Thursday, April 22, 2010

Highlights of Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure Launch event

Today I have attended the Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure Launch event in Auckland. There were close to 1000 people for this event.

The first presentation on Visual Studio was done by Sam Guckenheimer. He took us through the Visual Studio product suite
  • He explained how this product can now reduce time wastage in the SDLC,
  • also how transparent the VS has become in terms of managing a project from a team perspective (using excel and sharepoint to monitor the team progress on a project)
  • how the use of layer diagrams helps communicate the design intent and later helps check the implementation against the design.

The second presentation was done by David Chappell on Windows Azure platform which is the Microsoft Cloud Computing Technology.

He said that there are two broad categories for cloud computing -- Cloud Applications and Cloud Platform.

He covered on the cloud platform of Windows Azure. Windows Azure is a platform where you ask for an application to run (instead of a VM) and the application will control how many VMs to run etc. The Windows Azure platform recognises if an instance failed and restarts a new instance automatically.

He also mentioned about the SQL Azure which is basically Sql server and this needs the TDS (Tabular Data Stream) protocol

Also talked about the applications of Azure as follows:

  • Apps that need massive scale
  • Apps that need high reliability
  • Apps with variable load
  • Apps with a short or unpredictable lifetime
  • Apps that do parallel processing
  • Apps that must fail fast or scale fast
  • Apps that don't fit well in an organisation's data centre
  • Apps that can benefit from external storage

He also mentioend the differences between the various cloud platforms (Amazon web services, Google App Engine, Force.com) and whether they are competitors or not.

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