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.
This months web meetup showcased the new features of IE 8 Beta 2 presented by Matt Heller from Microsoft and Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 by Robert O'Callahan and Chris Double from Mozilla.
IE 8 Beta 2
Matt was first up he covered the following:
For those wanting to take the new Beta or old versions of IE for a test drive Microsoft Virtual PC images are available for download.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 1
Next up to present were Robert and Chris. Robert has a great post on his blog about how he saw the meeting. He includes a copy of his slide deck and some demo pages that currently work with the daily build of Firefox 3.1 Beta 1.
The video and svg demonstration were of particular interest as it showed equivalent functionality to what Silverlight 1.0 offered, but without the need for a separate plug-in that needed to be installed. As Robert indicated in a recent post Mozilla has elected to use the Ogg Vorbis/Theora codecs for audio and video. With support for H.264 currently in Flash and announced that H.264 will be available in a future version of Silverlight, it will be interesting to see how widespread the use of Ogg and Theora will become.
For those interested Chris has uploaded a couple videos to YouTube Firefox Video Element Bling and SVG Video Demo that demonstrate the new HTML 5 video and SVG features inside the current Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 available which is for download. As this a Beta release Mozilla suggest setting up a separate profile for testing side by side using the -ProfileManager command line switch.
Take away thoughts
- Support for parts of HTML5 and CSS3 are being released from multiple vendors.
- Hosting of media files for Ogg/Thora may pose issues for users without the equivalent YouTube/Silverlight Streaming services.
- JIT compiled javascript code has the possibility to deliver much faster experience to the end user.
- Much more competition between plug-in's (Flash, Silverlight) and embedded browser functionality coming up.
In this post I will briefly discuss using Google Analytics in conjunction with Silverlight, to track the version installed and your application usage patterns.
One of the original problems with the initial port of BabySmash to Silverlight was loading the XAML storyboard animations for UserControls.
In this post I will cover the changes required from a Silverlight point of view to replace the RoutedEvent in the UserControl.Triggers section with either equivalent XAML or C# code depending on your need.
Discussion of one alternative to using the FormattedText object that is not currently available in Silverlight.
Introduction to "BabySmash Web Edition". A Silverlight port of BabySmash, a Full Framework WPF application created by Scott Hanselman and other community contributors.
Wanting to dip your toe in and see the current state of Moonlight under Linux or check the compatibility of your Silverlight 1.0 application with Moonlight then read on as this post will walk through the step necessary to install Moonlight within openSUSE using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.
An overview of Distributed Caching with Microsoft's "Velocity" and some implications.