November 19th, 2009

Microsoft still working on an Adobe Lightroom competitor, but with a social twist

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 7:28 am

Categories: Code names, Corporate strategy, Research

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Adobe Lightroom, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp., SmartFlow, Microsoft FUSE, FUSE Lab, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing

It’s been almost two years since I first got tips about Microsoft “SmartFlow,” a product which allegedly was going to be a competitor with Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom post-production software for professional photographers. I had thought that incubation project may have been quietly eliminated somewhere along the way.

However, during an interview I had with Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie this week at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, I discovered work is going foward on SmartFlow — but in a new part of the company and with a new twist.

SmartFlow is now one of the projects under the recently-created Microsoft FUSE social-computing lab, Ozzie said. The 82-person Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs will be headed by General Manager Lili Cheng. FUSE is an amalgamation of Cheng’s Microsoft Research (MSR) Creative Systems group and two other labs that are already under Ozzie: Rich Media Labs, in Redmond, Wash., and Starup Labs, based in Cambridge, Mass.

“Cheng’s got — it wasn’t really written about a lot, but there was a project under (former Chief Technical Officer) David Vaskevitch called SmartFlow,” Ozzie told me. The FUSE Lab is bringing together people who are really great about the communications aspect of social (networking) and the media aspects. And so I’m really excited to see some of the ideas that they have in the realm of using photos, videos, and communications kind of brought together.”

After spending quite a bit of time behind the scenes with the Windows Azure team, helping that group to coalesce, Ozzie is now dedicating more of his time to other projects at the company, especially FUSE, he said this week.

SmartFlow “was heading toward Lightroom, and then we realized from the perspective of the direction of where it was going … that there’s more excitement about what people are doing,” Ozzie elaborated. “Photography has been transformed by what people are doing with camera phones a lot more than the high-end phones. I mean, I have my DSLR kinds of things, but I just think what every may is doing with photos and using it in the context of the communications is a lot more interesting and video is quite untapped, I think at this point.”

Like other Microsoft Labs, such as Live Labs, Office Labs and Ad Labs, there’s no promise that any of the incubations upon which Cheng and her team members are working will necessarily result in commercialized products. Ozzie didn’t offer up more specifics or a timetable as to when SmartFlow may be available to the public in test or final form. But once the cover is raised on SmartFlow, it will be interesting to see what social networking will bring to photo editing.

(A related aside: Vaskevitch, the former Microsoft CTO with the company’s Server and Tools group, quietly left Microsoft in September, I realized only today when searching for his title for this post. Vaskevitch had been with Microsoft since 1986 and had held a variety of marketing and strategy positions at the company.)

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 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 11th, 2009

Orchard: Microsoft's open-source CMS platform is (re)born

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:27 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Open source

Tags: Developer, Team, Open Source, Microsoft ASP.NET, Microsoft Corp., Content Management System, Content Management, .Net, Team Management, Enterprise Software

The guesses (by me and others) look like they were on target. The “Orchard Project,” which is getting its debut on November 11 at Tech Ed Europe is, indeed, the successor to the Microsoft Oxite content-management system (CMS).

Microsoft made available the first the open-source Oxite CMS bits at the end of 2008. Like Oxite, Orchard will be a free, open-source CMS platform — plus a set of shared components for building ASP.Net applications and extensions. The Orchard code is licensed under an OSI-approved New BSD license.

From the Orchard page on the Microsoft CodePlex code-repository site:

“(T)his core (Orchard) team will use their experience working with ASP.NET and Oxite to deliver a fundamentally new architecture that is the Orchard CMS. We have deliberately chosen to start development, with the guidance and contribution from the community. Over time we expect this project to become a viable successor to Oxite v1 and we know that providing a migration path for users of that existing application will be a high priority.”

The Orchard team includes various ASP.Net developers; two of the principal developers of Oxite, Erik Porter and Nathan Heskew; and Louis DeJardin, the creator of the SparkViewEngine for Model View Controller (MVC).

Despite its origins and team, Microsoft officials are claiming that Orchard is “not a Microsoft project,” according to the Orchard Web page. From the CodePlex page:

“Some of the initial (Orchard) source code and specs are available for review and comment but there is no downloadable release at this time. We encourage interested developers to check out the source code on this site and get involved with the project in these early stages.”

There is no public timetable (so far) for when a test build of Orchard will be out or when a final version will be released.

(Thanks to @kellabyte for the Orchard pointer, via Twitter.)

Update: As one reader (thanks, @karlseguin) noted, Oxite was anything but a big hit with developers, including many of those in Microsoft’s own .Net community. There have been many complaints about Oxite, from the development process, to the scope of the project, to the quality of the code and the way Microsoft explained the concept/product. Perhaps that’s one reason why Microsoft is starting over with a new codename and claiming this is not a Microsoft project…

November 10th, 2009

Microsoft whittles away at Oslo; now plans to fold it into SQL Server

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 11:23 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Database, Development tools, Oslo, PDC 2009, SQL Server, Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), Windows server

Tags: Oslo, Microsoft SQL Server, Server, Microsoft Corp., Databases, Research & Development, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Business Operations

There are few initiatives at Microsoft that have undergone as many twists and turns as Oslo, Microsoft’s modeling platform/strategy.

On November 10, Microsoft announced the latest Oslo shift: Oslo’s three main remaining components are going to be be renamed “SQL Server Modeling” and be folded into some future release of Microsoft’s database.

In 2007, Microsoft first discussed publicly its plans for “Oslo” — an amorphous multiproduct effort that encompased future releases of .Net, Visual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server. By the fall of 2008, Microsoft had decoupled .Net, VIsual Studio, BizTalk and SQL Server from Oslo. When officials said Oslo, they meant Microsoft’s evolving modeling strategy and technologies, specifically the M language, the Quadrant tool and the metadata repository. This past summer, as part of one of Microsoft’s countless reorgs, the Oslo team was combined with Microsoft’s Data Programmability team (which manages Astoria, Entity Data Model (EDM), Entity Framework (EF), XML, ADO.Net and tools/designers).

Going into the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 next week, Microsoft is planning to make available a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of Oslo, which will be its first since May 2009. This new CTP will be known as the SQL Server Modeling CTP.

According to a November 10 blog posting by Product Unit Manager Doug Purdy, this new CTP “will begin to demonstrate how developers will use these (Oslo) technologies in concert with things like T-SQL, ADO.NET, ASP.NET and other parts of the .NET Framework to build database applications.”

“All of these components are now part of SQL Server and will ship with a future release of that product,” Purdy blogged this week. (Purdy doesn’t specify a ship date target, but I’m doubtful it will be in time for the next version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2008 R2, which is due out in the first half of 2010.)

As of next week, Microsoft also plans to integrate the Oslo” Developer Center and the Data Developer Center into a new site, http://msdn.microsoft.com/data.

On Twitter, the overwhelming sentiment about the latest change in Oslo’s direction are largely negative. Here are a few reactions:

Scott Banwart: With this announcement, I no longer see the point of Oslo.

Tomas Restrepo: Cynical thought of the day: Oslo == Longhorn. OK, could’ve been worse (i.e. Cairo).

James Hart: Any expectations anybody had for what Oslo might turn out to be came from their own imagination. Disappointment was inevitable.

Ryan Rinaldi: The Oslo story just got more confusing.

Steve Bohlen: good lord; Oslo follows in the footsteps of WinFS; big (if nebulous) idea degenerates into dull implementation w dubious value

Sean Munger: Friends dumbstruck at flying saucers descending over Oslo. (Oops. Maybe a different Oslo)

Any developers out there see a silver lining in the latest Oslo moves? Or is it time for the aliens to rush in and take over?

November 6th, 2009

Microsoft 'Geneva' identity wares approach the finish line

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 1:35 pm

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Oslo, PDC 2009, Security, Utility/cloud computing, Windows server

Tags: Geneva, Microsoft Corp., Research & Development, .Net, Microsoft Windows, Application Servers, Development Tools, Middleware, Business Operations, Software Development

Microsoft is making available for download the near-final Release Candidate (RC) test build of its “Geneva” framework, the technology officially known as Windows Identity Foundation.

(For all you Microsoft codename trackers out there, “Geneva” is the next version of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). The programming framework supporting the next version of ADFS originally was codenamed “Zermatt,” then, later, also took on the “Geneva” codename. Microsoft’s Windows Cardspace is the third component of what Microsoft calls “Geneva.”)

On November 6, Microsoft released the RC bits of the framework, which are designed to provide developers with a new programming model and software development kit for creating identity-aware .Net applications. According to a blog post on the Forefront Team Blog, Windows Identity Foundation “provides developers pre-built .NET security logic for building claims-aware applications, enhancing either ASP.NET or WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) applications.

Geneva and the Geneva framework also are related to Microsoft’s Azure environment, as the next version of ADFS is part of the Azure Services layer in Microsoft’s cloud. (Microsoft’s current Azure diagrams don’t show ADFS as part of Azure, but I hear any new ones we see at the Professional Developers Conference in mid-November will include it.) The goal of Geneva is to provide developers and users with a single, secure sign-in capability across both cloud-based and on-premise applications.

In other PDC-related news, Microsoft is planning to distribute a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of its Oslo modeling platform. This will be the first CTP that team has provided since May and it will require Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4 Beta 2 to work. It’s due out on November 17. (Thanks to MVP Doug Finke for unearthing the Oslo link.)

November 6th, 2009

Microsoft to show off new visualization language at PDC

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 12:33 pm

Categories: Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, PDC 2009, Research

Tags: Microsoft Corp., Tool, Visualization Language, Vedea, MSCSS, Productivity, Blogging, Data Management, Internet, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is planning to show off a new visualization language, codenamed “Vedea” at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in mid-November.

From a blog posting by Microsoft UK Researcher Martin Calsyn.

“Vedea is a new language for creating interactive data-driven visualizations… Vedea will be demonstrated publicly for the first time at PDC 09 November 16-19 in Los Angeles and should be broadly available from research.microsoft.com shortly thereafter.”

Best I can tell, the language seems to be a project of the Microsoft Research Computational Science Laboratory. That unit is the team behind the Microsoft Compututational Science Studio (MSCSS), a “a tool for enabling non-programmer scientists and researchers to harness vast amounts of storage and compute power for running the multi-scale models that are needed to truly understand and predict complex natural systems.”

MSCSS s a shell into which you plug in extensions – for visualization, data management, computation, modelling, and more, Calsyn explained in his post. He added:

“One extension might give you access to remote data on Azure; another might allow you to draw heat-maps over Virtual Earth; and another might support Perfect Plasticity Approximation models or computations on the Hadley climate model data .”

MSCSS was one of the tools that Craig Mundie demonstrated during his university tour this past week. Mundie told the Seattle Times that tools like MSCSS would do for scientists what Excel did for business folks: Make t easier to analyze vast amounts of technical data.

I’m not sure whether Vedea is an outgrowth of an existing Microsoft Research project or something brand-new.  Microsoft showed off Vedea privately at the Microsoft Research eScience Workshop 2009 in mid-October.

There are lots of interesting directions Microsoft could take Vedea. Check out some of the visualization links on Calsyn’s blog page for references to other visualization projects, including the open-source “Processing” visualization language, which is being taught in an increasing number of universities.

November 6th, 2009

Microsoft puts more Azure cloud plumbing in place

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 6:39 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Azure, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, PDC 2009, Red Dog, Utility/cloud computing, Virtualization

Tags: Content Delivery, Content Delivery Network, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Mary Jo Foley

Microsoft is continuing to lay the groundwork for the commercial version of its Azure cloud environement, rolling out a new content delivery network (CDN) capability, as well as the November update to its Azure developer services.

On November 5, Microsoft delivered the November Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of its Service Bus and Access Control Service — both of which are feature-complete. Those two elements are known as .Net Services. (Workflow services, queuing and routers also originally were set to be part of the first .Net Services release, but the team decided to pull those components in order to sync with Microsoft’s .Net 4.0 release, due out in March, 2010.)

Microsoft also rolled out on November 5 a new CDN capability that extends the storage piece of the Windows Azure cloud operating system.

(A quick refresher: Windows Azure, codenamed “Red Dog” is what networks and manages the set of Windows Server 2008 machines that comprise the Microsoft-hosted cloud. At the highest level, Red Dog consists of four “pillars”: Storage (like a file system); the “fabric controller,” which is a management system for modeling/deploying and provisioning; virtualized computation/VM; and a development environment, which allows developers to emulate Red Dog on their desktops and plug in Visual Studio, Eclipse or other tools to write cloud apps against it. Azure services including .Net Services and SQL Azure sit on top of the Windows Azure operating system)

The new Windows Azure CDN is designed to allow developers to deliver high-bandwidth content more quickly and efficiently. Here are more details from a November 5 blog post by Brad Calder, who is a leader of the Windows Azure Storage team:

“Windows Azure CDN has 18 locations globally (United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America) and continues to expand. Windows Azure CDN caches your Windows Azure blobs at strategically placed locations to provide maximum bandwidth for delivering your content to users. You can enable CDN delivery for any storage account via the Windows Azure Developer Portal. The CDN provides edge delivery only to blobs that are in public blob containers, which are available for anonymous access.

“The benefit of using a CDN is better performance and user experience for users who are farther from the source of the content stored in the Windows Azure Blob service. In addition, Windows Azure CDN provides worldwide high-bandwidth access to serve content for popular events.”

For the remaining CTP period, Windows Azure CDN access will remain free to testers. (Pricing information isn’t yet available.) Microsoft is recommending caching blobs less than 10 GB in size for best performance.

Speaking of the remaining CTP period, while Microsoft officials have said for the past few months that they planned to remove the beta tag from Azure at the Professional Developers Conference in mid-November, Microsoft isn’t closing the CTP until the end of December. Developers and customers won’t be charged for Azure until February, 2010.

November 4th, 2009

Free Microsoft open-source content management app to get its debut next week

Posted by Mary Jo Foley @ 10:11 am

Categories: .Net Framework, Code names, Corporate strategy, Development tools, Open source

Tags: Microsoft ASP.NET, Microsoft Corp., Content Management, Orchard, Oxite, .Net, Open Source, Middleware, Software Development, Software/Web Development

Microsoft is working on a set of free open-source content-management application and set of reusable components for it that is codenamed “Orchard.”

The company is slated to share details about its plans for Orchard at TechEd Europe next week.

I asked Microsoft officials for more information on Orchard and got back a no comment.

But here’s what is known so far about the project, courtesy of the session write-up from the TechEd site:

“Orchard is a new effort to produce free, open source, reusable components and a full-featured CMS application built on these components to produce a variety of different types of web sites. Our small core team of dedicated ASP.NET developers are seeking the guidance and contribution of the .NET community at-large to help shape this project in its early stages. Bradley Millington, Engineering Lead for the project, will be hosting this interactive discussion to invite you to get involved on the ground floor - to tell us what you’d want to see from the project, what components you could envision using in your own applications, and how to best channel the contributions of community to make it all happen. We can talk strategy, logistics, features, or anything else that’s on your mind. Please join us!”

(That session is slated for Wednesday, November 11.)

Microsoft already has been dabbling in the open-source content-management space with a project codenamed “Oxite.” I also tried asking whether Orchard is simply a new name for Oxite or a revamped version of Oxite and received no word back.

Microsoft released an alpha version of the Oxite source code, under the open-source Microsoft Public License (MS-Pl) in December 2008. At that time, the Softies described Oxite as a platform “built to take full advantage of ASP.NET MVC but broken into assemblies so that even ASP.NET WebForm developers can use the data backend and utility code, supports use of Visual Studio Team Suite (DB Pro, Test, etc.), and Background Services Architecture (sending trackbacks, emails, etc. all done as a background process to prevent delays on the web site itself).”

Anyone else have more information about what Orchard is — or how it will compete (or not) with other CMS systems out there, like Dot Net Nuke, for example? DotNetNuke’s Co-founder Shaun Walker is on the board of the newly minted CodePlex Foundation (along with lots of Softies) — so maybe Orchard will end up as a CodePlex Foundation project? Other thoughts and/or guesses?