Three Screens and a Cloud

The official Day One of PDC started off with a bang. Ray Ozzie started off the Keynote by touting his Three Screens and a Cloud (mobile, pc, TV) vision. The goal is develop rich experience across the spectrum of devices available. Microsoft is facilitating this by giving developers the tools to make targeting multiple devices with minimal effort. The emphasis was on Cloud backend and Silverlight front end.

The first announcement was that Microsoft’s Cloud was coming out of Beta and into production on January 1, 2010. Customers will start paying for the service February 1. They will initially start out with one pair of datacenters in the US with one in Europe and Asia to follow later next year.

So what does it take to host a Cloud??? Microsoft brought v1 (they are currently on v4) of one of their “pods”

Put a few of these in your data center and you are all set.

The next announcement centered around a new product called Microsoft Pinpoint which delivers platforms as a service. The two main platforms that they covered were Exchange Server and SharePoint Server. This is just an extension of their online presence.

Continuing on the theme of bring services to the masses, Microsoft announced the CTP release of Microsoft Codename“Dallas” this is a data as a service platform. Think of it as a catalog of datasets third parties provide the content and users can shop for the content they need. It also provides content providers a platform to publish their data. The demo they did accessed the Mars Rover 3D Image dataset from NASA. They showed how you can incorporate data from that dataset into your applications.

The nation’s CIO, Vivek Kundra announced the pubic data is available at www.data.gov. He wants devs to integrate this data into applications, bringing the data to the masses.

Ray left us with some thoughts:

• Bet on Windows 7
• Bet on online services + Windows Azure
• Take all the innovations to Dream and Build

Next was Bob Muglia to show us some goodies. The first announcement was Project Sydney which will all connecting, through secure means, your data center servers to your cloud application. Allowing the database to live in your datacenter and the app being hosted in the cloud.

For the past year Microsoft has been talking about a Service Server called “Dublin”. This server would host your services (WCF) and Workflows, providing profiling out of the box. Dublin is now known as Windows Server AppFabric. This will be available as a standalone server and also available for Azure.

They also announced the RTM of Identity Framework allowing Single Sign-on capability across a federation using claims based security.

So how do you manage all of this? Microsoft System Center is the answer. You will be able manage on site systems and cloud systems from one application, at the same time.

Sorry that this post is late….Information overload! Day two Keynote was even better. Stay tuned!!!!!