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Marc Holmes

The Unauthorised Autobiography of Marc Holmes

Microsoftie thinking about dialogue with developers. Brit in Seattle. Windswept and Interesting.


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Filed under: azure

Cloud Cloud Cloud at #wpc10

It’s the Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington this week (come on, how could you not know?) which brings together the vast array of partners that make Microsoft so successful.

Both Steve and Bob talked about the cloud, and you can find a whole load of reflection in the usual tech news spaces. Bob made a lot of announcements, including the Windows Azure appliance enabling the cloud within the datacentre. This is a great post running briefly through the announcements.

See The Difference

I was delighted to see that See The Difference is now up and running on Azure.

I spent a bit of time with Dom from the team not so long ago talking about audience matters (he kindly offered some help on some stuff I was working on). He’s got a lot of experience in with traditional media but particularly now as he seeks to deliver on his plan to “
engage supporters with a diverse range of projects from all around the world, through a video-based site that uses ‘digital storytelling’ to promote projects and, very importantly, to show donors just what a difference their support has made” (UK Fundraising 2009).

I guess the real challenge for the team - and therefore the real value to the charities - is delivering difficult and complex messages to data-snackers. Here’s an example for Macmillan.

It’s a great idea to drive greater awareness and understanding of a vast array of charity projects and I wish them all the best in their efforts.

GalaxyZoo

Gzoo

Before they headed off to PDC, Mike and Paul headed to Oxford (almost the same weather - takes about the same time to get there too given the ring road) to talk to Chris Lintott and Arfon Smith about the GalaxyZoo.org project which is a "Citizen Science" project inviting users to classify galaxies using specialist skills not available to computers (eyes and intuition mainly).
 
The video is now up on Channel 9.

Chris talks about the Galaxy Zoo and Citizen Science, followed by Arfon talking about the platform behind the project, and it's migration from Rails/MySQL on Amazon to Windows Azure/SQL Azure.

Quick Links from #PDC09 Keynote Day 1

If you didn't catch the keynote from PDC 09 today then you can see the on-demand stream here shortly. This year the keynote was streamed with Silverlight Smooth Streaming: my experience was very good - didn't miss a beat in two hours - and there seemed to be positive tweets from others on the subject too.
 
Essentially the keynote today was Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia - aided by a few others - talking about the delivery of some aspects of the Azure platform, and pointing the way to the future. You can see the official press releases here. A few links:
Azure will be going into production from 1st January 2010 which is a huge milestone. You can see pricing details here.
  • Pinpoint is updated: an online marketplace for Microsoft partners to market and sell their applications.
  • Codename "Dallas" is a new data service, based on Azure and available through Pinpoint which enables developers to access premium datasets and content such as NAVTEQ, AP and Data.gov. An interesting innovation in the exposure of these kinds of datasets.
  • Beyond the services themselves, Bob concentrated on the tooling - via VS2010 and AppFabric. AppFabric is a set of services "that enable deployment and management" of scalable applications across server and cloud. This is a realisation of a few projects: Dublin, Velocity and Oslo alongside the .NET Services. The demo here was very impressive and will take a while for me to get my head around. Meantime, you can take a look at the learning centre for more background and - very shortly - downloads of the beta.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta was released and you can see Phil Haack's post here.
    A starter for 10. There'll be a load more tomorrow, so get reading!

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