This is day one of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC).  My goal is to keep posting to this single blog entry with updates from the conference based on the keynote and sessions that I attend

Keynote – Ray Ozzie

• 8:30 - Ray takes the stage to show off the high level vision for Microsoft products and services.  Nothing interesting to show off yet.
• 8:41 - Loic LeMeur (Founder & CEO) from seesmic showing his product using Silverlight.
• User Interface looks a lot like TweetDeck (which is built on Adobe Flex)
• Announced that the product (for Windows) has shipped today.
• Created as a development platform for other developers to extend.
• 8:46 - Ray back on stage discussing Windows Azure
• Windows Azure Fabric Controller is what enables the cloud in the datacenter…. It’s “like System Center”
• Said that Java, Eclipse, PHP, and mySQL will be available for use within Windows Azure
• Showing Timline for Azure
• Oct 27th, PDC 2008 – Azure is announced
• Nov 17th, PDC 2009 - Today
• Jan 1 – Production platform deployed
• Feb 1 – Begin billing
• Provide multiple sized VM’s within Azure
• Supports multiple platforms
• Java with TomCat
• php
• mySQL
• java
• Zend Framework
• Shows datacenters of Windows Azure as Pairs within a Geography
• Chicago/ San Antonio
• Dublin/Amsterdam
• Singapore/Hong Kong
• Azure Xdrives – Mountable durable storage that is an NTFS mountable device.  Not clear yet if this is directly available on a local computer, but I suspect that’s true.  Sounds like Amazon EBS.
• 8:55 – Matt Mullenweb (Founder, Automattic) from WordPress is now onstage showing off Wordpress.  What is this dude doing here?
• Showing Wordpress running on Windows Azure
• Using php, MySQL on Azure…. Very nice!
• Matt (Didn’t get his last name) from FailBlog (and other sites) discussing their services and scale issues.
• Showing 8 million page views a day network that
• 100,000 votes a day driven by users
• Launching a new site TODAY!  http://oddlyspecific.com built on Windows Azure and SQL Azure.  This makes it REALLY easy to scale
• Using a Windows Azure Storage Plugin
• 9:02 – Ray is back on stage. 
• Microsoft Pinpoint is a new Marketplace for users and IT to find new services.  Integrated into Azure Portal today and soon will be integrated with the Partner portal and on the core Microsoft sites. 
• New project called “Dallas” which is a data catalog service (Discover, Explore).  Dave Campbell to discuss further:
• Some are public and some are private data sources.
• Allows users to provide comments on the data
• User can “try” the data and even requires you to “sign” a EULA specific to that data source.
• Dallas can help you to preview and navigate the data, so you don’t have to learn the entire structure just to evaluate it.
• Can use Excel PowerPivot to explore the data.
• When pointing to the service via Visual Studio, you get an object collection built for you and allows you to easily connect and use via ADO.NET.  I’m sure there’s more going on here, but it really does make it easy to discover, explore, and utilized the service.
• Showing a WPF application pulling data via Dallas and we used some provided 3D glasses (like the ones from an old 80’s movie) to view data from the NASA Mars Rover data.  Very cool!  Be a Martian
• 9:14 – Ray back onstage
• Discussing that “This Administration” (talking about the US. Government… Obama) is interested in cloud computing and access to innovation.
• Vivek Kundra, CIO of US Government is connected via Video chatting with us.
• Explaining on how innovation is happening as public data is being made available and Cloud Computing.
• Showing how Data.gov is used to search for jobs based on location.  Showed this using an iPhone (funny).
• Asking the PDC crowd to developer applications “for the good of the republic”.
• Saying how this is the early days of cloud computing.  “Three Screens in the Cloud”
• Ray asks that we remember 3 things
• Bet on Windows 7
• Bet on Windows Azure
• Take a moment to think how Azure, Pinpoint, codename “Dallas” will impact our world.
• 9:24 – Ray is done…now a funny video about “The Cloud”
• 9:25 – Bob Muglia is now onstage to discuss the Cloud…. but he’s a Server and Tools President.  I bet we’re going to talk about Private Cloud.
• Important keywords to describe a “cloud”: scalable, elastic, software, app platform, infrastructure.
• Discussing how “Bing” uses a technology called, “Autopilot” to manage their platform.  This was a “prototype” but not a really platform or product.
• Evolution of Computing
• 70’s – Mainframe
• 80’s – Client-Server
• 90’s – Web
• 2000 – SOA
• 2010+ – Cloud
• Cloud Application Model: service-Oriented, Always Available, Model-Driven, Scale-Out, Staged Production, Self-Service, Multi-Tenant, Federated, Elastic, Failure Resilient
• 9:35 – Don Box and Chris Anderson on stage!
• Discussing how Azure has evolved since PDC 2008
• Going to show off some C++ and CGI (not FASTcgi) coding running on Azure.  Guess we can’t take their word for it.
• Showing how T-SQL/TDS experience is available in Azure SQL (more than just the open REST enabled method of accessing data).  Including transaction enablement
• Shows OAuthWrap and OData feeds (Work done with Microsoft, Yahoo, Google). Using Javascript to authenticate and display data.  Very nice!
• 9:46 – Bob Muglia is back onstage
• Showing the relationship between on-premise and cloud services
• SQL Server – SQL Azure
• Windows Server – Windows Azure
• 9:47 – Kelly Blue Book dude showing their application using Windows Azure and Silverlight
• KBB has 14 million users per month.  Uses 2 datacenters for redundancy but often uses both for extra capacity
• Looking for a more flexible cost model….now going to use Windows Azure.  Application was already built on .NET and SQL.  To move to Azure, it required only a 1% code update.
• Uses 30 Azure Instances on average
• KBB is a “Data Provider”
• SQL Azure is used
• Vehicle data is published via an ETL process
• Community data is updated often and by users
• SQL Azure Data Sync is used to sync data between local and cloud instances
• Reduced time to provision new servers from 6 days to 6 minutes
• 9:53 – Video time!
• Dominoes Pizza uses Windows Azure
• Siemens using a Hybrid Cloud approach
• RiskMetrics Group enjoys computing on-demand
• 9:55 – Explaining how Microsoft is focused on providing connectivity between on-premise and cloud (Azure Only of course) services.
• Windows Azure, Code Name “Project Sydney” enables existing servers together with servers running on Windows Azure.  Available next year.
• Demo showing internal Microsoft application, “Giving Campaign”.  Deployed and running locally (corpnet) and uses Silverlight.
• Application running on Azure fails because the database is not available due to firewall
• From within SQL Admin, can create a secure and remote connection between the application on Azure and the internal database.
• 9:59 – Explaining the change in Windows azure Virtual Machine Role.  In the future, Microsoft will allow you to create and deploy your own predefined Virtual Machine.
• 10:01 – Announcing “Windows Server AppFabric” and is available today!  Cameron Skinner, Product Unit Manager of Visual Studio Team to show more
• Showing a simple “Car Rental” application
• Showing Multi-Monitor support in Visual Studio 2010
• Using ASP.NET MVC, Modeling.
• Showing single sign-on using Windows Federation
• Showing “InteliTrace” which shows you a trace of your application which has already ran and even takes you to the code for a specific function (see the SQL Query in the trace, click on it and take me to the code that ran it).
• Showing AppFabric – Enabled via Web.config and now handles all of the cache management.  Integrates within the IIS Managers and handles the cache, workflow, traces, etc. 
• Shows how to package and deploy your application via MSDeploy is “one-click”.  This is useful for internal and hosted applications, but it’s different than Windows Azure and the Web Role.
• 10:16 – Bob Muglia back on-stage
• Now talking about System Center.  System Center at PDC?  Interesting.
• System Center enables and manages the “Private Cloud” since it deploys and monitors your internal VM’s
• Douglas Purdy, Architect at Microsoft to show off early view into some System Center innovations
• Showing the “Application Model Project” in Visual Studio to model and define your application.  (I think this was project code name “Oslo”)
• Allows you to define your application components and dependencies.
• Shows Web Role, AppFabric Role, and Database Role defined and bound to the code that was previously created.
• Shows how easy it easy for a developer to “right-click” and deploy to Azure to test in a staging environment
• Shows how the developer can then take the tested application and create a “package” which is then deployed either to Azure or internally on Windows Server.  The IT guy can then use Powershell to deploy the application.
• Now showing how the application is being monitored using System Center Operations Manager
• 10:28 – Bob Muglia now talking about the Microsoft applications like SharePoint, Exchange, and Dynamics.
• Says how they will also build and leverage the cloud as well.
• Available Now: Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure, SQL Azure
• Beta at PDC/Ship 2010: Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1, SQL Server 2008 R2, Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework V4
• Beta 2010: System Center “Cloud”, Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2
• Datacenters in the US are ready today, others to be available in 2010
• 10:35 – Done!

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