Today was the first day of Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, but they may as well have called it official announcement day! For anyone who uses Microsoft technologies on a day-to-day basis, today is a day to remember. Definitely one for the history books of technology.
The big announcement was Windows Azure:
Today, during a keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008), Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.’s chief software architect, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, and highlighted this platform’s role in delivering a software plus services approach to computing.
That’s a lot of marketing speak, but as usual Mary Jo Foley has a great post breaking Azure down. I’d suggest you read that to get a better idea of what exactly Azure is all about.
A few other interesting announcements:
- Windows Live ID Becomes an OpenID Provider – This is a major shot in the arm for OpenID. Support is currently available in the form of a CTP. Dare Obasanjo has more details and a screencast.
- Microsoft is opening Surface up to developers. PDC attendees will receive an invitation to join the Surface community where they can download an SDK and Simulator. Killer apps to follow?
- Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 M3 (Milestone 3) will be shown to PDC attendees. Today they released the privacy statement – Long Zheng does a good job of parsing it.
- Microsoft’s new ‘M’ language will be offered under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). More news on this is expected tomorrow.
- Not really PDC-related, but Bill Gates is stepping up the fight to open up “white space.”
That’s a lot of stuff for one day! As a developer, I’m a bit overwhelmed with the Azure announcement. It’s going to take a while to process. Very exciting though!
UPDATE: Colinizer has another great summary of today’s announcements on his blog. Check it out!
MasterMaq's Blog 
I’m not entirely sure why so many are confused about Azure. The azure.com website is good, but for a good explanation go to the channel9 video with Manuvir Das (not the other one).
With H2 2009 availability, it’s a little behind though.
There should be specifics on the Live Services parts tomorrow.
The Oslo dev center is already running on MSDN.
I blogged a whopping 8 posts on all this today…
Hi Colin…I’ve starred your posts to read, but you answered your own question. The fact that you needed EIGHT posts means it is confusing! Heh. I should link to your summary post actually…
Yeah, but only one is an explanation and that mostly points to the azure.com website 😛
P.S. The problem with the announcements is that they are announce the possibility that something like the stuff shown, may become available sometime in the future under undisclosed terms.
As I said in a post, if day 1 is the usual big-wow day then the Windows 7 and Live stuff doesn’t sound too promising. It is a pre-beta after all so it could all go the way of WinFS. I hope to be wrong 🙂
I hope you’re wrong too! They have Live Mesh running on Azure, apparently, so hopefully it is here to stay.