Keyvan Nayyeri

After almost three years of not having a PDC conference, today Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008 began in LA with a keynote by Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia, and David Thomspson.

Honestly, if I were not in a good mood today (I just got my military certificate), I had to leave watching the keynote before it ends. Today’s keynote mainly focused on cloud computing and the introduction of Microsoft Azure service (originally codenamed RedDog) as Microsoft’s solution for cloud computing.

Ray Ozzie gave an overview of requirements for the existence of such a service, and asked other guys to give further details.

In a nutshell Azure is a cloud computing service that allows businesses, ISVs, and developers to deploy their web applications to multiple data centers around the world easily, and scale up their applications based on their demand. Although it seems that Azure is mainly built for .NET developers, it offers service for other server technologies as well.

During the keynote, some guys talked about Azure which comes with a set of development tools for developers to be able to build applications to be deployed to this service. There are some Visual Studio project templates and extensions that let you build your applications, and then publish them in two files which can be uploaded to Azure with a single user interface that automatically hosts your application in several data centers around the world.

In this category, a demo was given showcasing the development and deployment of an application built for Azure which is available online and hosted on Azure already. Bluehoo is another site which requires scaling as a crucial aspect of its nature, and it was demoed as a real world application hosted on Azure.

Besides, there come the next generation of the .NET Framework as .NET Services, SQL Server as SQL Services, and Live as Live Services that all work on top of this cloud computing solution.

As Ray wrapped up in the end of the keynote, first CTP of Azure will be available to PDC attendees today, and they can get their hands on the service within next couple of the weeks, and most likely public users wouldn’t be able to use the service until 2009. Ray also pointed that pricing model for the service is straightforward and competing which would mean that it solely depends on the resource usage and the scale of the hosted application.

To be honest, I didn’t like this keynote very much. This may be a personal opinion but I didn’t see something better from other community members over Twitter. During the keynote we were tweeting about it and discussing the future but it didn’t look like a fascinating keynote to everyone.

One marginal note about the keynote is that I’ve been seeing many digressions in keynotes for Microsoft conferences. People deviate from the main point and talk about something that wouldn’t be stated in a keynote or give unnecessary details about them, and in my opinion this keynote (like may other Microsoft keynotes) could be shortened significantly.

Additionally, I’ve been waiting for this conference to hear something good coming out of the company but this keynote couldn’t satisfy me. In my opinion Microsoft has been walking on a silent path recently, and it was expected to see better stuff in the conference. However, it’s too soon to judge but if it’s going to emphasize on cloud computing (which it seems to be the case), I don’t think it’s a good thing at all mostly because cloud computing is not a common concern for many developers even for many of those who work on enterprise web applications, and it shouldn’t become a widespread concern for web developers at least for the next 5-6 years.

By the way, Simone said it simply in his tweet after the keynote: Microsoft is too far ahead or they only work for enterprise software vendors.