PDC 2009 Wrap Up

23 November 2009

I thought the keynote started slowly – I didn’t understand why the world needs a new Twitter client, but after some patience, it was good to see the whole Azure thing really come together.

Modern data centres are built using containerised servers like this one:

It was fun to be shut inside while they turned up the air conditioning ;-)

I’m intrigued by Dallas and PinPoint and the democratization of data. Zach gave me a key, so I’m looking forward to experimenting. I’m wondering how it will play in the semantic web space and whether the metadata will be rich enough to enable discovery and thus dynamic mash-ups. I want to be able to link concepts across data sets and I think RDF and Linked Data is probably the way to go.

I went to an interesting session on Microsoft Semantic Engine – It seems like WinFS on steroids. I think it has a lot of relevance to Intranets and our own research on Infoplaza. Unfortunately the PM spoke for so long that the engineer only had a few minutes to show us under the covers.

On Wednesday, Richard and I were invited to demonstrate some of our work with the .NET Service Bus (Lessons Learned: Building On-Premises and Cloud Applications with the Service Bus and Windows Azure). The video and slides are available here : http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVC31. There is an accompanying case study.

I’d heard about StreamInsight from Mark, but had been put off by the SQL Server badge. It turns out to be a very clever piece of kit that looks great for dealing with time series data in close to real-time.

The announcements about AppFabric (the new home of the Service Bus) seems to make a lot of sense. WIF, WRAP and ADFS V2 will surely change the way we build identity and security into web applications. Project Sydney looks like it will make it easier to mix cloud and on-premise applications.

Great to see Java and PHP running win Windows Azure and the launch of the Soyatec libraries for accessing Azure Storage. I think these are important cross platform and integration messages and it’s good to see Microsoft taking this seriously.

The file system over blob store technology (X drive?) is apparently coming soon, and I got the impression that it wasn’t just an Azure compute thing, but that you might be able to run it from your laptop.

Some interesting talks on High Performance Computing, multi-core and parallel etc. There is certainly innovation with f# but unfortunately I don’t find the syntax particularly elegant so I’m reluctant to use it in anger.

VS2010 and .NET 4 both demonstrate innovation. System.Dynamic is great news for obscure-language-compiler-developers like me!

I also got to chat for a few minutes with Patrick Dussud in the speaker work room. Patrick is a past contributor and inspirator to LSharp. He didn’t seem to have lost is enthusiasm for Lisp and he did a pretty good job of rekindling my own!

We were fortunate enough to be invited to the Azure VIP party. Great company, as well as blue illuminated cocktails.