Well Scott Hanselman has delivered his session at PDC NET Framework: Overview and Applications for Babies. And from the tweet streams it looks like he had a full room and fantastic feedback.

As Scott indicated in his earlier blog post he covers a lot of content in a short space of time so I would suggest watching the recorded video of his session TL49 (once it becomes available at http://channel9.msdn.com in the next 24 hours) that is now online from Channel9 or download the WMV file directly for offline viewing.

As an overview Scott’s presentation included different variants of his original WPF full framework  BabySmash application expanded to use different platforms & technologies i.e.

• BabySmash Surface PC Demo.
• BabySmash WPF application using MEF.
• ADO.Net Data Service.
• Windows Mobile Running Silverlight 2 BabySmash.
• ASP.Net Charting.
• ASP.NET MVC Charting.
• BabySmash running under Silverlight 2 in the Browser.
• Silverlight 2 Charting.

Scott ended the presentation by sending the address to the Silverlight version out to twitter users. As users hit the keys, the results were sent to the ADO.Net Data Service which then displayed the live results using a Silverlight Chart and Microsoft Virtual earth.

This is where my involvement started. Scott decided to use initial port of BabySmash to Silverlight that I created in his PDC presentation, to deliver on the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) request for BabySmash.

So the BabySmash Silverlight MMO PDC version was born so to speak. Now that Scott has publically demonstrated the Silverlight version, I will continue adding blog posts to my existing BabySmash series. In the new posts I will discuss further details of the Silverlight version of BabySmash and the Silverlight Reporting that Scott and I collaborated upon to create the final result for the presentation.

Windows Azure has just been announced at PDC 2008. And information is now available online from http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx.

Drilling into the features for developers there is a video interview with Steve Marx that outlines Azure from a developer perspective:

• His blog http://blog.smarx.com/default.aspx hosted on Windows Azure.
• Aim to use current skills and technology that they are used to. Built around .Net I.e.
  • Use Visual Studio
  • .Net 3.5
  • IIS 7
  • Windows Communication Foundation
• Only difference is that it runs on the cloud or Fabric of components.
• Client side local development experience to test before deployment
  • Azure API's
  • Debugging
  • Ability to emulate Simulate scale via Visualised Compute.
  • Synchronised state
  • Azure storage available (Blobs, Tables)
• Deployment, VS.Net deploy package and configuration file to a web portal.
• Question about management:
• Framework will restart application is required
• Logging and metering
• Integration with Windows Live Alerts to send information about service
• Ability to deploy new versions seamlessly
• Ability to set metrics "e.g. Queue length, response time" to trigger scale out.
• Ability to scale out on demand if required (IIS and SQL Services).
• Currently in CTP.
• Programming Differences
• Horizontal Scale - Store state centralised so that it can be accessed by any machine in the virtual web farm
• e.g. Web Farm - Save shopping cart
• Using in blob or table helps eliminate bottlenecks of centralised SQL Server for persistence of state.
• Ability to create services that can be leveraged buy other users e.g. Email service gateway.
• Service Discovery, still determine plans about how create Market Place of services over the next Year e.g.
• Find Services
• What do they cost
• Ratings for services
• Ability to integrate services in the development environment
• Technology
• RESTful interface
• Manages & Unmanaged Code
• Can be used from Python, Ruby etc
• Does not have to be web form applications could just be a REST interface to a headless service.