Blogged live – now complete – curiously Bob Muglia’s closing remarks were cut off on the live feed.  Very much looking forward to the Silverlight stuff tomorrow.

Check out further PDC coverage

Background

• Everything is about 3 screens (desktop, phone and TV) and the cloud.
• Day 1 focus – Backend, i.e. Azure.
• Day 2 focus – Office, Silverlight & Windows focus on Day 2.
• Microsoft emphasis will be on IE + Silverlight for all 3 screens – desktop, phone and TV.
• Ray Ozzie wants you to bet on Windows 7, IE8, Silverlight, Windows Azure, SQL Azure, 3 screens and a cloud
• Bob Muglia talks at length about moving existing applications to the cloud (‘move, enhance, transform’) – partnering with Avanade & Accenture
• Cloud application aspects being covered at PDC Self-Service, Elastic, Service-Orientated, Federated, Scale-Out, Staged Productions, Always Available, Multi-Tenant, Failure Resilient

Microsoft Announcements

• Azure platform going live Jan 1 2010, but no charging until Feb 1 2010 – this is not news btw
• Azure projects are available in Visual Studio 2010
• Windows Azure has RESTful service APIs to manage configuration
• Windows Azure Pricing: $0.12ph (1×1.6GHz/1.75MB); $0.24ph (2×1.6GHz/3.5GB); $0.48ph (4×1.6GHz/7.0GB); $0.96ph (8×1.6GHz/14GB)
• Windows Azure now supports fast CGI support, PHP, MySQL
• Azure – auto geo-replication in pairs – 3 pairs (NA, EU, Asia) going live in Jan 2010
• Azure Storage Updating features – entity group transactions, snapshot, copy
• Azure Storage Accessing features – block blobs, page blobs, leases
• Azure Storage Serving features – shared access signatures, custom domain names, content delivery network (CDN)
• Azure Storage – X-Drives – NTFS-like drive access to cloud storage
• SQL Azure – Fuller DB, T-SQL, Stored Procedures, ADO.NET, works against Excel, support from SQL Server Management Studio (2008 R2)
• Some customers will be able to go live today including WordPress
• Microsoft PinPoint – catalogue of products and services targeting developers and IT (showing in Azure portal and partner network, and later into online portal for IT)
• Codename “Dallas” (completely on Windows Azure and SQL Azure) open catalogue for data (public and commercial) with uniform discovery, trial and licensing – touted as a game-changer
• ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) also now known as OData.
• Project “Sydney” – connects Azure platform to existing private data-centre services together
• Windows Azure creatable images (with admin access) coming in 2010 (Windows base, customise, snapshot, deploy)
• AppFabric (Windows Server Beta 1 available now & Windows Azure Beta 1 in 2010) – create high availability, scale-out, multi-tenant, manageable apps (especially using WCF and WF) covering caching, Workflow hosting, monitoring, service bus, service hosting, access control – formerly called “Dublin”?
• Windows Identify Foundation RTM
• Go-live license for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 & .NET Framework 4 beta 2 – this is not news
• Oslo now SQL Server Modeling Services
• The stack is now: Applications – Exchange/SharePoint; Dev Tools – VS; Programming Model – .NET Framework; App Services, Windows Server/Azure AppFabric; DB – SQL Server/Azure; OS – Windows Server/Azure; Management – System Center
• System Center Cloud Beta in 2010
• SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM in 2010
• Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4.0 RTM March 22nd 2009 – this is not news

Demos

• Seesmic.com demo of Twitter client using Silverlight and for Windows with WPF – will become a platform soon
• WordPress (who hosts 10 million blogs) demo on Azure and how it can scale easily
• OddlySpecific.com (from creators of ICanHasCheeseburger, FailBlog & PunditKitchen) launched today on Windows Azure & SQL Azure – also can use CDN
• Codename “Dallas” – Showing discovery (by catalogue); explore data with REST, AtomPub, etc. and Excel 2010 PowerPivot; demo of service proxy it can build for you; 3D (!!) demo of mars image exploration – underwhelming reaction from audience
• US Federal Chief Information Officer – talking about democratising information (like GPS and NASA Pathfinder);  http://beamartian.jpl.nasa.gov; Career finder application on mobile device (via data.gov) – yawn (despite the profound implications)
• Silly fictional video about the cloud starring Bob Muglia – groan
• Azure Low-level access (Don Box & Chris Anderson) – Windows Azure application in low-level simple C++ (and assembler!); Azure SQL accepting T-SQL from SMSS to create pdc ‘talks’ table and insert rows; Show OData javascript app (using o-auth wrap to .NET Services Access Control Service) on ‘talks’ table
• Kelly Blue Book (kbb.com – 14M unique per month in 2 data centres) Silverlight App (showing filtering and zooming) – showing flexible cost model with Windows Azure; less than 1% code-base change plus Azure config file; also using SQL Azure (using same mechanisms as before) and showing SQL Azure Data Sync – most scripted/stiff demo of the keynote.
• Video of how customers can use Azure platform: Dominoes (peaks on Superbowl and Friday nights); Siemens; RiskMetrics
• Project “Sydney” demo – connection of Azure application to private data-centre SQL database
• Increasing functional of the Tailspin travel app (.NET 3.5) with .NET 4.0 and VS 2010 tools: showing VS 2010 multi-monitor; using ASP.NET MVC diagram; adding single sign-on quickly with Windows Identity Foundation (uses AD token service); new find-in-files window; client-side validation with ASP.NET MVC 2; Intellitrace shows trace (e.g. ADO.NET) and allow navigation back to code that produced the trace; add AppFabric to use distributed memory cache feature; automated web-app UI test(!) which shows that the memory cache improved performance; new Windows Workflow 4 designer; AppFabric exposes WF 4 through a web service automatically with tracking UI shown in IIS Manager; MSDeploy integrated with Visual Studio for each single-file publish/deploy (to staging/live)
• Moving Tailsping travel app (as enhanced above) seamlessly to Azure; creating an app model with designer in VS 2010 by adding web role, AppFabric role and database role and associating with projects; published to Azure (using Windows Identity Foundation to allow federation of AD identity); use System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to monitor Azure application and help check for SLA violations