOA minds now turns to the fate of SOA: have we seen SOA’s last act or will there be an encore? With the economic downturn and companies increasing their focus on near term results, we’re a bit surprised over the fervor. A perfectly logical response might have been “Yeah, and?”

This debate will continue, that’s for certain. There are folks on either side of the fence who are passionate about this topic, and more than a few vendors have tied their revenue to it in a material way. Read some of the responses thru that lens – opinions on SOA being dead, or alive and well, seem to reflect economic passion more than anything else.

The ‘SO’ of SOA has been around for over a decade. It started in the form of Web Services back in the late 90s; companies were looking to find efficiencies between systems to do things like employee on-boarding. Soon after, the light bulb went on, and oragnizations extended this federation beyond internal systems to foster better integration with partners and customer. Federation will continue as customers turn smart decisions into technical reality through service orientation in a blended world of computing (premises and in the cloud–Something we’ve been discussing and investing in for quite some time now).

If SOA fostered all the fantastic innovation above, why are companies struggling with it and abandoning their SOA projects? Let’s be clear: many SOA projects have been successful and will continue, specifically the ones born from a middle out, project approach and based on business value. Customers like M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Vail Resorts are great examples. However, oftentimes there has been too much focus on the “A” in SOA instead of the “SO.” The bottom line: projects that have been monolithic undertakings are the ones that never made it out of the lab, and are probably being discontinued today.

We’ve been out on the road talking to customers as part of the SOA Roadshows discussing this topic, and we have a lot more to say on this topic, so look for more soon from the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference happening later this month. In the mean time, enjoy the show…

Signs of the Apocalypse - Sun fears the Browser

stevemar — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:09:00 GMT

1. Protest in Auburn over a football coach draws more than an anti-war protest

2. Despite all the economic, environmental and social woes in the world, top press outlets still have the time to cover Oprah’s weight and giant feats of agriculture

3. Sun talks about the importance of the client and escaping the browser

Please feel free to add your own.

Web Platform – Single Install Release Candidate

stevemar — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:25:00 GMT

Today, we posted a release candidate (RC) of the Web Platform Installer (Web PI) here. This effort is a direct result of feedback we’ve received from customers regarding the need to significantly simplify the installation of key components needed to spin up new web properties. With the Web PI, customers can now use a simple tool to install Microsoft's entire Web Platform, including IIS7, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Or, the tool can be used to install more specific combinations of these technologies.

Timing is critical for this update; our customers are already knee deep in deploying platform updates across Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and others. This newest RC for the Web PI now enables installation of ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight and offers compatibility with Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP for a more complete, enterprise-level experience. As well, with the Microsoft Web Application Installer (WebAI), we are including several .NET and Open Source applications for development on top of the platform itself. These include Drupal, Wordpress, OSCommerce, DotNetNuke, Graffiti, PHPBB, and Gallery. We know our customers are working within heterogeneous environments today, and the need for tools and solutions that drive cross-platform interoperability is more important than ever. We’re continuing to drive interoperability into the core platform through.NET framework updates, Silverlight and “Oslo’s” M language, which is now included in the Open Specification Promise.

We’re already hearing from our customers that this tool is saving them significant amounts of time; check it out and see for yourself. Then, go back to doing what you do best—building and hosting powerful next-generation web apps that will revolutionize the business! Oh yeah, by the way – it’s free.