Notes from Microsoft’s “Developer Liberation Day”
I attended “Developer Liberation Day” on the 6th of November in Sydney to watch the 15 billion dollar man, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft profess his company’s vision for Cloud Computing; the new paradigm that has the software industry agog with excitement. Since the beginning of the year several startups have been formed around the world with executives of large companies (like Microsoft itself) jumping ship to lead these startups in what has been perceived to be the next most lucrative wave of technology.
I believe the day was themed correctly because Windows Azure, Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform and associated tooling, seamlessly integrated with Visual Studio 2008 was designed to allow the developer total freedom from topological constraints of infrastructure required to host applications.
I thought Steve was a very motivational speaker and connected almost immediately with the audience. The message was crystal leader – Microsoft’s most valueable and treasured assets were the developers who delivered innovative, next generation solutions based on Microsoft technology. Steve infused excitement in his presentation from the start and by reiterating that software development is going to be the most exciting career in 10 years with a vision of all areas of the home and office having sensitive, multi-touch surfaces that process information seamlessly and respond accordingly.
A second presentation by Gianpaolo Carraro targeted exclusively at a developer audience was not as convincing with the very basic “Hello Cloud” application not working in the first instance. Several audience that I met after the presentation had serious concerns about the reliability and responsiveness of Microsoft’s cloud. My impression was that the technology was still being developed and it was too early to draw conclusions on reliability. As I have a CTP Live Services account to access .NET Services and SQL Services on the cloud, I intend to implement stress test scripts to test cloud reliability over the next few weeks.
Some notes that I made at the conference (with follow-up material that I later researched) is as listed below. The notes below are not intended to explain the technology, rather, they are meant to describe the salient features of the presentation that may not be so obvious when technical material related to Windows Azure is perused at Azure’s official site.
- Steve Balmer hinted at a possible alliance with Telstra, one of Australia’s larger telecom providers to support bandwidth requirements for cloud computing. This press release of the proposed Microsoft and Telstra alliance was published the same day in the U.S.
- Microsoft Bizspark is a programme targeted at helping startups succeed by grants and concessions made by Microsoft around software licenses, support and visibility. Steve Balmer encouraged startups in the Cloud Computing space to seriously consider applying for enrollment into this programme.
- Microsoft Dreamspark is a programme by Microsoft that provides students with free professional software to pursue their dreams.
- The most interesting technical artifact I took away from the conference was the Windows Azure Service Bus implementation, where services built behind a corporation’s firewall could be exposed seamlessly via Microsoft’s cloud.
- Microsoft boasted that developers could “push” applications to an on-premise environment, a partners datacentre or the MS Cloud directly from Visual Studio 2008 itself. This means that there will exist a single method of deployment henceforth.
- The archived web cast of the event could be found at http://www.microsoft.com.au/powertodevelopers/default.aspx.
