PDC 2009 Day 1: Keynote, Bob Muglia

[Also see Part 1, the keynote by Roy Ozzie]

Next on the stage was Bob Muglia, President, Server & Tools Business, Microsoft Corp. Unfortunately, I’m a developer and so some of his speech was a little along the following lines:

we have the data of the potential and we need to unlock the innovation of the solutions to the apps of the data in the potential, with the software. we also need to data on the weave and make the impact of the solutions. i want to applicate the embraces of the steps to enable availability in choice of applications. to scale clouding with reliability means available business needs. fabric is also very available and responsive to scalability of solutions in cloudy businesses.

Seriously though, there were some pretty cool announcements. Here are some of them.

There will be support for “local”, private Azure data centers that customers can host, or can use the public data centers hosted by Microsoft.

Bing built an infrastructure called Auto Pilot, a foundation for managing data centers with a very small amount of human intervention. Servers go offline is faulted and go online automatically when repaired. With over 100,000 computers it was the only way to support this kind of data center. Windows Azure is essentially a generalization of Auto Pilot as an application platform.

Next up, were Don Box (Distinguished Engineer) and Chris Anderson (Architect) came on the stage. And Don is exciting as usual! Last year they programmed a live demo on Azure, and today they want to show us some of the reaction to the programmer feedback.

One of the biggest requests were to integrate other languages and frameworks, such as C and C++, PHP and so on. And Chris is writing a CGI application in C that prints out some information from the query string!

In SQL Azure there’s support for T-SQL and TDS and it’s now possible to use the standard SQL Server Management Studio to create tables and do anything that’s possible in T-SQL. It’s also possible to use transactions. There’s also a simplified model for working with access control, and they demoed it from Javascript.

One of the customers of Windows Azure is Domino’s Pizza, who have a serious problem with peaks on Sundays and especially on Superbowl Sundays. They had to tie lots of unused resources to accommodate the peak load, and Azure enabled them to do so automatically without paying for the extra, unnecessary resources. This is a classic usage scenario for a cloud service.

Next, Bob announces Windows Server AppFabric, available in Beta on Windows Server today and next year in Beta on Windows Azure. This extends the environment of IIS and providing a platform for building scale-out, highly available, middle-tier services with WCF and Workflow.

It’s an easily manageable infrastructure with load balancing, failover, high-availability and so forth. Workflow and WCF + Database Cache for better performance to applications.

Cameron Skinner, Product Unit Manager for Visual Studio, shows us some features of Visual Studio 2010 – code relationship diagrams, multi-monitor support, and other (already familiar) features… Windows Identity Foundation to implement single-on – they actually use their Microsoft Corp. Active Directory credentials that are federated with Windows Azure.

Session and object caches have been there for a while, but we want to use a scale-out cache. The cache is a distributed in-memory cache and it's part of AppFabric.

There’s a very neat management dashboard for workflow instances in IIS with AppFabric, and there is full tracking event support in the dashboard. (What about Workflow Monitor, the MSDN sample? Good question.)

Deploying a web application is even easier using MS-Deploy. There’s a way to zip an app and hand it off to IT for deployment. There’s also a publishing profile capability to push the application to the staging environment within Visual Studio, and it works with a private staging environment as well as a hosted Azure staging environment.

Check out TailSpin, the demo Cameron used for deployment to Windows Azure: http://r.ch9.ms/tailspin

Bob also mentioned Microsoft Systems Center that manages all virtual and physical machines in a private enterprise environment as well as the public hosted environment, and they’re working on connecting the two. There’s also a new type of project in Visual Studio – an Application Model Project which supports deployment of various server roles into Azure! (e.g. Web Role, AppFabric Role, Database Role – and it all works within a nice designer surface, dragging projects into the various roles)

Wow, that was a long keynote :-) Look forward to more interesting news from other sessions later today.