Session 1:  Software + Services a.k.a Windows Azure

The first session of the day was all about Windows Azure. Yousef Khalidi took the stage and gave a nice talk about this.

As I visited the PDC 2008 last year, and I also attended the Cloud Computing seminar done by David Chappel, for me there was not that much new stuff being told.

He told what Azure as a Cloud Computing platform delivers:

• Automated Service Management
• High availability and scalability
• Rich developer experience (uses the common platform: .NET, VS2008)
• Model driven service lifecycle management (manages services, not just servers)

Some characteristics of a cloud computing platform (for more on this, read my blog post and its links about the David Chappell seminar):

• Scale out and not Scale up
• Add and remove capacity on demand
• Pay for what you use, as you go (based on e.x. network utilization, storage capacity or VM hours)
• Automation is the key to reducing costs

Then, Yousef shared some ideas on the future of azure:

• Support for unmanaged code
• Also run legacy apps
• support for more application types
• more interfaces to utilize (for example for monitoring, tracking and event handling)

Session 2: Role of Architecture in the current Economic Climate

Now here was a session that I didn't quite expect, in a positive sense. Neil Leslie had us put our feet back on the ground talking about how to leverage the current economical situation to its best.
( I found his PPT right here on a public web site: http://architect-center.com/groups/saf/media/p/30.aspx)
First he talks about the Microsoft internal IT characteristics:

Message here was, Microsoft does know enterprise IT and how to best centralize this. With these kind of numbers, I guess you have to :)
Leslie then took a lot of time asking and discussing what he called the ‘Ultimate Question’:

• How do you add business value?
  The answer Leslie have have here is:
• User Experience
• BI

When talking to, or selling to customers make these are your unique selling points. Focus on these because right now it seems these are the most triggering aspects a customer might relate to and decide on.

• And how do you drive out costs?
  The answer Leslie gave here is:
• SOA and Business Process
• Development

SOA and Business Process has everything to do with centralizing key (software) functions, reuse (not just of small software parts, but also of complete subsystems)  and optimizing business processes around this.  To reduce costs, you could also take a look at fast prototyping methodologies like Agile (Scrum, XP etc…)

To distinguish yourself, Leslie told, you have to move now! On what area? Watch this slide:

Session 3:  Application Architecture Guidance

Unlike the Agenda stated, not Don Smith took care of this session, but Ade Miller took the stage.
He guided through the Application Architecture Guide you can find on CodePlex.

I’ve been using this guide for a while now, and I must say I think it’s a great collection of information you’d normally see spread out in different segments within a project. It’s not that Microsoft is telling anything really new in this guide, to me the added value is the fact that it’s now all put into one great book for reference purposes.

Ade told about the different Architectural Types, Architectural frame and Architectural Styles. He also explained the different steps you can take when designing your architecture, and the quality attributes you should look at the guarantee some sort of stable, high quality deliverable.

If you are now raising your eyebrows, I’d really invite you to take a look at the book.

By the way, I really belief this kind of info should go hand in hand with a security approach. So when defining an architecture also take a look on the MSDN Security Developer Center, and especially on Threat Modeling.

Session 4: Office Futures

Gideon Bibliowicz took his turn to talk about the future of the Office products.
Due to an NDA we had to sign, I cant say anything about this, but as usual it will get bigger, better, more beautiful and perhaps also easier to integrate :)

Well, at least I guessed Gideon’s favorite soccer team right, ‘Holland’ won me a USB key :)

After the bus ride back to the hotel, we went to the Lucky Strike Lanes & Lounge across the street for some fun and beers.

Last Friday, David Chappell spoke at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Barneveld (NL) about Cloud Platforms in general and a lot about the Azure services platform in detail.

When talking about Cloud Computing David identifies three categories:

1. SAAS (Software as a Service) ex. SalesForce.com  == App in the cloud
2. Attached Services == Combine on-premises applications with cloud services
3. Cloud Platforms

To me, the most important part of the talk was hearing his lists of advantages and disadvantages of SAAS and Cloud Platforms in general.

So what could be the pro’s and con’s of cloud computing / SAAS?
Pro’s:

• Less financial risk
  - No large up-front investman
  - Try before buy
• Lower costs (initially, at least)
  - No license buy (pay per usage)
  - Shift fixed buying expenses to variable operating expenses
• Faster deployment
• Higher Availability
• Easier upgrades

Con’s:

• Trust (which is a major thing; do you trust the service provider? will they protect your data?)
• Regulatory and compliance issues
• Customization (tailoring)
• Integration (with on-premise applications)
• Identity (federation)
• Management (monitoring)
• Support

He then further talked about the Azure services platform itself; perhaps I’ll write some more posts on this subject later on. I first like to have investigated it a bit more.
Overall, I really liked his talk. You can hear why he’s a frequently asked speaker; great job!

PS. David wrote a short introduction about Cloud Platforms; go read it here.

So tonight I wanted to take a first look on Azure.
I installed all of the stuff needed :

• IIS7  (under Vista Ultimate 32bit on my machine)
• WindowsAzureSDK-x86.msi
• VSCloudService.msi
• SDK.msi (Microsoft SQL Server Data Services SDK)

So I fired up VS2008 and started a new Web Cloud Service:

To check if all worked out, I pressed F5.. And first saw this:

So OK, let’s restart VS2008 under Administrator rights (“Run as Administrator”) and I pressed F5 again.. I then first saw this:

And after pressing YES I saw this error appear:

What the heck?! It’s using my Username (which is “Robert Jan” as a parameter to initialize the development storage. Fine of course, but please Microsoft, USE QUOTES when doing this! Because now, it stating that “Jan” is an unknown option…

So why not try to initialize this storage ourselves and we’ll use DSInit with the quoted username (and prefixed with the domain name or local machine name):

And the result:
 

So now, I can play along :)