Port25

Microsoft at Node Summit

Peter Galli — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:45:00 GMT

We are excited to be attending and participating at Node Summit in San Francisco this week.

Among those Microsoft staffers on site are Server & Tools Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie - who participated on a panel about Platform as a Service this morning and also gave a keynote address - and Gianugo Rabellino, the Senior Director for Open Source Communities, who was on a panel discussing the importance of cross-platform.

You can read more about Scott's keynote on the Windows Azure blog here.

As this work continues inside of Microsoft as well as with the Node.js community and our partner ecosystem, new and exciting capabilities are coming available allowing Node.js developers to have great experiences on the Windows platform.

Today, during his keynote, Scott Guthrie demonstrated how easy it is to get up and running with Node.js on Windows and Windows Azure, while our partners at Cloud9 showcased new tooling experiences that provide even greater flexibility to Node.js for developers who want to build for Windows Azure.

Microsoft has been closely partnering with Joyent for some time now to port Node.js to Windows. We have built an IO abstraction library with them that can be used to make the code run on both Linux and Windows.

We also recently released the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js as open source, available on Github. These libraries are the perfect complement to our recently announced contributions to Node.js and provide a better Node.js experience on Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Developer Center provides documentation, tutorial, samples and how-to guides to get started with Node.js on Windows Azure.

The Joyent team also recently updated the Node Package Manager for Windows (NPM) code to allow use of NPM on Windows. NPM is an essential tool for Node.js developers so now having support for it on Windows we have a better development experience on Windows.

We are also working with the Joyent team on improving the development experience by leveraging the power of Microsoft Development tools and documentation that will make easier for developers to use Node.js APIs.

And, relatedly, we have also been working closely with 10Gen and the MongoDB community in the past few months, and MongoDB already runs on Windows Azure. If you’re using the popular combination of Node.js and MongoDB, a simple straightforward install process will get you started on Windows Azure. You can learn more here.

Our interest in, and support for Node.js is just one of the ways in which Windows Azure is continuing on its roadmap of embracing Open Source Software tools developers know and love, by working collaboratively with the open source community to build together a better cloud that supports all developers and their need for interoperable solutions based on developer choice.

As Microsoft continues to provide incremental improvements to Windows Azure, we remain committed to working with developer communities.

We also clearly understand that there are many different technologies that developers may want to use to build applications in the cloud: they want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice.

All of this delivers on our ongoing commitment to provide an experience where developers can build applications on Windows Azure using the languages and frameworks they already know, enable greater customer flexibility for managing and scaling databases, and making it easier for customers to get started and use cloud computing on their terms with Windows Azure.

Windows Azure Libraries for Java Available, including support for Service Bus

Ram Jeyaraman — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:35:00 GMT

Good news for all you Java developers out there: I am happy to share with you the availability of Windows Azure libraries for Java that provide Java-based access to the functionality exposed via the REST API in Windows Azure Service Bus.

You can download the Windows Azure libraries for Java from GitHub.

This is an early step as we continue to make Windows Azure a great cloud platform for many languages, including .NET and Java. If you’re using Windows Azure Service Bus from Java, please let us know your feedback on how these libraries are working for you and how we can improve them. Your feedback is very important to us!

You may refer to Windows Azure Java Developer Center for related information.

Openness and interoperability are important to Microsoft, our customers, partners, and developers and we believe these libraries will enable Java applications to more easily connect to Windows Azure, in particular the Service Bus, making it easier for applications written on any platform to interoperate with each another through Windows Azure.

Thanks,

Ram Jeyaraman

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft’s Interoperability Group

Open Source OData Library for Objective-C Project Moves to Outercurve Foundation

Peter Galli — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:00:00 GMT

As Microsoft continues to deliver on its commitment to Interoperability, I have good news on the Open Source Software front: today, the OData Library for Objective-C project was submitted to the Outercurve Foundation’s Data, Languages, and Systems Interoperability gallery.

This means that OData4ObjC, the OData client for iOS, is now a full, community-supported Open Source project.

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol for communications between client devices and RESTful web services, simplifying the building of queries and interpreting the responses from the server. It specifies how a web service can state its semantics such that a generic library can express those semantics to an application, meaning that applications do not need to be custom-written for a single source.

The Outercurve Foundation already hosts 19 OSS projects and, as Gallery Manager Spyros Sakellariadis notes in his blog post, this is the gallery’s second OData project, the first being the OData Validation project contributed last August.

“With this new assignment, we expect to involve open source community developers even more in the enhancement of seminal OData libraries,” he said.

Microsoft Senior Program Manager for OData Arlo Belshee notes in his blog post that the Open Sourcing of the OData client library for Objective C will enable first-class support of this important platform. “Combined with exiting support for Android (Odata4j, OSS and Windows Phone (in the odata-sdk by Microsoft), this release provides strong, uniform support for all major phones,” he said.

In assigning ownership of the code to the Outercurve Foundation, the project leads are opening it up for community contributions and support. “They firmly believe that the direction and quality of the project are best managed by users in the community, and are eager to develop a broad base of contributors and followers,” Belshee said.

As Microsoft continues to build and provide Interoperability solutions, Sakellariadis thanked the Open Source communities for their continued support, noting that together “we can all contribute to achieving a goal of device and cloud interoperability, of true openness.”

Full Support for PhoneGap on Windows Phone is Now Complete!

Abu Obeida — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to all the people involved in the PhoneGap community for the recent release of version 1.3 of their HTML5 open source mobile framework!

This release includes many new features, and you can find more details here. You may remember that we announced back in Sept that Microsoft was helping to bring Windows Phone support in PhoneGap: I am happy to say we can now check
this box!

We’re also pleased to note that all features in PhoneGap 1.3 are now supported for Windows Phone, as you can see on their site here.

Also, beyond the core PhoneGap features, developers can enjoy a selection of PhoneGap plugins that support social networks - including Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and Twitter - and a solid integration into Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone.

We have also developed further plugins to give HTML5 developers a feel for Windows Phone’s unique features like Live Tile Update and Bing Maps Search.

Please check out Jesse MacFadyen’s blog, PhoneGap’s dev lead, on his experiences developing PhoneGap on Windows Phone.

For more technical details of using the framework, see Glen's and Jesse’s technical walk thru blogs. For a quick a spin of what PhoneGap and Visual Studio allow you to do, see this WP7 and Android camera app created in 3 minutes! Phonegap bits are located here; plugins are here.

Looking ahead:

As mentioned in PhoneGap’s announcement blog post, the next PhoneGap 1.4 release will be from the Cordova incubation project at Apache. We at Microsoft are proud to be members of this project and to offer technical resources. We welcome the involvement of Adobe, IBM and RIM and look forward to collaboratively growing PhoneGap at its new home in Apache while helping evolve an open web for any device.

Microsoft’s commitment to HTML5 in IE9 has been instrumental in achieving this level of support. We are also building on our HTML5 investment through initiatives like bringing jQuery Mobile support as we outlined few weeks ago. Partnering with open source communities to bring this level of openness continues to be an important goal here at Microsoft.

So, stay tuned for more news on our support for popular mobile open source frameworks on WP7.5!

Abu Obeida Bakhach

Interoperability Strategy Program Manager

GigaSpaces shows Java + Windows Azure

Peter Galli — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:29:00 GMT

Today Microsoft is hosting the Learn Windows Azure broadcast event to demonstrate how easy it is for developers to get started with Windows Azure. Senior Microsoft executives like Scott Guthrie, Dave Campbell, Mark Russinovich and others will show how easy it is to build scalable cloud applications using Visual Studio. The event is be broadcasting live and will also be available on-demand.

For Java developers interested in using Windows Azure, one particularly interesting segment of the day is a new Channel 9 video with GigaSpaces. Their Cloudify offering helps Java developers easily move their applications, without any code or
architecture changes, to Windows Azure.

This broadcast follows yesterday’s updates to Windows Azure around an improved developer experience, Interoperability, and scalability. A significant part of that was an update on a wide range of Open Source developments on Windows Azure, which are the latest incremental improvements that deliver on our commitment to working with developer communities so that they can build applications on Windows Azure using the languages and frameworks they already know.

We understand that developers want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice. In keeping with that, we are extremely happy to be delivering new and improved experiences for popular OSS technologies such as Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, Solr and Memcached on Windows Azure.

You can find all the details on the full Windows Azure news here, and more information on the Open Source updates here.

Openness Update for Windows Azure

gianugo — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:08:00 GMT

As Microsoft’s Senior Director of Open Source Communities, I couldn’t be happier to share with you today an update on a wide range of Open Source developments on Windows Azure.

As we continue to provide incremental improvements to Windows Azure, we remain committed to working with developer communities. We’ve spent a lot of time listening, and we have heard you loud and clear.

We understand that there are many different technologies that developers may want to use to build applications in the cloud. Developers want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice.

In keeping with that goal, we are extremely happy to be delivering new and improved experiences for Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, Solr and Memcached on Windows Azure.

This delivers on our ongoing commitment to provide an experience where developers can build applications on Windows Azure using the languages and frameworks they already know, enable greater customer flexibility for managing and scaling databases, and making it easier for customers to get started and use cloud computing on their terms with Windows Azure.

Here are the highlights of today’s announcements:

We are releasing the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js as open source, available immediately on Github. These libraries are the perfect complement to our recently announced contributions to Node.js and provide a better Node.js experience on Windows Azure. Head to the Windows Azure Developer Center for documentation, tutorial, samples and how-to guides to get you started with Node.js on Windows Azure.
We will also be delivering the Node package manager for Windows (npm) code to allow use of npm on Windows for simpler and faster Node.js configuration and development. Windows developers can now use NPM to install Node modules and take advantage of its automated handling of module dependencies and other details.
To build on our recent announcement about Apache Hadoop, we are making available a limited preview of the Apache Hadoop based distribution service on Windows Azure. This enables Hadoop apps to be deployed in hours instead of days, and includes Hadoop Javascript libraries and powerful insights on data through the ODBC driver and Excel plugin for Hive. Read more about this on the Windows Azure team blog. If you are interested in trying this preview, please complete the form here with details of your Big Data scenario. Microsoft will issue an access code to select customers based on usage scenarios.
For all of you NoSQL fans, we have been working closely with 10Gen and the MongoDB community in the past few months, and if you were at at MongoSV last week you have already seen MongoDB running on Windows Azure. Head out to the 10Gen website to find downloads, documentation and other document-oriented goodies. If you’re using the popular combination of Node.js and MongoDB, a simple straightforward install process will get you started on Windows Azure. Learn more here.
For Java developers, take a look at the updated Java support, including a new and revamped Eclipse plugin. The new features are too many to list for this post, but you can count on a much better experience thanks to new and exciting functionality such as support for sticky sessions and configuration of remote Java debugging. Head over to the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more.
Does your application need advanced search capabilities? If so, the chances are you either use or are evaluating Solr, and so the good news for you is that we just released a set of code tools and configuration guidelines to get the most out of Solr running on Windows Azure.
We invite developers to try out the tools, configuration and sample code for Solr tuned for searching commercial and publisher sites. The published guidance showcases how to configure and host Solr/Lucene in Windows Azure using multi-instance replication for index-serving and single-instance for index generation with a persistent index mounted in Windows Azure storage.
* Another great example of OSS on Windows Azure is the use of Memcached server, the popular open-source caching technology, to improve the performance of dynamic web applications. Maarten Balliauw recently blogged about his MemcacheScaffolder, which simplifies management of Memcached servers on the Windows Azure platform. That blog post is only focused on PHP, but the same approach can be used by other languages supported by Memcached as well.
Scaling data in the Cloud is very important. Today, the SQL Azure team made SQL Azure Federation available. This new feature provides built-in support for data sharding (horizontal partitioning of data) to elastically scale-out data in the cloud. I am thrilled to announce that concurrent with the release of this new feature, we have released a new specification called SQL Database Federations, which describes additional SQL capabilities that enable data sharding (horizontal partitioning of data) for scalability in the cloud, under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. With those additional SQL capabilities, the database tier can provide built-in support for data sharding to elastically scale-out data in the cloud, as covered in Ram Jeyaraman’s post on this blog.

In addition to all this great news, the Windows Azure experience has also been significantly improved and streamlined. This includes simplified subscription management and billing, a guaranteed free 90-day trial with quick sign-up process, reduced prices, improved database scale and management, and more. Please see the Windows Azure team blog post for insight on all the great news.

As we enter the holiday season, I’m happy to see Windows Azure continuing on its roadmap of embracing OSS tools developers know and love, by working collaboratively with the open source community to build together a better cloud that supports all developers and their need for interoperable solutions based on developer choice.

In conclusion, I just want to stress that we intend to keep listening, so please send us your feedback. Rest assured we’ll take note!

SQL Database Federations: Enhancing SQL to enable Data Sharding for Scalability in the Cloud

Ram Jeyaraman — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:05:00 GMT

I am thrilled to announce the availability of a new specification called SQL Database Federations, which describes additional SQL capabilities that enable data sharding (horizontal partitioning of data) for scalability in the cloud.

The specification has been released under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. With these additional SQL capabilities, the database tier can provide built-in support for data sharding to elastically scale-out the data. This is yet another milestone in our Openness and Interoperability journey.

As you may know, multi-tier applications scale-out their front and middle tiers for elastic scale-out. With this model, as the demand on the application varies, administrators add and remove new instances of the front end and middle tier nodes to handle the workload.

However, the database tier in general does not yet provide built-in support for such an elastic scale-out model and, as a result, applications had to custom build their own data-tier scale-out solution. Using the additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification the database tier can now provide built-in support to elastically scale-out the data-tier much like the middle and front tiers of applications. Applications and middle-tier frameworks can also more easily use data sharding and delegate data tier scale-out to database platforms.

Openness and interoperability are important to Microsoft, our customers, partners, and developers, and so the publication of SQL Database Federations specification under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise will enable applications and middle-tier frameworks to more easily use data sharding, and also enable database platforms to provide built-in support for data sharding in order to elastically scale-out the data.

Also of note: The additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification are now supported in Microsoft SQL Azure via the SQL Azure Federation feature.

Here is an example that uses Microsoft SQL Azure to illustrate the use of the additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification.

-- Assume the existence of a user database called sales_db. Connect to sales_db and create a federation called orders_federation to scale out the tables: customers and orders. This creates the federation represented as an object in the sales_db database (root database for this federation) and also creates the first federation member of the federation.

CREATE FEDERATION orders_federation(c_id BIGINT RANGE)
GO

-- Deploy schema to root, create tables in the root database (sales_db)

CREATE TABLE application_configuration(…)
GO

…

-- Connect to the federation member and deploy schema to the federation member

USE FEDERATION orders_federation(c_id=0) …
GO

-- Create federated tables: customers and orders

CREATE TABLE customers (customer_id BIGINT PRIMARY KEY, …) FEDERATED ON (c_id = customer_id)
GO

CREATE TABLE orders (…, customer_id BIGINT NOT NULL) FEDERATED ON (c_id = customer_id)
GO

-- To scale out customer’s orders, SPLIT the federation data into two federation members

USE FEDERATION ROOT …
GO

ALTER FEDERATION orders_federation SPLIT AT(c_id=100)
GO

-- Connect to the federation member that contains the value ‘55’

USE FEDERATION orders_federation(c_id=55) …
GO

-- Query the federation member that contains the value ‘55’

UPDATE orders SET last_order_date=getutcdate()…
GO

I am confident that you will find the additional SQL capabilities for data sharding described in the SQL Database Federations specification very useful as you consider scaling-out the data-tier of your applications. We welcome your feedback on the SQL Database Federations specification.

Thanks,

Ram Jeyaraman

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft’s Interoperability Group

Preview Release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux Hits the Streets

Peter Galli — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:12:00 GMT

Microsoft's SQL Server team yesterday announced the availability of a preview release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, which allows native developers to access Microsoft SQL Server from Linux operating systems.

For customers with native applications on multi-platform, the existing, reliable and enterprise-class ODBC for Windows driver (a.k.a. SQL Server Native Client, or SNAC) has been ported to the Linux platform.

You can download the driver here.

"In this release, the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux will be a 64-bit driver for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. We will support SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 with this release of the driver. Notable driver features (in addition to what you would expect in an ODBC driver) include support for the Kerberos authentication protocol, SSL and client-side UTF-8 encoding. This release also brings proven and effective tools and the BCP and SQLCMD utilities to the Linux world,"said Shekhar Joshi, a Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft SQL Server ODBC Driver For Linux team.

This is another example of both Microsoft and the SQL team's commitment to interoperability.

You can read Shekhar's full blog post here, while additional information on the first release of Microsoft ODBC Driver for Linux can be found here.

jQuery Mobile Open Source Framework Support for Windows Phone

Abu Obeida — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:20:00 GMT

Hello web and mobile developers!

As you probably noticed, jQuery Mobile version 1.0 was announced this week. We are pleased to use this exciting occasion to reinforce our commitment to supporting popular open source mobile frameworks.

Of the most recent activities, I want to highlight the work done to supporting PhoneGap by adding support for Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), and now we are moving up the stack to improve support of jQuery Mobile on Windows Phone 7.5.

As you probably know, jQuery Mobile framework is a Javascript HTML5-based user interface system for mobile device platforms, built on the jQuery and jQuery UI foundation.

While today’s version 1 and the recent RC releases contain many features, we wanted to take a minute and highlight the collaboration we started with the jQuery Mobile team. In the last few weeks we have focused our attention on supporting Kin Blas and others in the community to improving the performance on Windows Phone 7.5.

In particular, as the RC3 blog published earlier this week outlines, Windows Phone performance has improved quite dramatically as shown by the two showcase apps:

226% improvement in rendering the form gallery, bringing it down from 5 to 2.2 seconds
20x improvement in rendering the complex 400 item listview, from 60 seconds to 3 seconds

The jQuery team has additional performance optimization tips for Windows Phone in the change log that saves additional perf time in certain scenarios.

We are pretty encouraged with this progress, and will continue working with community to bring higher levels of performance and support for jQuery features to Windows Phone... stay tuned, and congratulations again to the jQuery Mobile Team!

Abu Obeida Bakhach

Interoperability Strategy Program Manager

First Stable Build of Node.js on Windows Released

Claudio Caldato — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 10:26:00 GMT

Great news for all Node.js developers wanting to use Windows: today we reached an important milestone - v0.6.0 – which is the first official stable build that includes Windows support.

This comes some four months after our June 23rd announcement that Microsoft was working with Joyent to port Node.js to Windows. Since then we’ve been heads down writing code.

Those developers who have been following our progress on GitHub know that there have been Node.js builds with Windows support for a while, but today we reached the all-important v.6.0 milestone.

This accomplishment is the result of a great collaboration with Joyent and its team of developers. With the dedicated team of Igor Zinkovsky, Bert Belder and Ben Noordhuis under the leadership of Ryan Dahl, we were able to implement all the features that let Node.js run natively on Windows.

And, while we were busy making the core Node.js runtime run on Windows, the Azure team was working on iisnode to enable Node.js to be hosted in IIS.

Among other significant benefits, Windows native support gave Node.js significant performance improvements as reported by Ryan on the Node.js.org blog.

Node.js developers on Windows will also be able to rely on NPM to install the modules they need for their application. Isaac Schlueter from the Joyent team is currently working on porting NPM on Windows, and an early experimental version is already available on GitHub. The good news is that soon we’ll have a stable build integrated in the Node.js installer for Windows.

So stay tuned for more news on this front.

Claudio Caldato

Principal Program Manager, Interoperability Strategy Team

Microsoft, Hadoop and Big Data

gianugo — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:03:00 GMT

In a couple of weeks it will be my one year anniversary here at Microsoft and I couldn’t wish for a better anniversary gift: now that Microsoft has laid out its roadmap for Big Data, I’m really excited about the role that Apache Hadoop^TM plays in this.

In case you missed it, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Ted Kummert earlier today announced that we are adopting Hadoop by announcing plans to deliver enterprise class Apache Hadoop based distributions on both Windows Server and Windows Azure.

This news is loaded with goodies for the big data community, broadening the accessibility and usage of Hadoop-based technologies among developers and IT professionals, by making it available on Windows Server and Windows Azure.

But there is more. Microsoft will be working with the community to offer contributions for inclusion into the Apache Hadoop project and its ecosystem of tools and technologies.

I believe that all of this will really benefit not only the broader Open Source community by enabling them to take their existing skill sets and assets use them on Windows Azure and Windows Server, but also developers, our customers and partners. It is also another example of our ongoing commitment to providing Interoperability, compatibility and flexibility.

As a proud member of the Apache Software Foundation, I personally could not be happier to see how Microsoft is willing to engage in such an important Open Source project and community.

Technical Considerations

On the more technical front, we have been working on a simplified download, installation and configuration experience of several Hadoop related technologies, including HDFS, Hive, and Pig, which will help broaden the adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise.

The Hadoop based service for Windows Azure will allow any developer or user to submit and run standard Hadoop jobs directly on the Azure cloud with a simple user experience.

Let me stress this once again: it doesn’t matter what platform you are developing your Hadoop jobs on -you will always be able to take a standard Hadoop job and deploy it on our platform, as we strive towards full interoperability with the official Apache Hadoop distribution.

This is great news as it lowers the barrier for building Hadoop based applications while encouraging rapid prototyping scenarios in the Windows Azure cloud for Big Data.

To facilitate all of this, we have also entered into a strategic partnership with Hortonworks that enables us to gain unique experience and expertise to help accelerate the delivery of Microsoft’s Hadoop based distributions on both Windows Server and Windows Azure.

For developers, we will enable integration with Microsoft developer tools as well as invest in making Javascript a first class language for Big Data. We will do this by making it possible to write high performance Map/Reduce jobs using Javascript. Yes, Javascript Map/Reduce, you read it right.

For end users, the Hadoop-based applications targeting the Windows Server and Windows Azure platforms will easily work with Microsoft’s existing BI tools like PowerPivot and recently announced Power View, enabling self-service analysis on business information that was not previously accessible. To enable this we will be delivering an ODBC Driver and an Add-in for Excel, each of which will interoperate with Apache Hive.

Finally, in line with our commitment to Interoperability and to facilitate the high performance bi-directional movement of enterprise data between Apache Hadoop and Microsoft SQL Server, we have released two Hadoop-based connectors for SQL Server to manufacturing.

The SQL Server connector for Apache Hadoop lets customers move large volumes of data between Hadoop and SQL Server 2008 R2, while the SQL Server PDW connector for Apache Hadoop moves data between Hadoop and SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW). These new connectors will enable customers to work effectively with both structured and unstructured data.

I really look forward to sharing updates on all this as we move forward. For now, check out www.microsoft.com/bigdata and check back on the DPI blog tomorrow.

Gianugo

Open Source Community Participation at Think Tank Paris and Open World Forum

Peter Galli — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:58:00 GMT

I recently returned from Paris, where I attended both the annual Open Source Think Tank and Open World Forum events. It was really great getting to chat with some of the folks representing the myriad of businesses that have sprung up around Open Source solutions, and having some in-depth discussions about broad industry trends.

The Open Source Think Tank is pretty much a unique event in that it gives attendees the opportunity to examine open source and cloud evolution through detailed analysis and discussions of specific industry related case studies, as well as panels, presentations and networking opportunities with a collaborative group of folks from across the industry.

For its part Open World Forum brings together hundreds of decision-makers, developers and users from across the world to discuss Open technological, business and societal initiatives to help shape the digital future

I was happy to be able to participate in a number of panel discussions at both events. At the Think Tank, I got to brainstorm on the topic of “Open Source Ethos as an Agent of Change," which essentially looked at how closed source companies use the open source ethos to energize their companies and change how they relate to their customers, partners and employees. I was joined by Erynn Petersen of AOL and Gil Yehuda of Yahoo, and a lively conversation ensued.

From a Microsoft perspective I pointed out how we recognize the value of openness in working with a diverse array of OSS communities to help developers, customers and partners succeed in today's heterogeneous IT environments.

I noted that we now have a better appreciation for how the open source development model can be useful for our own software development as well as the potential for Microsoft technologies to be great platforms for open source applications. I also briefly talked about our increased investments in standards, interoperability and integration with Open Source Software.

The second Think Tank discussion revolved around Open Source, Open Systems and Open Standards and what that means today. Larry Augustin from SugarCRM and Yahoo's Gil Yehuda also participated, and a lively discussion ensued, a lot of which was way off topic :-)

I referenced how Microsoft supports thousands of standards in its products and that we actively participate in more than 150 standards organizations and over 350 working groups worldwide. However, it is important to realize that while standards are an important tool to help facilitate interoperability, they do not guarantee that: technical strategies, standards use and ongoing collaboration are all required.

I also noted that the Cloud was the new frontier in this space, and how Cloud Platforms support interoperability through their support of standards. Microsoft last year outlined four foundational interoperability elements of a cloud platform: Data Portability, Standards, Ease of Migration and Deployment and Developer Choice.

“Open Source Ethos as an Agent of Change" was also the focus of a discussion between AOL's Erynn Petersen and myself at Open World Forum, which was moderated again by Andrew Aitken of the Olliance Group, a company in the Black Duck Software stable.

I shared with the audience how Open Source thinking and participation is taking place across many teams, groups and divisions at Microsoft, talked about the Outercurve Foundation and CodePlex, our open source forge, as well as the many Web properties devoted to Interoperability, Open Source Community and Openness.

I, along with my colleagues Craig Kitterman - who also participated in a panel discussion and gave a technical session - and Alfonso Castro, who delivered the Microsoft OWF keynote, talked to Romain Gueugneau, a journalist with leading French business publication Les Echos. You can read his article, in French, here.

Our participation in these events like these not only complements our existing and ongoing broad engagement with OSS communities, but is vital to ensure we keep abreast of the broad industry developments so as to best meet the needs of developers, customers and partners. It also allows us to remain closely connected to our friends from communities like PhP, Node.js, Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, while making new ones.

OpenNebula Clouds on Windows Server Hyper-V

Peter Galli — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:59:00 GMT

More good news on Microsoft's commitment to Interoperability in the cloud: last week Sandy Gupta, the General Manager for Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, announced that Windows Server Hyper-V is now an officially supported hypervisor for OpenNebula.

This open source project is working on a prototype for release next month and it will soon be possible for customers to build and manage OpenNebula clouds on a Hyper-V based virtualization platform.

"Windows Server Hyper-V is an enterprise class virtualization platform that is getting rapidly and widely deployed in the industry. Given the highly heterogeneous environments in today’s data centers and clouds, we are seeing enablement of various Linux distributions including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, and CS2C on Windows Server Hyper-V, as well as emerging open source cloud projects like OpenStack -- and now OpenNebula," Gupta said in a blog post.

Community Participation

Peter Galli — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 01:45:00 GMT

I'm heading off to Paris this weekend to participate in the annual Open Source Think Tank and Open World Forum events held in that wonderful city next week.

I'm really looking forward to chatting with all those folk interested in this space, from enthusiasts to developers and end users.

I will be joined at these events by my colleague and Technical Ambassador Craig Kitterman, as well as by Alfonso Castro, our local market interoperability program lead.

We will present technical sessions and participate in a number of panel discussions, ranging from what Open Source, Open Standards and Open Systems mean today to Open Source as an agent of change.

Our participation in these Paris events complements our existing broad engagement with OSS communities, and we look forward to meeting our friends from the PhP, Node.js, Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.communities as well as to making a lot of new ones.

You can read more about our participation in Paris here, and we look forward to meeting those of you lucky enough to be attending in person.

Microsoft and China's CS2C Sign Cross-Platform Collaboration Agreement

Peter Galli — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:43:00 GMT

Microsoft today signed a collaboration agreement with China Standard Software Corporation (CS2C), the country’s leading domestic Linux operating system provider, to jointly develop, market and sell solutions for the cloud-computing market in China.

The deal will help provide the mixed source infrastructure necessary to facilitate the rapid growth and change taking place across China, where cloud-based infrastructure is budding across cities and provinces.

The primary goal of this agreement, which was announced at a joint event in Beijing today, is to provide public and private cloud solutions to a diverse array of industries through a rich partner ecosystem.

The mixed source solutions stemming from this collaboration will be built on Microsoft’s Hyper-V Open Cloud architecture and will include support to run CS2C NeoKylin Linux Server products.

As Sandy Gupta, the General Manager for Microsoft’s Open Solutions Group, notes in his blog, Microsoft is working with CS2C to bring about a true, open architecture in the area of cloud management and automation for IT organizations throughout China.

“A cornerstone of this agreement is for CS2C-branded Linux servers to run under the Hyper-V Cloud architecture as a first class guest. CS2C and Microsoft will work together to enable CS2C Linux to run well on Hyper-V and be managed through Microsoft System Center,” Gupta says.

Microsoft and CS2C have also pledged to sponsor a joint virtual technology lab in Beijing for solution development and testing of cloud solutions that will allow customers to move to virtualization and a cloud-based IT infrastructure.

The lab will focus on the certification of CS2C NeoKylin Operating System on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, creating Microsoft Systems Center management packs for CS2C NeoKylin Operating System application workloads, and incorporating support for CS2C NeoKylin Operating System within the Hyper-V Cloud architecture.

As part of the collaboration, CS2C will also join the Interop Vendor Alliance, an established community of software and hardware vendors that have been working together to enhance interoperability with Microsoft systems.

In addition to establishing market and technology collaboration, the two companies have also signed a customer legal covenant agreement.

In line with Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to Interoperability, Gupta notes that “interoperable Linux and Windows offerings will empower customers to build solutions that will enable them to capitalize on opportunities to expand, grow and achieve the focus necessary to fuel innovation.”

Han Naiping, the president of CS2C, notes that this is an “important opportunity to collaborate with Microsoft to deliver comprehensive, flexible, cloud-based solutions that will serve as a platform for business growth.”

You can read more about this agreement on Sandy Gupta’s blog and in the press release.

Microsoft @ Oscon 2011: We have become more open, let’s work together!

Peter Galli — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:05:00 GMT

Gianugo Rabellino, Microsoft’s Senior Director for Open Source Communities, just finished delivering his keynote at OSCON in Portland.
As Gianugo is now wandering around the OSCON session and expo floor, I thought it would we useful to give you a quick recap of what he just presented.

During his keynote, Gianugo discussed how both the world and Microsoft are changing, saying that “at Microsoft we continue to evolve our focus to meet the challenging needs on the industry: we are open, more open than you may think.”

Gianugo explained that the frontiers between open source, proprietary and commercial software are becoming more and more of a blur. The point is not about whether you run your IT on an Open Source stack or a commercial stack, the important thing is how you can assemble software components and build solutions on top of them using APIs, protocols and standards. And the reality is that most IT systems are using heterogeneous components, he said.

Looking at the cloud, the blur is even more opaque. What does Open Source or Commercial mean in the cloud?

Gianugo put it this way: “In the cloud, we see just a continuous, uninterrupted shade of grey, which makes me believe it's probably time to upgrade our vision gear. If we do that, we may understand that we have a challenge ahead of us, and it's a big one: we need to define the new cornerstones of openness in the cloud. And we actually gave it a shot on this very same stage one year ago, when we came up with four interoperability elements of a cloud platform: data portability, standards, ease of migration & deployment, and developer choice.”

Finally, Gianugo talked about how Microsoft’s participation in Open Source communities is real, and he used his keynote as an opportunity to announce a few new projects and updates.

Gianugo Rabellino

One way we interact with open source software is by building technical bridges, Gianugo said, giving an example on the virtualization front: announcing support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and CentOS 6.0 guest operating systems on Windows Server Hyper-V (which follows this Linux Interoperability announcement at OSBC a few weeks ago. )

On the cloud development front, we are continuing to improve support for open source languages and runtimes, Gianugo said, announcing the availability of a new version of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, an open source project which is led by Maarten Balliauw from RealDolmen, where Microsoft is providing funding and technical assistance.

Maarten has all the details on the new features and link to the open source code of the SDK. This announcement also includes a set of cloud rules for the popular PHP_CodeSniffer tool that Microsoft has developed to facilitate the transition of existing PHP applications to Windows Azure. The new set of rules is available on Github.

An on demand Webcast of Gianugo’s keynote will soon be available, and I’ll post the link to it here.

Thanks!

Windows Azure Supports NIST Use Cases using Java

Jas Sandhu — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:11:31 GMT

We've been participating in creating a roadmap for adoption of cloud computing throughout the federal government, with the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) , an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the United States first federal physical science research laboratory. NIST is also known for publishing the often-quoted Definition of Cloud Computing, used by many organizations and vendors in the cloud space.

Microsoft is participating in the NIST initiative to jumpstart the adoption of cloud computing standards called Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart the Adoption of Cloud Computing, (SAJACC).The goal is to formulate a roadmap for adoption of high-quality cloud computing standards. One way they do this is by providing working examples to show how key cloud computing use cases can be supported by interfaces implemented by various cloud services available today. Microsoft worked with NIST and our partner, Soyatec, to demonstrate how Windows Azure can support some of the key use cases defined by SAJACC using our publicly documented and openly available cloud APIs.

NIST works with industry, government agencies and academia. They use an open and ongoing process of collecting and generating cloud system specifications. The hope is to have these resources serve to both accelerate the development of standards and reduce technical uncertainty during the interim adoption period before many cloud computing standards are formalized.

By using the Windows Azure Service Management REST APIs we are able to manage services and run simple operations including simple CRUD operations, solve simple authentication and authorizations using certificates. Our Service management components are built with RESTful principles and support multiple languages and runtimes including Java, PHP and .NET as well as IDEs including Eclipse and Visual Studio.

It also provides rich interfaces and functionality that provide scalable access to public, private and hosted clouds. All of the SDKs are available as open source too. With the Windows Azure Storage Service REST APIs we can use 3 sets of APIs that provide storage management support for Tables, Blobs and Queues with the same RESTful principles using the same set of languages. These APIs as well are available as open source.

We also have an example that we have created called SAJACC use case drivers to demonstrate this code in action. In this demonstration written in Java we show the basic functionality demonstrated for the NIST Sample. We created the following scenarios and corresponding code …

1. Copying Data Objects into a Cloud, the user is able to copy items on their local machine (client) and copy to the Windows Azure Storage without any change in the file; the assumptions are to have credential with a pair of account name and key. The scenario involves generating a container with a random name in each test execution to avoid possible name conflicts. The container uses the Windows Azure API. With the credential previously created the user prepares the Windows Azure Storage execution context. Then a blob container is created, with optional custom network connection timeout and retry policy, you are able to easily recover from network failure. Then we will create a block blob and transfer a local file to it. We will then compute a MD5 hash for the local file, get one for the blob and compare it to show there are equivalent and no data was lost

2. Copying Data Objects Out of a Cloud, repeats what we do from the first use case, Copying Data Objects into a Cloud. Additionally we will include another scenario, where set public access to the blob container and get its public URL; we will then as an un-identified (public) user retrieve the blob using an http GET request and save it to the local file system. We will then generate a MD5 hash for this file and compare it to the originals we used previously

3. Erasing Data Objects in a Cloud erases a data object on behalf of a user. With the credentials and data you created in the previous examples we will use the public URL of the blob and delete it by using its blob name. We will verify by using an http GET request to confirm that it has been erased.

4. VM Control: Allocating VM Instance, the user is able to create a VM image to compute on that is secure and performs well. The scenario involves creating a Java Keystore and Truststore from a user certificate to support SSL transport (described below). We will also create Windows Azure management execution context to issue commands from and create a hosted service using it. We will then prepare a Windows Azure service package and copy it to the blob we created in the first use case. We will then deploy in the hosted service using its name and service configuration information including the URL of the blob and the number of instances. We can then change the instance count to as many roles we want to execute using what we deploy and verify the change by getting status information from it.

5. VM Control: Managing Virtual Machine Instance State, the user is able to stop, terminate, reboot, and start the state of a virtual instance. We will first prepare an app to run as the Web Role in Windows Azure. The program will add a Windows Azure Drive to keep some files persistent when the VM is killed or rebooted. We will have two web pages, one where a random file is created inside the mounted drive, and another to list all the files on the drive. Then we will build and package the program and deploy the Web Role create as a hosted service on Window Azure using the portal. We will then create another program to manage the VM instance state similar to what we had done before in the previous use case, VM Control: Allocating VM Instance. We will use http GET requests to visit the first web page to create a random file on the Windows Azure Drive and the second web page to lists the files to show that they are not empty. We will then use the management execution context to stop the VM and disassociate the IP address and confirm this by visiting the second web page which will not be available. We will then use the same management execution context to restart the VM and confirm that the files in the drive are persistent between the restarts of the VM.

6. Copying Data Objects between Cloud-Providers, the user is able to copy data objects from one Windows Azure Storage account to another. This example involves creating a program to run as a worker role where a storage execution context is created. We will use the container as per the first use case, Copying Data Objects into a Cloud. We will download the blob to a local file system. We will then then create a second storage execution context and transfer the downloaded file to this new storage execution context. Then as per the first use case we will create a new program and deploy it to retrieve the two blobs and compare and verify the contents MD5 hashes are the same.

Java code to test the Service Management API

Test Results

Managing API Certificates

For the Java examples (use cases 4-6), we need to have key credentials. In our download we demonstrate the Service Management API being called with an IIS certificate. We will take you through generating an X509 certificate for the Windows Azure Management API. We show the management console for IIS7 and certificate manager in Windows. Creating the self-signed server certificates and exporting them to the Windows Azure portal and generate a JKS format key store for the Java Azure SDK. We will then upload it to the Azure account and converting the keys for use in the Java Keystore and for calling the Service Management API from Java
We then demonstrate the Service Management API using the Java Key tool Certificates. We will use the Java Keystore and export an X.509 certificate to the Windows Azure Management API. Then we upload certificate to an Azure account. We will then construct a new Service Management Rest object with the specific parameters and end by testing the Services Management API from Java

To get more information, the Windows Azure Storage Services REST API Reference and the Windows Azure SDK for PHP Developers are useful resources to have. You may also want to explore more with the following tutorials:

Table Storage service, offers structured storage in the form of tables. The Table service API is a REST API for working with tables and the data that they contain.
Blob Storage service, stores text and binary data. The Blob service offers the following three resources: the storage account, containers, and blobs
Queue Service, stores messages that may be read by any client who has access to the storage account. A queue can contain an unlimited number of messages, each of which can be up to 8 KB in size

With the above tools and Azure cloud services, you can implement most of the Use Cases listed by NIST for use in SAJACC. We hope you find these demonstrations and resources useful, and please send feedback!

Resources:

Jas Sandhu, Technical Evangelist, @jassand

Microsoft working with Joyent and the Node community to bring Node.js to Windows

Claudio Caldato — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 08:00:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that Microsoft has joined Joyent and Ryan Dahl in their effort to make Windows a supported platform in Node.

Our first goal is to add a high-performance IOCP API to Node to give developers the same high-performance/scalability on Windows that Node is known for, given that the IOCP API performs multiple simultaneous asynchronous input/output operations.

At the end of this initial phase of the project, we will have official binary node.exe releases on nodejs.org, meaning that Node.js will run on Windows Azure, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2008 and Windows 2003.

You can read more about all this on nodejs.org as well as on Joyeur.com.

While this is just the beginning of the journey to make Node.js on Windows a great platform for Node developers, I’m really excited about making this happen.

So, stay tuned, as there’s a lot more to come!

Claudio Caldato,

Principal Program Manager, Interoperability Strategy Team

New SDK and Sample Kit demonstrates how to leverage the scalability of Windows Azure with PHP

Craig Kitterman — Thu, 26 May 2011 18:42:42 GMT

From the floor of the PHP Tek Conference in Chicago, with my colleague Peter Laudati, we’re excited to announce the availability of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP version 3.0. This Open Source SDK gives PHP developers a “speed dial” library to take full advantage of Windows Azure’s coolest features. On top of many improvements and bug fixes for this version (see the list from Maarten Balliauw’s preview), we’re particularly excited about the new service management possibilities and the new logging infrastructure.

Beyond the new features, we also feel that version 3.0 of this SDK marks an important milestone because we’re not only starting to witness real world deployment, but also we’re seeing more people joining the project and contributing. We’ve been talking a lot to Maarten Balliauw from RealDolmen who is the lead developer on this open source project and he also shares the same sentiment: “It’s interesting to see the Windows Azure SDK for PHP mature: people are willing to contribute to it and incorporate their experience with the SDK and the platform.”

The most compute intensive part of Facebook app www.hotelpeeps.com is powered by PHP on Windows Azure

My colleague Todi Pruteanu from Microsoft Romania worked with Lucian Daia and Alexandru Lapusan from Zitec to help them get started with PHP on Windows Azure. The result is impressive. The most compute intensive part of the Hotel Peeps Facebook application is now running on Windows Azure, using the SDK for PHP, as well as SQL Azure. Read the interview of Alexandru to get the details on what and how they did it (you can also check out the case study here). I like this quote from the interview: “HotelPeeps Trends running on the Windows Azure platform is the epitome of interoperability. Some people think that a PHP application running on Microsoft infrastructure is science fiction, but that’s not the case.”
Another interesting aspect is also the subsequent contribution by Zitec of an advanced “logging” component to the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. This new component provides the possibility of storing logs from multiple instances in a centralized location, namely Azure Tables.

More contributions from the community

As the SDK gets more widely adopted, there is an exciting trend toward more community involvement. For example, Damien Tournoud from the CommerceGuys who is working on developing the Drupal integration module for Windows Azure, recently contributed a patch fixing bugs related to inconsistencies in URL-encoding of parameters in the HTTP_Client library. As we continue to improve the SDK to ensure great interoperability with popular applications like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! we look forward to engagement more deeply with those communities to make the experience even better.

New! Windows Azure Sample Kit for PHP

Today we are also announcing the Windows Azure Sample Kit for PHP. It is a new project hosted on github that will be the primary repository for all sample php code / apps that developers can use to learn how to take advantage of the various features of Windows Azure in php. Today we are releasing two samples to the repository: the Guestbook application (example of how to use the Windows Azure storage objects – blobs, queues and tables as well as a simple web/worker pattern) and “Deal of the Day” (more on this one later). We look forward to feedback on the samples and I am also hoping to see some forks and new samples coming from the community!

New features to easily manage auto-scaling of applications on Windows Azure

As I mentioned the version 3.0 of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP includes a new “service management” library, which provides easy ways to monitor the activity of your running instances (Windows Azure web roles & workers roles virtual machines), and to start/stop automatically instances based on usage. Then it becomes easy for you to decide which parameters (CPU, bandwidth, # of connections, etc.) and thresholds to use to scale up and down, and maintain the optimum quality of service for your web applications.

The scenario is simple: let’s say you are running an e-commerce site and you want to run daily promotions to get rid of overstocked items. So you’re going to offer crazy deals every day starting at 8am, each deal being advertised to your subscribers by an email blast. You will have to be ready ready to absorb a major spike in traffic, but the exact time is difficult to predict as the news of the deal may take some time to travel through twitter. When the traffic does materialize, you want the site to run & scale independently – providing service assurance but also minimizing your costs (by shutting down unnecessary capacity as loads go down). This is the scenario for the “Deal of the Day” sample application.

What’s the “Deal of the Day” (DotD) sample app and what to expect?

Deal of the Day (DotD) is a sample application written in PHP to show how to utilize Windows Azure’s scalability features from within PHP. We’ve kept is simple and built it in a way that’s easy to deconstruct and learn from.

As a sample application, DotD did not undergo extensive testing, nor does the code include all the required error catching, security verifications and so on, that an application designed for real production would require. So, do expect glitches. And if you do witness issues, send us a screenshot showing error messages with a description. I’ll get a prize to the first 100 bug trackers!

However, to give you an opportunity to see the sample application working, we’ve decided to deploy a live version on Windows Azure to let you test it for real and give the chance to win actual fun prizes! (and sorry for our friends outside of USA, but prizes can be shipped only to a US address )

Wanna play? Just go this way: http://dealoftheday.cloudapp.net/
Looking for the code, just get it on GitHub here: http://bit.ly/iPddwx

Architecture of the DotD sample app

The DotD sample app is comprised of several pieces which fit together to create the overall experience:

Storage –responsible for containing all business data (product information & images, comments) and monitoring data (diagnostic information). All data is stored in Windows Azure Tables, Queues, and Blobs.
Web Roles – Point of interaction of the application with visitors. Number of active Web Roles varies depending on the load. They are all the same, running the core of the applications logic, producing the user interface (HTML) and handling user inputs. All Web Roles share the storage elements described above.
Worker Roles – Worker roles sit in the background processing events, managing data, and provide load balancing for scale out. The diagram shows two Worker Roles, one for managing the applications “scalability” (adding/removing Web roles) and one for asynchronously processing some of the applications tasks in the background (another way to achieve scalability)
Content Delivery Network (CDN) – Global content distribution that provides fast content delivery based on visitor location.

Each of these parts is essential to the performance and scalability of DotD and for more details I invite you to read this introduction article, and then to dig deeper by reading part I (Performance Metrics) and Part II (Role Management) of our “Scaling PHP applications on Windows Azure” series. We will expand the series with additional in depth articles, the next one will be around monitoring the performance of your app.

We look forward to your feedback on the SDK and the Sample Kit. Once again the URL is https://github.com/Interop-Bridges/Windows-Azure-Sample-Kit-4-PHP

Cheers!

Craig Kitterman
Twitter: Follow @craigkitterman
Web: http://craig.kitterman.net

Expanding Interoperability to Community Linux

Peter Galli — Mon, 16 May 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Microsoft announced today that, with immediate effect, it will support Windows Server2008 R2 Hyper-V running CentOS, a popular Linux distribution for hosters.

"This development enables our hosting partners to consolidate their mixed Windows and Linux infrastructure on Windows Server Hyper-V; reducing cost and complexity, while betting on an enterprise class virtualization platform. I want to thank the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center for the work they have done with the community to make this possible," Sandy Gupta, a general manager in Microsoft's Open Solutions Group, said in a blog post.

Gupta will also be delivering a keynote address at the opening day of the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco today. During the keynote he, along with his colleague Fabio Cunha, will demonstrate the cross-platform architecture of Microsoft’s Private Cloud.

"We will show implementation that supports multiple hypervisors and delivers a platform for the transformation of a heterogeneous IT infrastructure into an automated mixed source Cloud infrastructure. Fabio will show demos of various cross-platform capabilities of System Center Operations Manager, System Center Orchestrator, and also how customers can use a single pane of glass to deploy patches and updates across Windows and Linux Servers," Gupta said.

You can read the full blog post here.

The .Net Gadgeteer Goes Open Source

Peter Galli — Mon, 02 May 2011 12:27:00 GMT

Today Microsoft Open Sourced the reference designs to the .Net Gadgeteer, a rapid prototyping, education/hobbyist kit built on the .NET Micro Framework.

The .Net Gadgeteer team has spent the past few months redesigning and re-implementing the kit to ensure that the architecture will work with the widest variety of processors and support the most diverse set of modules.

The .NET Gadgeteer is based on a set of pluggable modules that remove the need to create specific connections for each electronic component - you only need to plug the modules in. This greatly speeds up the process of building experimental devices and also removes the need for any electronics background to bring your ideas to reality.

In addition to making the hardware development easy, .NET Gadgeteer includes a set of libraries that provide a high level, high productivity development environment so that you can create the intelligence of the device in just a few lines of code.

These libraries are built on the .Net Micro Framework which provides a deep integration with the powerful Microsoft development tools. Now you can develop embedded logic in Visual Studio using C# then deploy the application to the device and debug that application using the rich debugging capabilites of the IDE.

The reference implementation includes the software libraries, which are licensed under Apache 2.0, as well as the designs and specifications for the hardware, which are licensed under the Creative Commons.

Program Unit Manager Colin Miller tells me that the .Net Gadgeteer platform has generated a great deal of enthusiasm among hobbyists and educators as it enables people with a wide range of electronics and programming skills to create an almost limitless array of devices. (Watch this video for more background).

“Our goal is to encourage and support third parties to build kits and modules that all work together to create a rich ecosystem for the user community. This software is still in beta form and we encourage your input on it. We will also aggressively encourage and support vendors interested in evaluating the potential of the platform,” he says.

WordPress on Windows Azure: A discussion with Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Craig Kitterman — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:02:58 GMT

I finally had the chance to sit down with Morten at MIX11 in Las Vegas last week to discuss the work he is doing on WordPress with Windows Azure to solve some common challenges with multi-site WordPress installations using traditional hosting.

In Morten's words: "I am building a garden just for me and my clients...I control it...but the security and management of the garden is run by a very large company...they also will make sure that it works!"

Read Morten's blog on http://www.designisphilosophy.com and find him on Twitter @Mor10

Enjoy!

Craig Kitterman
Twitter: @craigkitterman
http://craig.kitterman.net

MIX11 Recap

Peter Galli — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:51:00 GMT

In case you missed the great Open Source and related Interop news that came out of Microsoft's annual MIX conference which was held in Las Vegas this week, here's a recap.

Scott Guthrie, a Corporate Vice President in the Microsoft Developer Division, used his MIX keynote to discuss the company's commitment to sponsoring open source projects, such as the Orchard project, a free CMS project in the Outercurve Foundation's ASP.NET Open Source Gallery.

Orchard 1.1 is now available, along with the new UserVoice and DISQUS modules that contribute to the growing number of community-authored extensions for Orchard.

Guthrie also announced an ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update, which enables Web developers to innovate quickly and easily via new HTML 5 markup support, Entity Framework 4.1 with Entity Code First now built in for easier database Web solution development, and expanded NuGet capabilities for finding and installing community components.

Guthrie also used his keynote to announce the immediate availability of the Microsoft Silverlight 5 beta, which provides advances in rich media and application development.

Silverlight is a free web-browser plug-in that enables interactive media experiences, rich business applications and immersive mobile apps. It works on all major Operating Systems plus all major browsers, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

New capabilities in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Video Decode, for enhanced video quality and performance, and "Trickplay," which provides variable-rate video playback with audio pitch correction.

The beta also offers a new Microsoft XNA-based interface for delivering 3-D visualizations within applications, along with a host of new features that are designed to enhance developer productivity and end-user experiences.

In his MIX keynote Dean Hachamovitch, the Corporate Vice President for Internet Explorer, announced the addition to the HTML5 Labs site of a new prototype - FileAPI - as well as announcing plans for the MediaCapture API.

Microsoft launched HTML5 Labs last December as the place where it shares prototypes of early and unstable standards, and committed to regularly update these prototypes and add additional prototypes based on what will most help with the testing of the specifications.

Since then, we have updated the WebSockets prototype three times and we have analyzed a number of specifications, with three new areas currently under active investigation. We have also been working with, and listening to, the feedback from early users, and have updated the HTML5 Labs site and given it a new look and feel.

For more context on all this, read the blog by Walid Abu-Hadba, the Corporate Vice President for Developer Platform & Evangelism, Scott Guthrie, and Soma Somasegar, a Senior Vice President in the Developer Division, about Standards-based web, plug-ins, and Silverlight. In this blog they share their thoughts on the role of plug-ins in general, and Silverlight in particular, in the context of HTML5 and the future of the web.

A new production version of Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control service was also announced at MIX. This enables you to build Single-Sign-On experience into applications by integrating with standards-based identity providers, including enterprise directories such as Active Directory, and consumer-oriented web identities such as Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.

The Access Control service enables this experience through commonly used industry standards to facilitate interoperability with other software and services that support the same standards.

Open Source + Southern Hospitality

Craig Kitterman — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:31:00 GMT

I spent the entire week last week enjoying some good weather and southern hospitality in the Carolinas. On Tuesday Mar 15 I had the pleasure of being invited to present at the Charlotte Enterprise Developers Guild organized by Bill Jones (special thanks to SystemTec for sponsoring the evening). On arrival I found the best dressed group of developers I have seen in a long time and felt compelled to apologize for my jeans and Converse. They sure keep it classy down South – something us Northwesterners could probably stand to learn from.

The focus of the talk (and subsequent discussion) was Java and PHP on Windows Azure. I was pleased to learn that the group consisted of a healthy mix of developers writing Java code, PHP code, and .NET code. In fact, close to 50% of the folks in the room indicated that they use multiple runtimes in their local data centers and are used to interacting with multiple codebases consisting of different languages. We had a great conversation about what it means to move to the Cloud and the approach Microsoft is taking to building an open an interoperable platform that will provide a robust general purpose platform for languages and runtimes far beyond .NET. I got a lot of great feedback on the Eclipse and ANT tooling that was recently announced and have opened some new discussions on additional work we are exploring enable additional Java developer workflows / build systems including Apache Maven. Stay tuned on this!

I also had the pleasure of attending the 4th Annual POSSCON (Palmetto Open Source Conference) in Columbia, South Carolina where Microsoft was a sponsor. The speaker lineup was great and there were a number of interesting sessions on the agenda particularly related to open source in mobile applications which seemed to be the hot topic of the event. I was pleased to finally meet such OSS icons as Jim Jagielski of the Apache Software Foundation, and attend a number of great sessions by other well known OSS advocates including William “whurley” Hurley, Bob Sutor of IBM and Jon “maddog” Hall.

My colleague Gianugo Rabellino had the opportunity to present a keynote at the event and took the opportunity to showcase a lot of open source work that is underway both in Microsoft and the Windows ecosystem. He described the change underway in Microsoft toward greater openness and discussed the future of collaboration between Microsoft and the the many Open Source communities on objectives we all share as technologists.

My best booth award (from a coolness factor point of view) goes to my new friends at RepRap.org who are working on building self replicating open source 3D printers. This is a sweet mashup of open source software, open hardware design, commodity component architecture and pure geekitude. We had a great debate about the future of self replication and when we were done my head hurt but it was a blast.

The conference had around 500 attendees and I even somehow became the mayor on Foursquare despite only checking in twice. It was a great time and I look forward to seeing what is in store next year at POSSCON 2012.

Craig Kitterman
Sr. Technical Ambassador
@craigkitterman
http://craig.kitterman.net

.NET Rocks! Chats with Jean Paoli

Peter Galli — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 11:46:00 GMT

For those of you who love .Net and have an interest in Web standards and Interoperability at Microsoft, then listening to the interview with Jean Paoli, the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, with .NET Rocks!, is a must.

.NET Rocks! is an internet audio talk show for those interested in developing on the .Net platform, and the interview with Paoli is part of a six-part series titled, "Ignite Your Coding: Web Development Series."

In the interview, Paoli draws upon his experience as a co-creator of the XML 1.0 standard to discuss XML, web standards, and the role of interoperability within Microsoft.

The interview, which can be found here, is hosted by Richard Campbell , Microsoft Regional Director and Carl Franklin, MSDN Regional Director for Connecticut.

Enjoy!