PDC08, from my perspective…

Welcome to the PDC08

The PDC was a great conference showing much of Microsoft’s future vision for their products and platforms.

I would say that this conference could be broken up into several major areas of interest:

• Oslo

• Azure Cloud Operating System

• Live Services

• User Interface – Silverlight

• Languages – C#, Dynamic Languages, F#

• Windows 7

Overall, I was very impressed with Microsoft’s ability as a company to coordinate the efforts of many diverse groups and technologies throughout the company. It seems that many of the efforts and initiatives that Microsoft has undertaken are starting to come together into a common cohesive vision. That said, it was also evident to me that they still have a bit of work to do to bring all of this new technology together for prime time usage. Although the PDC is an event that usually occurs only every few years, I did hear a rumor that Microsoft has already announced a PDC09. This makes me believe that the timing of this PDC may have been a little aggressive. For many of the Azure and Live services sessions the presenter was in constant IM contact with the Microsoft datacenter. That tells me that there were lots of stability concerns regarding the products that had strong reliance on their cloud services.

My personal interests drove me to many of the sessions on their cloud-based services and Oslo. It was pretty well know that Microsoft would be announcing a cloud-based platform and Live Mesh client-side platform but many of the details were clouded in secrecy before the PDC. Oslo was also talked about a little before the PDC and was shown in a little more detail at the PDC.

Over the last several years Microsoft has been building datacenters at a record pace. During the 1st keynote address, Ray Ozzie talked about how Microsoft realized that in building up their own web-based internet properties that many of these activities were being undertaken by many large and smaller companies around the world. While many large companies could afford to build large datacenters that provide reliability, redundancy, fault tolerance, etc. Many not so big companies were struggling with this overwhelming task. Even very large companies were having trouble with scaling out their services to handle geo-location and fault tolerance. It was becoming clear to Microsoft that cloud based services to complement on premises software was needed. In his keynote, Ozzie recognized similar efforts by both Google and Amazon in this area.

With Windows Azure, Microsoft differentiates itself with cloud based services offered by both Google and Microsoft by offering a service that is:

• Abstracted out to be completely elastic, by allowing computing power to by dynamically sized and scaled at runtime so that you can handle peak loads without paying for more than you need.

• Geo-location, by being able to spread a cloud-based deployment across the globe.

• Fully fault tolerant. All data and software in the cloud is located in several places in the cloud and always spread between servers at different locations.

• An infrastructure that can easily be connected to on-premises software through an internet service bus.

• And the list goes on…

With Windows Azure will come many interesting deployment tools that will make deploying and managing applications in the cloud easy.  Microsoft has created many new and interesting technologies to create what they call “Fabric”.  This “Fabric” is the abstraction that sits on top of the actual servers that are running inside their many datacenters.  You can think of this “Fabric” as an abstraction that is a few levels higher than virtual machines.

From all of the various sessions on Azure and cloud-based services it was very clear that the new world of cloud-based software was going to require us to think differently about how we architect, design and implement our software so that it is better suited to fit into a cloud-based paradigm which, in my opinion, is where things will be headed in the next ten years.  Many of these practices involve the proper decoupling of software as well as other practices that are just part of good software design.

As part of this new cloud-based initiative, it is clear that WCF and WF (Windows Workflow) are going to be two very fundamental enabling technologies. Up to the point, we haven’t seen too much usage of Windows Workflow but it is clear that this will be a large part of many cloud-based applications.  As part of this, Microsoft announced a new server product called “Dublin” which is an application server built using WCF services that front Windows Workflows.  This server product has many advances in Windows Workflow that make it an ideal choice for hosting workflow in the cloud.

There were also talks given on the new data technologies that expand Sql Server into the cloud.  These were dubbed “Sql Services”.  One of the new services is Sql Server Data Service.  This service provides a new way to retrieve data over the internet using REST-based protocols.  These new REST protocols provide ways to query and update data using standard HTTP verbs, such as Get, Post, Put and Delete.  These protocols are built on the idea that specific data resources are uniquely addressable using URIs.  REST based protocols are built to scale like the internet itself.  It was clear that in addition to SOAP based protocols, Microsoft was heavily investing in REST-based protocols as well.

I also attended a session on storing scalable data in the cloud. From what I could gather, one will need to rethink how data is organized in order to take full advantage over the scalability that the cloud offers  What was described was very close to what Amazon does with it’s data storage services.  Basically, there are three storage items in cloud based storage services: blobs, tables and queues.  From what I could understand, the table storage was pretty basic.  Much of the storage seemed to center around entities which play nicely into Microsoft’s Entity Framework (which was just released with .NET 3.5 service pack 1).  They alluded to providing more relational storage in then cloud in the future but none of the cloud storage options had any relational capabilities.  I would imagine that much of this is because they want to provide a massively scalable and reliable data platform and the relational aspects would make this task much more difficult (which is the same route that Amazon has appeared to take).  Not sure where relational cloud storage would fit it but I would think that they would need to have a story here.

In addition to recognizing how difficult it is for companies to write highly scalable software and the need for cloud-based computing, Microsoft has put a considerable investment into “Oslo” which is a software modeling technology.  In recent years, software has become more and more complex.  It is also recognized that there are many aspects of software development that needs to be coordinated. These aspects include business analysis, software architecture, software design and implementation, software deployment. etc.

Over the past 20 years, there have been many attempts to model the software development process.  Many of these attempts, like Rational Rose, have had very limited success.  With “Oslo” Microsoft has taken software modeling to the extreme.  This appears to be one of Microsoft’s most ambitious projects in recent years.  In “Oslo” all of the modeling is stored in a database repository.  On top of this repository there is a highly customizable user interface that is used to explore this repository.  The user interface is very interesting and provides very in depth views into a given software application and how it connects to other various applications and services.

In addition to providing a graphical view of software, “Oslo” also provides a new modeling language called “M” that can be used to model software.  “M” makes it easy to also create Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to make it easy to create applications.

As I mentioned, all of the modeling is stored inside a Sql Server database repository.  Runtimes that are meant to drive WCF/WF etc. are then driven from the data stored in the Oslo repository.

While I was very impressed by what I saw in “Oslo” it appeared to be a long way off.  Done right, this could really change the way we write and think about software in the future although it will be many years, in my opinion, before “Oslo” will be able to make that type of impact.

Well…that’s the long drawn out overview of PDC.  I will add more posts that target the specific sessions I attended along with links to the online videos of those sessions.