November 24th, 2009

Microsoft isn't the only one developing a hardware-accelerated browser

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:40 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Google, Internet Explorer, PDC 2009, Windows 8, Windows XP, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Web Browser, Hardware, Graphics, Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft has shared very few details so far about Internet Explorer (IE) 9, but has said the company is planning to accelerate the performance of text and graphics rendering by taking advantage of the power of PCs’ graphics-processing unit (GPU).

Specifically, Microsoft officials said at the Professional Developers Conference last week that with IE9, it will be “moving all graphics and text rendering from the CPU (and GDI) to the graphics card using Direct2D and DirectWrite.” (Istartedsomething blogger Long Zheng posted a good write up on Microsoft’s hardware-acceleration plans for IE 9 last week, if you want more details.)

But as News.com reported on November 24, Microsoft isn’t the only browser provider planning to harness hardware acceleration. Mozilla is planning to do the same with Firefox. Firefox developers have posted a prototype demonstrating the ability to take advantage of Direct2D and DirectWrite. Google is interested in the possibilities of hardware-accelerating Chrome, as well, as News.com’s Stephen Shankland notes. Unsurprisingly, the Chrome team is keeping any plans, concrete or otherwise, close to the vest.

The Mozilla folks already are claiming they believe they’ll be first to deliver a hardware-accelerated browser. I’d bet they’re right. Microsoft officials aren’t saying when to expect a test or final version of IE 9. But if the IE team stays on the same trajectory that it followed with IE 8, I’d bet the earliest we’ll see a final version of IE9 is spring 2011. (My calculation? I’m betting Windows 8 will be released in summer/fall 2011, two years after Windows 7 was released to market, and that IE 9 — the version of the browser that will be part of Windows 8, will hit a few months earlier.)

Besides being unwilling to share dates, the Microsoft folks also are not yet talking about which versions of Windows they plan to support with IE 9. Will Microsoft still support XP machines with the next version of IE? There’s no word. My guess is IE 9 won’t work on XP. And based on the less-than-optimal way IE 8 runs on lower-memory XP machines, I’d say XP users might want to steer clear of it if it does run.

November 24th, 2009

Can (and will) Microsoft keep Silverlight compatible across platforms?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:47 am

Categories: .Net Framework, App Compatibility, Apple, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Linux, Novell, PDC 2009, Silverlight (wpf/e), Windows Mobile, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Corp., COM, ActiveX/COM/COM+/DCOM, Middleware, Microsoft Windows, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Enterprise Software, Software

As Microsoft made plain at its Professional Developers Conference last week, there’s no end in sight to the list of new features and functionality it plans to add to Silverlight.

Some developers who have been on the fence about whether they should be developing Windows applications using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Silverlight applications see a light at the end of the tunnel of confusion. Microsoft is adding more and more WPF features to Silverlight (and vice versa). But as Tim Anderson, an IT journalist/blogger noted last week, there is a downside to this strategy: By adding technologies like COM support to Silverlight, Microsoft is doing damage to its story that Silverlight is a cross-platform browser plug-in that supports Windows, Mac — and, thanks to the Mono folks at Novell , Linux — equally.

(The Register’s Gavin Clarke and I talk more about the risks of making Silverlight better on Windows than other platforms during our latest episode of the Microbite podcast.)

The COM object support that Microsoft is promising for Silverlight 4, the version of Microsoft’s Web application framework/plug-in due to ship by mid-2010, is applicable to Silverlight running on Firefox or Internet Explorer on Windows only. Neither Mac OS X nor Linux support COM.

Microsoft officials were quick to note that adding access to COM components was a customer request, not something Microsoft did in a vacuum. When I asked Microsoft about its plans to keep Silverlight in sync across platforms, a spokesperson sent me the following statements:

“In Silverlight 4 we addressed over 8,000 customer feature requests. One specific request was adding support for accessing COM components, enabling common enterprise scenarios such as automating Microsoft Office and providing developers easy access to hardware capabilities such as scanners and security card readers.”

But check this out: Microsoft officials say they are evaluating how to add some kind of COM component access to the Mac version of Silverlight. From the aforementioned spokesperson:

“Unfortunately, the Mac offers no support for COM interfaces and we’re actively evaluating options to get COM-like features on the Mac.”

There’s no further word on when or how Microsoft plans to add this kind of support to Silverlight for the Mac.

Meanwhile, it looks like Novell’s Developer Platform Vice President Miguel de Icaza is itching to create support for the new Silverlight 4 functionality to future implementations of Moonlight, the Novell/Mono team-developed implementation of Silverlight for Linux. After the PDC, de Icaza blogged:

“For the Moonlight team, this means that there is a lot of work ahead of us to bring every Silverlight 3 and 4 feature. I think I speak for the whole Mono team when I say that this is exciting, fascinating, challenging and feels like we just drank a huge energy boost drink.”

Microsoft’s latest Silverlight moves mean that Silverlight is evolving to become a universal run-time for Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR), the heart of .Net, according to de Icaza. Developing a desktop suite of Silverlight apps isn’t just a pipe dream, de Icaza said; it’s a real, doable project.

Some developers are already dreaming of the possibility of a Silverlight operating system. (For some reason, I think the Windows team might try to derail that effort before it could ever happen, but who knows?) Microsoft has more immediate and pressing concerns, though: It needs to keep Silverlight in sync across platforms if the company plans to play up the “available everywhere” piece of its Silverlight message.

November 20th, 2009

Office Starter 2010 private beta, with 'Office to GO,' goes to testers

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:21 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Office 2010/Office 14, Office Live, Office Live Workspace, PDC 2009, SharePoint Server, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Beta, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft released a bunch of public betas of various Office 2010 products this week. But it also released another one under non-disclosure to a select group of testers: Office Starter 2010.

Microsoft made the code for Office Starter 2010 available to select testers via its Connect Web site late this week. Office Starter 2010, as Microsoft officials have disclosed previously, Office Starter 2010 is the replacement for Microsoft Works. It will be free and ad-supported, includes Word and Excel only and allows only basic document viewing and editing.

There’s one new feature in Office Starter 2010 that I had not heard about previously. It’s called “Office to GO,” according to testers with whom I spoke, who asked not to be named. Office to GO is installed using the Click-to-Run setup that is part of Office 2010. (Click to Run is one of the new ways Microsoft is planning to distribute the Office 2010 bits. It streams the bits onto a user’s PC using virtualization technology so that users can be up and running with Office more quickly than if they had to wait for the entire product to download.)

The Office to GO application allows users to download Word Starter, Excel Starter and any related documents to a USB drive that users can then run onany  Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows 7 PC, according to the aforementioned tester.

Office Starter 2010 also includes a permanent sidebar that includes links to a Gettting Started guide, help and support, templates and clip art, and an “upgrade to a paid version now” (with PowerPoint and/or Outlook) setting. Here’s what that sidebar looks like (click on the image to enlarge):

I’ve asked Microsoft for more details about Office to GO and will add anything I get back to this post.

Update (November 23): Here’s the statement I received from a Microsoft spokesperson regarding my questions on Office to GO:

“Office Starter To-Go is a product where Office Starter users can create a USB device that temporarily enables them to use Word Starter and Excel Starter on another PC on as long as the USB device is plugged in.  The technology used by Office Starter To-Go, is similar to how “Click-to-Run” works in that the USB device is being used as the server for a version of Starter on the device.  When the device is removed from a PC, Office Starter To-Go is also removed. Starter To-Go is only part of Office Starter edition that is pre-installed on new PC’s.  It cannot be installed on a separate PC, but it gives our customers the ability to take their Office with them and use it on any PC to open and work with their Word and Excel documents.”

Meanwhile, in other Office 2010 news from this week, I have a bit of additional information about the Office Web Apps public beta that Microsoft released to testers this week.

As Microsoft officials have said before, Office Web Apps — the Webified versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote — will be available in three versions. One will be free and ad-supported and aimed at consumers. The consumer version, which is tied to Microsoft’s SkyDrive, is what Microsoft released as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build to selected testers this past summer. Microsoft officials told me this week that the final version of the free Office Web Apps product will be released in conjunction with Windows Live Wave 4 (which sounds as if it is a “spring 2010″ kind of thing).

There also are going to be two business-focused versions of Office Web Apps that are going to be available as paid subscription offerings: One that will be available to enterprise customers to run on-premises and one that will be hosted by Microsoft. The beta that went out this week is the on-premises business version of the Office Web Apps release. To be clear: It’s not the updated beta version of the consumer test build that Microsoft released earlier this fall. (It sounds like the consumer version of Office Web Apps may not get a new public build refresh before it is released in final form this spring.)

The business versions require SharePoint Server on the back end. Microsoft’s Office Web Apps team did a blog post earlier this week explaining more about the Office Web Apps-SharePoint tie-in. That post includes this diagram:

I’m interested in hearing more from anyone who’s test-driving the new Office Web Apps beta and/or Office Starter 2010. How are the products shaping up? What’s working or not for you?

November 18th, 2009

Pivot: Microsoft's experiment to 'view the Web as a web'

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 3:10 pm

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, PDC 2009, Research

Tags: Web, Microsoft Corp., Pivot, Channel Management, Marketing, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft’s Live Labs — its Research and MSN mash-up — fielded a new test project on November 18 known as “Pivot.”

Pivot (not to be confused with Microsoft’s recently renamed PowerPivot) is meant to combine search, browsing and recommendations to create a more unified Web experience, according to a description on the Live Labs Web site.

Another way the team is describing the goal of the Pivot project is to enable users to view the Web as a “web” rather than a series of isolated pages. Pivot is to allow users to visualize hidden patterns so they can “discover new insights while interacting with thousands of things at once,” according to the Web site.

Microsoft is making a limited technical preview of Pivot available to a set of invited testers. The team is counting on developers to extend the “Collections” that are central to the Pivot technology. Collections, as the Pivot team explains on the Web site, are combinations of large groups of similar items on the Web that allow users to “begin viewing the relationships between individual pieces of information in a new way.”

Collection files are CXML and Deep Zoom-formatted (DZC) images. According to the site, “depending on whether the user browses web pages or collections, the Pivot client will either use the embedded IE rendering engine (Trident) or the collection browser to display the files.”

The download site for Live Labs’ Pivot is here. Pivot “runs best” on a Windows 7 PC with Aero Glass enabled and requires .Net 3.5 Service Pack 1 and Internet Explorer 8, but it also runs on Windows Vista. It is available in English only for now.

The fine print: “Intel integrated chipsets cannot run this application and you may see a failure during install or once you are using Pivot. Other graphics cards that are not new or do not have dedicated VRAM may show unpredictable behavior including crashes, visual artifacts, or failures in installation. We may not be able to do much about these failures if you hit them with this build, but tell us about what you are seeing and we can prioritize improving this area for the future.”

Update: One of my tipsters said Pivot is the project that was formerly codenamed “Seahorse.” I’ll ask Microsoft and see if they’ll confirm or deny. Sounds like I have some very good sources, as one of my Talkback posters (Live Labs chief Gary Flake) says himself.

November 18th, 2009

Microsoft shares a few tidbits on IE9 and (lots) more on Silverlight 4

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:20 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Development tools, Internet Explorer, PDC 2009, Silverlight (wpf/e), Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft shared some information about what’s coming in Internet Explorer 9 and Silverlight 4 during its November 18 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) keynotes.

If you want to see a real example of the difference in disclosure policies between Microsoft’s Windows unit and its Developer Division, the level of information provided by execs with each division today made that quite clear.

As expected, Microsoft Windows President Steven Sinofsky shared a few tidbits about Internet Explorer (IE) 9. Sinofsky emphasized that Microsoft will continue to play up privacy, user choice and responsible development with the next IE release. But he offered no information on when the team is planning to release a test build or the final version of the browser.

Sinofsky said during the Wednesday morning keynote that the IE team is about three weeks into the IE 9 project. (I’ve been getting tips that there already is a build of the product out there that is being used inside Microsoft, but it’s not available to external testers yet.)

Sinofsky noted that Microsoft is fully aware that it needs to keep pushing on the standards front. He noted that IE 9 is currently passing 32 of 100 Acid3 tests (compared to Firefox at more than 70 and Opera at 100). He also made it clear that Microsoft is aware it needs to continue to do work to improve JavaScript performance with IE.

Sinofsky said IE 9 will support hardware-accelerated rendering and rounded borders, but didn’t say a whole lot more about it. There are a (very) few more specifics about IE 9 on the IE Team blog today.

Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for .Net, had lots more to say about Silverlight 4, the next version of Microsoft’s browser plug-in that competes with Adobe Flash.

Microsoft is making a public beta of Silverlight 4 available for download today, November 18. A single, near-final Release Candidate will follow and then the final version of Silverlight 4 will be out in the first half of 2010, according to Guthrie.

Guthrie said Silverlight 4 will be a major new release of the plug-in. He said the upcoming version will incorporate nine of the ten most requested features by developers.

Guthrie itemized and demonstrated some of the new features of Silverlight 4 — which include everything from its support for webcam and microphone access, to the ability to run Silverlight inside the Google Chrome browser. Silverlight 4 also will include full support for Visual Studio 2010, native multicast support and improved printing, networking and reporting capabilities, company officials said. Silverlight Program Manager Tim Heuer has a full list of those Silverlight 4 features on his blog.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone who manages to download Silverlight 4 (servers are crawling, I hear) about what you think of the new beta of the product. Feel free to chime in in the talkbacks….

November 18th, 2009

So where's Microsoft's Live Mesh?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 9:38 am

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Live Mesh, PDC 2009, Utility/cloud computing, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Zune

Tags: Microsoft Azure, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Web Site Development, Benefits, Channel Management, Operating Systems, Software, Internet

One noticeable no-show at this week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is Live Mesh.

Live Mesh, Microsoft’s synchronization service that is the pet project of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, was one of the main attractions at previous Microsoft developers’ conferences. When Microsoft first described the service, it was billed as a way to prove to consumers that Microsoft’s Azure cloud would have something of interest to them and not just business customers and developers.

Earlier this year, as part of one of the company’s many reorgs, Microsoft moved the Live Mesh team under the Windows/Windows Live group. Since then, things have gone quiet.

At the PDC this week, I (and others) thought Microsoft might give us a progress report on Live Mesh… or a demo of the latest version of it… or a roadmap for it… or something. But no.

I had a chance to ask Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie about Live Mesh during a one-on-one interview with him at the show on November 17. I asked Ozzie why there was nothing about Mesh at the PDC. He said:

“We’re pushing the Live platform stuff to Mix. Or I shouldn’t actually say Mix, in terms of that, it is going to be spring….The Live stuff and phone stuff basically is out in that time frame.

“But that (Live Mesh) will no longer be discussed in the context of ‘Live Mesh,’ but rather in ‘the Windows Live platform,’ which is now, as you know, which it’s now part of.

I asked Ozzie a follow-up: If you aren’t using Live Mesh any more as a way to get consumers excited about the Azure platform, what’s the new plan to push the “commercialization of IT” strategy with Azure? Ozzie’s response:

“(T)he reality is — I know this isn’t very sexy — but I don’t think people are really going to be aware that it (Azure) is there. I think when people go to Web sites, they’ll just go to a Web site. They won’t really know what it’s connected to. When they use a phone or a piece of client software or a TV or a cable box that happens to talk to a cloud back end, it will just happen. And the way they will experience it is it will be reliable, it will be fast, it will scale.

“Probably the most important thing is that we live in a very faddish culture,… Whenever there is a service that’s backing up something that’s very trendy, these things will just happen without any issues. There will be black Friday and everyone wants to just buy their Beanie Baby and they’ll be able to.”

So if Live Mesh isn’t the consumer proof point for Windows Azure, what is? Ozzie said:

“(T)he best example I have is this app that (Microsoft Online Systems Division President) Qi Lu announced at Web 2.0 some weeks ago with Bing/Twitter integration. That came together in a very short time.

“In just a few weeks, a few developers got together and they had the Twitter fire hose, because of our relationship with — an early relationship with Twitter, and suddenly because of Azure, they were able to ingest this whole thing and start to do some amazing analysis that they could have never done if they had to, let’s see, how many machines should we order? When do we get them configured? When can we have rack space in GFS (Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services)? Those apps just never would have happened. And that’s why I’m so excited about this Dallas stuff because even though it is obscure, it’s hard to give compelling examples of how to use that data, once people have the ability to make a discovery based on data and then scale it to lots and lots of data, I think new possibilities are opened up.

“I think consumers are going to experience the benefit of the apps. Just take the H1N1 thing that’s going on right now. I’m not sure exactly what the benefit will be, but when there are these large challenges, suddenly some new app may be overlaid on maps or maybe it’s an app on a map that brings together some health data with geo data or an industry that you work in or something like that will pop up, and we’ll take it for granted at the time when it happens, but it will never have been able to happen without all that data behind it.”

When I recently asked some execs in Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division — the folks behind Windows Mobile and Zune — about their plans for implementing Live Mesh, I didn’t get a sense they had any real, near-term plans (and I don’t think they were just being cagey).

I’m really wondering what’s going to happen with Live Mesh going forward. Any guesses/hopes?

November 18th, 2009

Microsoft PDC Live Blog Day Two: IE, Silverlight 4.0 and more

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 8:17 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, Office, Office 2010/Office 14, PDC 2009, Silverlight (wpf/e)

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Keynote, Blog, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Blogging, Web Browsers, Microsoft Office, Operating Systems

The second day of keynotes at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is about to begin, and expectations are running high that MIcrosoft might share some details on what’s coming with Internet Explorer 9, Silverlight 4 and Office 2010 Beta 2 today.

A bunch of us Microsoft bloggers will be live blogging this morning’s keynote, which are expected to feature Microsoft Windows President Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President of Office Kurt DelBene, .Net Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie and more.

Join in with us on CoverItLive and discuss the keynotes live, starting at 8:30 am PT, along with ZDNet’s Ed Bott, LiveSide’s Kip Knicksern, Within Windows’ Rafael Rivera, Windows Supersite’s Paul Thurrott, istartedsomething’s Long Zheng and myself.

November 17th, 2009

What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform?

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 3:47 pm

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Google, Management tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, SQL Server, System Center, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization, Web 2.0

Tags: Microsoft Azure, Data Center, Microsoft Corp., Data Centers, Microsoft Windows, Storage, Operating Systems, Hardware, Data Management, Software

In the past year, customers and developers testing Windows Azure have been running primarily brand-new (and largely Web 2.0 style) apps on Microsoft’s cloud operating system. But when will Azure be tuned to handle host legacy enterprise apps? And when and how will users be able to take advantage of some of the Azure technologies inside of their own “private clouds”?

Microsoft officials didn’t share dates for its next phases of the Windows Azure platform. But they did talk about some of their plans for their next steps with Microsoft’s cloud platform during meetings and sessions at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on November 17.

Microsoft said the Windows Azure platform — which is the Windows Azure operating system and the SQL Azure database — is feature-complete as of today. (Officials said a few weeks ago that Microsoft wouldn’t begin charging customers to use the platform until February 1, 2010.)

“Our initial focus on the platform was on enabling Web 2.0 customers to develop and run their apps on it,” said Amitabh Srivastava, Senior Vice President in charge of Windows Azure. These kinds of applications are Xcopy-deployable, while older, legacy apps typically are not, Srivastava said.

Microsoft’s next Azure steps — which it will be executing largely in parallel — will be to get existing, and typically more complex, line-of-business apps to run on the platform and to make it possible for customers to implement Azure technologies in their own data centers (a k a, to be able to create private clouds).

To enable existing apps to run on Azure, Microsoft is planning to make virtual machines (VMs) available to developers, which they will be able to customize and run their legacy apps inside them. Srivastava wouldn’t provide a timetable or more details as to how or when Microsoft will do this. Apps running in VMs won’t be able to take full advantage of the elasticity, multitenancy, and other cloud functionality, but they still will derive some benefits, such as automatic cloud backup for apps running on the Azure platform. (The name of this VM capability will be “Windows Server Virtual Machine Roles on Windows Azure,” Microsoft execs later told me.)

On the private cloud front, Microsoft didn’t have much new to say at the PDC. Microsoft officials have said in the past that Microsoft won’t allow customers to run the Azure operating system in their own datacenters. Microsoft’s main focus here continues to be to provide customers with software like Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc., for them to run in their own datacenters. That said, Microsoft isn’t simply leaving the delivery of a private cloud solution to Amazon and other cloud competitors.

“Lots of the technologies we have in the cloud are things people want to run in their datacenters,” Srivastava
acknowledged.(He cited as an example the ability to run a scalable cloud-storage appliance on premises.)

Microsoft is working on a longer-term solution that would allow the company to offer datacenter containers that can be dedicated to individual customers, Srivastava said. That way, clouds can be customized for individual users and users will be able to manage these containers themselves. Again, Srivastava wasn’t ready to talk about deployment specifics or timetables for this. That said, “Project Sydney” (Microsoft’s newly announced connectivity offering for private datacenters and public clouds) shows the general direction where we are going,” Srivastava said.

Microsoft officials made a vague reference in this morning’s keynote to System Center in the cloud. I asked Srivastava if this meant Microsoft was looking to offer System Center as a Microsoft-hosted service, the way that it is offering Exchange and Office Communications Server as Microsoft-hosted offerings. That isn’t the case, he said; instead, Microsoft has opened up the Windows Azure management programming interfaces so that System Center — as well as third-party management products like HP OpenView — can manage Azure-hosted applications.

Not everything about what’s next for Azure is a longer-term direction. In sessions on November 17, Microsoft officials outlined some of the nearer term deliverables for Microsoft’s cloud platform. The recently introduced content-delivery-network (CDN) support for blobs in Windows Azure’s storage system is one of those deliverables. Another is a capability MIcrosoft is calling “Windows Azure Drive” (also known as Xdrive) which allows Azure developers to create a drive inside their virtual machines, providing them with an automatic back up capability. Microsoft plans to officially “turn on” Xdrive support in January, officials said.

November 17th, 2009

Three new codenames and how they fit into Microsoft's cloud vision

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 2:09 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, SQL Server, Utility/cloud computing, Windows server

Tags: SDK, Vision, Microsoft Corp., Dataset, Microsoft Windows, .Net, Operating Systems, Software, Software Development, Software/Web Development

Any Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) wouldn’t be complete without a few new codenames. On November 17, Microsoft introduced three new ones that all are related to Microsoft’s evolving cloud-computing vision and infrastructure.

During the Day One set of keynotes, Microsoft officials attempted to explain further how the company’s three-screens-and-a-cloud vision will take shape in product and service form.

Last year, when it rolled out its first Windows Azure Community Technology Preview, Microsoft showed a “layer cake” type diagram which showed all of the various Azure layers and components as a comprehensive whole. (See last year’s layer cake at right.)

This year, there was no diagram. The new message is that Microsoft’s cloud is comprised of Windows Azure (the Red Dog operating system), SQL Azure and a new AppFabric development platform. That’s it. Gone are the Live Services, .Net Services, SharePoint Services, and Dynamics CRM Services that wer all part of the original platform.

Did Microsoft decide its original vision was too ambitious? It seems more the case that it has decided some of the original pieces didn’t belong as part of the core Azure platform, such as Live Services, which are now part of Windows/Windows Live. In other cases, Microsoft has repackaged other elements of its original platform in different ways (example: the slimmed-down .Net Services is now part of AppFabric).

In the midst of all this movement, Microsoft introduced the three new cloud-related codenames today. How do they fit into Microsoft’s newly flattened cloud cake?

* Project Sydney: Technology that enables customers to connect securely their on-premises and cloud servers. Some of the underlying technologies that are enabling it include IPSec, IPV6 and Microsoft’s Geneva federated-identity capability. It could be used for a variety of applications, such as allowing developers to fail over cloud apps to on-premises servers or to run an app that is structured to run on both on-premises and cloud servers, for example. Sydney is slated to go to beta early next year and go final in 2010.

* Dallas: Microsoft’s “data-as-a-service” offering. Dallas is a new service built on top of Windows Azure and SQL Azure that will provide users with access to free and paid collections of public and commercial data sets that they can use in developing applications. The datasets are available via Microsoft’s PinPoint partner/ISV site. Dallas is hosted on Azure already and is available as of today as an invitation-only CTP. No word on when Microsoft is hoping to release the final version of the service.

* AppFabric: AppFabric is a collection of existing Azure developer components, including the “Dublin” app server, “Velocity” caching technology, and .Net Services (the service bus and access control services). The version of the Windows Server AppFabric on-premises version of the product is available for download today, with final availability slated for 2010. Community Technology Previews (CTPs) of the Windows Azure AppFabric version are slated to be available during 2010. No word on when the final Azure-based version will be out. (Note: The CTPs of the Access Control and Service Bus technologies are still available separately in CTP form today.)

Microsoft made available last week a November release of its own Windows Azure SDK and related tools. The new releases include an update to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, which extends VS 2008 and VS2010 Beta 2 so they can create, configure, build, debug and run Web apps and services on Windows Azure.

Roger Jennings, a cloud computing expert and author of the Oakleaf Systems blog said that the November release of the Windows Azure SDK includes “something Azure devs have been asking for and needed to compete with AWS EC2 (Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Cloud 2): Variable-size virtual machines (VMs). Using that featue, Azure developers may now specify the size of the virtual machine to which they wish to deploy a role instance, based on the role’s resource requirements. The size of the VM determines the number of CPU cores, the memory capacity, and the local file system size allocated to a running instance, Jennings noted.

In a similar vein, Amazon quietly released on November 11 version 1.0 of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) software development kit for .Net. The SDK allows developers to “get started in minutes with a single, downloadable package complete with VIsual Studio project templates, the AWS .Net library, C# code samples and documentation,” according to a note Amazon forwarded me over the weekend.

November 17th, 2009

Microsoft to share some details on IE 9 at PDC show this week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:18 am

Categories: Corporate strategy, Internet Explorer, PDC 2009, Windows client

Tags: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Web Browsers, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is on tap to share some information about its Internet Explorer (IE) 9 browser at its Professional Developers Conference this week, but isn’t yet ready to deliver any bits.

Microsoft will be providing “a bit of conversation about IE” during the keynote at PDC on November 18, but isn’t yet ready to deliver even a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of its next-generation browser, a company spokesperson said.

Microsoft officials have declined to say anything but the broadest promises of more standards compliance, better security and better performance as its planned set of deliverables for IE 9.

Even before IE 8 was released, developers and users already had a long list of feature improvements that they are hoping the Microsoft IE team includes in IE 9.

Microsoft released IE 8 to the Web in March 2009. The team has been on a mission to deliver new releases of IE more rapidly, but it’s unclear whether the IE team will be able to get a new version out any faster than every two years.

I continue to hear developers and customers hoping that Microsoft will reverse course and deliver a WebKit rendering-engine-based version of IE. Microsoft officials have said no way, no how. I don’t think this is something we’ll be seeing any time soon… and definitely not in the IE 9 timeframe…

Me? I’d just be happy if my IE tabs hung less with IE 9. What about you? What are you hoping makes it into the next version of IE?