PDC 2008 - Day 2
Posted by bsstahl on 2008-11-01 and Filed Under: event development
Day 2 was a more focused day for me at PDC 2008. After attending the morning keynotes, which included the first peeks at Windows 7 features as well as a terrific (as always) code-only presentation on programming against the cloud by Don Box and Chris Anderson, I headed over to the hands-on-labs where I spent the rest of the day working with Azure and creating applications that run in the cloud. I also received my Azure key and began the process of setting up a virtual machine to house the Azure tools.
Real-Time Updates on Social Media
Just a reminder that much of what is happening here at the PDC is being posted in real-time (or close to it) on social media. My updates can now be found @bsstahl@cognitiveinheritance.com.
Keynotes
Day 2 keynotes focused on the client side of Windows development. Not surprisingly, this included Windows 7 and WPF development improvements as well as Silverlight and ASP.NET development. Some things that caught my attention in the keynotes included features of Windows 7 like its ability to "live" on a domain, but still participate in a "Home Group" when your work laptop is brought home. Multi-monitor support also looks to be vastly improved including the ability to work multi-monitor in a remote desktop session. Scott Guthrie also introduced a number of new controls and tools for developing applications in WPF and Silverlight including a Ribbon control that appears intended to make your WPF apps look like Windows Forms apps.
The 2nd Keynote of the day was Don Box and Chris Anderson's fantastic presentation on developing applications that bring cloud computing into the enterprise. Clearly the most engaging of all of the Microsoft speakers, this duo put together, over the course of the 1.5 hour session, a series of services that ran both in the cloud and within the firewall, and linked the two securely, but in real-time. You would not be wasting your time if you were to view the video of this keynote online.
Hands-On Labs
The remainder of my day, after lunch, was spent in the hands-on labs working through the prescriptive samples provided by Microsoft for their Azure product. I was able to complete the first two of these labs which detailed the process of creating websites and services in the cloud that used local-storage and queues to perform a number of relatively simple tasks. These labs clearly answered my question from yesterday morning, with the answer that I expected. That is, an Azure "Web Role" is a web page or SOAP service that runs in the cloud. As such, everything (that I can think of) that I might need to run on my own servers, can be outsourced into the cloud, to provide the availability of virtually unlimited scale with amazing reliability. The still-unanswered question here is price, but since the CTP is free, I will continue to move in this direction until I find a reason to change course.
Day 3 Preview
Day 3 looks to be futures day, with the keynote focusing on Microsoft Research properties and technologies. Watch social media for all the action as it occurs.
Barry S. Stahl (he/him/his) - Barry is a .NET Software Engineer who has been creating business solutions for enterprise customers since the mid 1980s. Barry is also an Election Integrity Activist, baseball and hockey fan, husband of one genius and father of another, and a 40 year resident of Phoenix Arizona USA. When Barry is not traveling around the world to speak at Conferences, Code Camps and User Groups or to participate in GiveCamp events, he spends his days as a Solution Architect for Carvana in Tempe AZ and his nights thinking about the next AZGiveCamp event where software creators come together to build websites and apps for some great non-profit organizations.