Azure and interoperability

Microsoft announced at PDC09 that they will support more platforms than just .NET on Windows Azure. Azure now has an interoperability page where they show some of the options.

SDKs’ for

• PHP
• Java
• Ruby

Tools for

• Eclipse
• Java
• Ruby
• PHP

This really broadens the potential customer base. Pair the Eclipse Tools for Windows Azure with the newly acquired TeamPrise offering and Java developers can start developing for Windows Azure today. Welcome into this cloud Javas!

More fun stuff from PDC09

Don Box and Chris Anderson showed an example where they used CGI, C and Assembler to write a Windows Azure application. Assembler on Azure?!

Bob Muglia showed Project Sydney – a way to connect applications running in the cloud to servers running in your local datacenters. Sydney will come out as beta early next year.

Virtual Machine Role for Azure: Enables admin mode and remote desktop access to virtual servers running on Azure.

Intellitrace in Visual Studio 2010 looked very nice.

Note to self: download Tailspin sample

 

Technorati Tags: pdc09

News from PDC09

Unfortunately I’m not at this years PDC. Would really have liked to go there..

Right now I’m looking for the keynote video, but it’s not available yet. Found some interesting information about what was covered on the keynote at Microsoft PressPass: Microsoft Cloud Services Vision Becomes Reality With Launch of Windows Azure Platform.

Especially three new things peeked my interest.

• AppFabric
  “..Microsoft is delivering Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1, a set of integrated, high-level application services that enable developers to more easily deploy and manage applications spanning both server and cloud.”
  Could this be a way to make “private Azure” available eventually? Or at least use the same programming paradigm for both Azure and local datacenters?
• Windows Server virtual machine support on Windows Azure. Is this something like Amazons EC2?
• RTM of Windows Identity Foundation – aka “Geneva”. I think this piece will be very important in the future.

It will be interesting to watch the Keynotes, probably available tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: pdc09

My idea just sunk…

I had an idea for the Windows Azure Developer Challenge (Swedish). One of the major parts of the idea was to read files from Live Mesh. I just forgot one very important thing..  As of September 8th, the Live Framework CTP will be unavailable. My idea just sunk. If I can’t read files from Live Mesh from my Azure Worker Process the whole idea falls apart.

Don’t think I’ll be able to come up with a new idea for the contest, the contest closes on Friday.

On the bright side: It’s been fun poking around with Azure and .NET and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve spent to much time in Word, PPT and Visio. The only coding I could get my hands on lately has been some Java JAAS stuff.

 

Technorati Tags: azure

Memory Lane: Too much RAM!

Once upon a time …… Or at least 20+ years ago my friend Johan and I struggled with the delightful dilemma of having to much RAM in our shared computer. Johan, which at the time worked for IBM could by a blazingly fast IBM PS/2 50z at about 50% off the market price. If I remember correctly it costed 25.000 SEK with the discount. A lot of money now, even more then. So Johan asked if I would pay half and we could share the computer. We used time slicing, one would have it for one week, then bring it to the other. At that time we lived in the same building and my mother managed to get hold of a “computer desktop” with wheels which we placed the PC (sorry PS/2) on. We would go down the elevator, run through the long corridor and up the other elevator, how’s that for timesharing ?

Johan was also able to buy extra RAM (which was very expensive then) cheap from work. If I remember correctly we had 4M RAM (yep, Megabytes, not Gigabytes) which was a lot then. DOS could only use 640K directly, the rest was fixed with extended memory stuff which I have mostly blissfully forgotten today.

We never succeeded in using all that RAM so we had to find another use for it.

Enter Virtual Disk!

Since we had an excess of RAM we could use a good program called Virtual Disk (or something similar) to create a volatile disk from some of the RAM. We created a virtual disk of 2M from our total of 4M. We could then copy programs, mostly games, onto this superfast volatile disk and run them much faster.

.NET Technology Roadmap

On 30:th of September I was at Microsoft and listened to Michelle Leroux Bustamente who was giving a seminar called “NET Technology Roadmap” (Swedish intro: at PC-Ware). Michelle’s title “Survive the Technology Avalanche” had a bit more bite to it

Slides, code and other resources is now available online.

dasBlonde – Survive the Technology Avalanche – 2009 EU Tour

Another nice Windows 7 UI feature

While copying a rather large file on my Win7 RC machine I noticed that the Explorer icon in the taskbar looked different. It turns out that Windows 7 is coloring the icon to show the progress of the file copy operation.

As can be seen below it matches the “Copying Item” dialogue.

Nice work Windows 7 team!

SQL Azure Database CTP is here

Steve Marx tweeted that the SQL Azure Database CTP is here. I Just signed up for it, will be fun to try out.

I firmly believe that Azure needs a solid SQL storage to succeed. SQL Azure seems to be Microsofts SQL cloud offering.

Once I receive an account I plan to take (parts of) an existing application and port all of it up to Azure and see what happens.

Technorati-taggar: Azure,SDS

Memory Lane: Sorting many records using tape drives

A lot of you who have studied Computer Science have been confronted with sorting problems. They are good  computer class assignments, implementing bubble sort and other sorting algorithms.

The problem we discussed about sorting when I studied Computer Sciense in1986 was of a of another kind. The problem was how to most efficently sort many records using tape drives.

It felt a bit obsolete even then, but the problem was real in some situations for data centers at that time. Some data was to large to sort in memory, or even on disk, for servers then. We had some assignments where we calculated how to most efficently sort large data sets using multiple tapes and tape drives. The key to it all was to have two or more tape drives and three or more tapes and increasingly refine the sorted data by attaching them in the correct sequence.

I kind of prefer todays SELECT name FROM users SORT BY name ASC

Nowadays disk and RAM is ridiculously cheap. But 20+ years ago both were expensive and the capacity was only a fraction of todays capacity. So using tape drives was important then.

Memory Lane

Had an idea to write a couple of blogg posts on stuff from memory lane. I’ve been working professionally with computers since 1987 and using them for fun even longer. It has happened so much in the field of computers these 20-30 years, and it feels that the pace is increasing even more.