OakLeaf Systems

Unlike my Updated List of 74 Cloud-Computing Sessions at TechEd North America 2010 of 5/22/2010, this list isn’t categorized by session type.

ARC306 | Open Data for the Enterprise

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Thursday, June 10  |  8:00 AM - 9:15 AM  |  Rm 288
• Track: Architecture
• Speaker(s): Jonathan Carter
• Level: 300 - Advanced
• Audience: Database Administrator, Developer, Developer Manager, Solutions Architect, Systems Administrator

In today’s Web applications, data is no longer locked up behind a Web site, but is now exposed via a set of service APIs that allow for third-party developers to create an endless number of experiences on a variety of platforms and devices. The OData protocol will usher in a more open and programmable Web by creating a common funnel to expose rich data, thereby creating a world of customized consumer mash-ups; a world where government data is transparent and accessible to any citizen; a world where you can ask a question and know, “There’s a feed for that.” Not only does this impact how we make data available on the Web, but it can have a profound impact on how we make data available in the enterprise. The OData ecosystem is composed of consumers and publishers, including Microsoft’s own implementations in WCF Data Services as well as integration into our products such as SharePoint and Excel. In this session, we discuss the OData protocol and show how it will change the way we think about exchanging data inside and outside the enterprise.

BOF10-DV | PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?

• Session Type: Birds-of-a-Feather
• Wednesday, June 9  |  9:45 AM - 11:00 AM  | 
• Track:
• Speaker(s): Andrew Brust
• Level:
• Audience:

Microsoft's forthcoming PowerPivot product is nominally a BI offering. But if you’re a developer or IT pro, the story’s much more important than that would make it seem. On the dev side, PowerPivot is the rich client for consuming OData (Open Data Protocol) feeds, which is what the Entity Framework and WCF Data Services produce. On the IT side, PowerPivot lets end-users do analytics in Excel, but allows those spreadsheets to be secured, stored, serviced, and monitored on the server side with SharePoint. PowerPivot is not about BI in the conventional sense – it’s about analytics on relational data that developers can produce and IT can manage. What does this shift in BI approaches mean for Microsoft, its Office and SharePoint franchises, developers, IT and the BI industry in general? No one knows the answer, of course, but the discussion, and your participation in it, may well provide important insights to help us all prepare for the change. Are you using analytics in your applications? Should you be? Come join in the discussion!

DEV13-HOL | Building Applications and Services Using Open Data Protocol

• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Diego Vega
• Level: 400 - Expert
• Audience: Developer, Developer Manager, Solutions Architect

In this lab, learn about the Open Data Protocol, the ecosystem where it works, and why developers should write applications and services using the Open Data Protocol as their Data Access protocol. Also, learn how to create simple applications in various technologies that manage OData feeds.

DEV202 | Implementing RESTful Services Using the Microsoft .NET Framework

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Tuesday, June 8  |  5:00 PM - 6:15 PM  |  Rm 295
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Ron Jacobs
• Level: 200 - Intermediate
• Audience:

In this session we present how .NET developers can reuse their Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) skills to take advantage of the integrated tooling and rich extensibility of a single WCF distributed programming framework including WCF WebHttp Services for RESTful services, WCF Data Services and OData and WCF RIA Services for end-to-end Microsoft Silverlight application development.

DEV208 | Open Data for the Open Web

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Tuesday, June 8  |  5:00 PM - 6:15 PM  |  Rm 279
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Douglas Purdy, Jonathan Carter
• Level: 200 - Intermediate
• Audience: Developer, Developer Manager, Web Developer/Designer

There is no shortage of valuable data being generated by applications, reports, tools, Web sites, etc. Unfortunately, this leaves many of us wishing we could programmatically access the data and logic behind an app, report, or Web site. To break down data silos and increase the shared value of data and its associated business logic through the Web, Microsoft has recently announced the Open Data Protocol which enables exposing any data source as a Web-friendly data feed. Join this session to understand what the Open Data Protocol (OData) is and how it adds end-user and developer value to many of Microsoft's leading products and services (such as SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Codename "Dallas", Windows Azure, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel, Visual Studio, .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, etc.) and is accessible from a range of platforms such as Java and PHP.

DEV303 | Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Wednesday, June 9  |  3:15 PM - 4:30 PM  |  Rm 283
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Stephen Forte
• Level: 300 - Advanced
• Audience: Developer, Developer Manager, Web Administrator/Webmaster

Applications today are expected to expose their data and consume data-centric services via REST. In this session we discuss what REST is and have an overview of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Data Services and see how we can REST enable your data using the Open Data Protocol (OData). Then we cover how to leverage existing skills related to Microsoft Visual Studio, LINQ and data access to customize the behavior, control-flow, security model and experience of your data service. We then see how to enable data-binding to traditional ASP.NET controls as well as Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010. We then turn to consuming SharePoint and other OData-based applications in Microsoft .NET as well as from a non-Microsoft client. This is a very demo intensive session.

DEV323 | Best Practices: Creating OData Services Using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Data Services

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Wednesday, June 9  |  5:00 PM - 6:15 PM  |  Rm 295
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Alex James
• Level: 300 - Advanced
• Audience: Developer, Developer Manager, Solutions Architect

The OData ecosystem is a vibrant growing community of data producers and consumers using the OData protocol to exchange data. The easiest way to become an OData producer and join the OData community is using WCF Data Services. In this session, learn WCF Data Services best practices so you can do it right. We cover security, performance, custom business logic, and how to expose your unique data source using OData.

TLC-77 | Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Data Development (ADO.NET, OData, XML)

• Session Type: TLC Demo Station
• |   |  TLC Yellow
• Track: Database Platform
• Level: 200 - Intermediate
• Audience:

WEB311 | Building Rich AJAX Applications with jQuery and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Wednesday, June 9  |  3:15 PM - 4:30 PM  |  Rm 276
• Track: Web Platform
• Speaker(s): Dan Wahlin
• Level: 300 - Advanced
• Audience: Developer, Developer Manager, Web Administrator/Webmaster, Web Developer/Designer

The jQuery library is an open source JavaScript library that has a passionate community of developers. Come learn how Microsoft is working with the jQuery project to contribute new features to jQuery such as support for client-side templates and how Microsoft is working to make it easier to use jQuery with Microsoft technologies such as ASP.NET, Windows Communication Foundation, and OData. Also learn how Microsoft is improving the quality of the AJAX Control Toolkit and working to build greater community participation in the AJAX Control Toolkit project. With over 100,000 downloads a month, the AJAX Control Toolkit is one of the most popular open-source projects hosted at CodePlex.

Why isn’t Pablo Castro giving one of these sessions?

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 2:57 PM View Comments  

Labels: ADO.NET Data Services, Astoria, Codename "Dallas", OData, Open Data Protocol, REST, TechEd NorthAmerica 2010

• Added ARC304 | Real-World Patterns for Cloud Computing breakout session by Wade Wegner on 4/26/2010, reformatted session titles.

As of 4/26/2010, there were:

• 19 (削除) 18 (削除ここまで) Breakout Sessions
• 5 Interactive Sessions
• 4 Hands-on Labs

scheduled for TechEd North America 2010. The following abstracts are from the current TechEd Session Catalog:

Breakout Sessions

• ARC304 | Real-World Patterns for Cloud Computing

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Architecture
• Speaker(s): Wade Wegner
• Level: 300 – Advanced

Everything that you read these days seems to suggest that you should be moving to the cloud. But where do you start? Which applications and services should you be moving? How do you build the bridge between on-premises and the cloud? And more importantly, what should you be looking out for along the way? In this session, we explore how the Tribune Company has embraced the Windows Azure platform (including Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, and Project codename “Dallas”) to enhance and extend new and existing applications. We explore how they leverage elastic storage, scalable Web and Worker roles, leverage parallel and distributed compute, and handle inter- and intra-organizational communications. This session provides you with specific examples of cloud architectures (with examples) that will help you evaluate the Windows Azure platform for your next project.

ASI202 | Real-World SOA with Microsoft .NET and Windows Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Application Server & Infrastructure
• Speaker(s): Brian Loesgen, John deVadoss, Thomas Erl
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Companies worldwide are enjoying the benefits and efficiencies that can be realized through a well-defined and implement Service-Oriented Architecture strategy. For many, with the recent “go-live” of the Windows Azure platform, intriguing new architectural patterns for distributed, loosely-coupled applications are being made possible, allowing them to fundamentally re-think how they build and consume applications. In this session we explore what it means to realize the benefits of service-oriented architectures on the Microsoft .NET Framework, and see that exposing legacy assets by means of Web services whilst being necessary is not sufficient. We explore various on-premise and off-premise real-world SOA-related capabilities, examine a number of design patterns, and drill-down into what it takes to bridge from on-premise to the Windows Azure platform. Speakers for this session consist of authors from the recently-released “SOA with .NET and Windows Azure” book and also co-authors of the SOA Manifesto.

ASI204 | Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Overview

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Application Server & Infrastructure
• Speaker(s): Maggie Myslinska, Todd Holmquist-Sutherland
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Come learn how to use the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control as building block services for Web-based and hosted applications, and how developers can leverage services to create applications in the cloud and connect them with on-premises systems.

ASI302 | Architecting Hybrid Cloud Applications with the Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Service Bus

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Application Server & Infrastructure
• Speaker(s): Clemens Vasters, Juval Lowy
• Level: 300 - Advanced

In the abstract, all distributed applications need events management, remote calls and tunneling through various communication boundaries, from address spaces to firewalls and platforms. In the particular, often developers take these requirements either for granted as absolute mandates for specific technologies (“must use Web services”) or as impossible to approach (“it's too hard”) and thus limit the scope of their application both in capabilities and in market share. The availability of the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus is disruptive since it enables new design and deployment patterns that are simply inconceivable without it, opening new horizons for architecture, integration, interoperability, deployment, and productivity. In this unique session organized especially for Tech·Ed, Clemens Vasters and Juval Lowy share their perspective, insight, and expertise in architecting solutions using the service bus for hybrid applications that straddle both the cloud and the intranet, all from the perspective of the application, not merely the technology itself. See how Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) as the universal communication fabric enables families of communication patters, from discrete events, to elastic communication with buffers, discovery with the service bus, how to design for tunneling for diagnostics or logging, to enabling edge devices. The session ends with a glimpse at what is in store for the next versions of the service bus and the future patterns.

ASI305 | Integrating LoB Systems (SAP, Mainframe) with the Cloud Using Microsoft BizTalk Server and the Windows Azure AppFabric

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Application Server & Infrastructure
• Speaker(s): Chris Kabat, Elizabeth Graham
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Cloud computing is a technology that has widespread impact on IT organizations of all sizes. Organizations with large enterprise applications, such as SAP or mainframe applications, often wonder how they can realize the value of cloud computing when they already have such as huge investment in on-premise software. In this session we demonstrate how we interact with a business process that involves an SAP and a Mainframe application from a cloud-based application, leveraging all the advantages the cloud has to offer.  We use Microsoft BizTalk Server and Windows Azure AppFabric to expose enterprise data to our application in a secure and scalable way.

COS200 | Cloud Computing Overview: Moving to the Cloud with Microsoft

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Tim O'Brien
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Businesses are increasingly looking to the cloud as a way to maximize the value and reach of their technology investments, and the Cloud Services track is where you’ll learn about Microsoft’s investments in service-based applications and platform technologies. Join us for this track kickoff session and learn about Microsoft’s vision for cloud computing and the range of tools and technologies to support development, deployment, and management of applications in the cloud. Learn about the Windows Azure platform that allows developers to design and deploy applications and services for the cloud. Also learn about enterprise-ready services from Microsoft Online Services that help organizations quickly deploy and use communication, collaboration, and business intelligence capabilities.

COS302 | Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Steve Marx
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Go beyond "Hello, World" and see how Windows Azure supports building complex, multi-tier applications.

COS303 | Lap around the Windows Azure Platform

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Steve Marx
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Come hear how the Windows Azure Platform provides a scalable compute and storage environment with Windows Azure, secure connectivity with Service Bus and Access Control Service, and a relational database with SQL Azure. Learn about these new services and see several demos that show how to build applications that run in and take advantage of Microsoft’s new cloud platform.

COS304 | Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to Microsoft SharePoint Online Customization and Integration Deep Dive

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Brad Younge
• Level: 300 - Advanced

During this session, we discuss how we accomplished the CRM Online and SharePoint Online customizations and integration that are available in our Stratus product. We initially demo the final product and touch on the high level architecture which includes three of Microsoft's cloud platforms: CRM Online, SharePoint Online and Azure. Then we dive deep into how we accomplished making customizations to CRM and SharePoint on the fly, how we created a seamless user experience in both the above applications without being able to deploy custom binaries to either platform, and how the Azure platform brought everything together. Stratus is an Enterprise Application Mashup tool that integrates the best features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Microsoft SharePoint. CRM users can feed client contact information and upload client documents directly to SharePoint sites from within Microsoft Dynamics CRM while SharePoint users can view these documents and general information about the CRM accounts, opportunities and cases they relate to. To learn more go to http://stratus.statera.com.

COS305 | Microsoft SQL Azure Development Best Practices

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Rick Negrin
• Level: 300 - Advanced

This session covers best practices for using the SQL Azure cloud relational database. We walk through the creation of a departmental application from scratch. We see firsthand how easy it is to provision a SQL Azure Database and start developing against it. We also look at importing and exporting data, and reporting. Time is also spent looking at strategies for migrating your existing applications to the cloud so that you are provided with high availability, fault tolerance and visibility to these often unseen data repositories. Finally we see how the reach of the cloud provides you with opportunities to create a new, differentiated class of applications.

COS306 | The Economics of Cloud Computing

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Dianne O'Brien
• Level: 300 - Advanced

When architecting and developing cloud applications, you now have the ability to directly impact the cost for running your application. In this session, learn about the Windows Azure Platform pricing model, the service level agreements for the platform, and the top cost considerations you should make when architecting your application.

COS307 | Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 to Build Applications That Run on Windows Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Jim Nakashima
• Level: 300 - Advanced

A platform is only as powerful as the tools that let you build applications for it. This session focuses on using demos, not slides, to show the best way to use Visual Studio 2010 to develop Windows Azure applications. Learn tips, tricks and solutions to common problems when creating or moving an existing application to run on Windows Azure. Come see how Visual Studio 2010 supports all parts of the development cycle as we show how to take an ASP.NET application running on IIS and make it a scalable cloud application running on Windows Azure.

COS310 | Windows Azure Storage Deep Dive

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Jai Haridas
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Learn about the storage capabilities provided by Windows Azure including storing and manipulating blobs, structured non-relational entities, and using queues. Learn tips, tricks, and performance guidance for building new applications or migrating an existing project.

COS311 | Migrating Applications to Microsoft SQL Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Cihan Biyikoglu
• Level: 300 - Advanced

This exciting session walks through the creation of a departmental application from scratch. See firsthand how easy it is to provision a SQL Azure Database and start developing against it. We look at importing and exporting data, and reporting. Time is also spent looking at strategies for migrating your existing departmental applications to the cloud so that you are provided with high availability, fault tolerance, and visibility to these often unseen data repositories. Finally, we show how the reach of the cloud provides you with opportunities to create a new, differentiated class of applications.

OSP213 | SharePoint and Azure: How Do They Play Together?

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Steve Fox
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

There is immense opportunity for you to build and deploy cloud-centric solutions using the new Windows Azure platform. However, what does that opportunity look like vis-à-vis Microsoft SharePoint? In this session, see the different ways in which you can integrate Azure services with SharePoint to extend your SharePoint solutions into the cloud.

SIA303 | Identity and Access Management: Windows Identity Foundation and Windows Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Security, Identity & Access
• Speaker(s): Vittorio Bertocci
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Claims-based identity provides an open and interoperable approach to identity and access control that can be consistently applied both on-premises and in the cloud. Come to this session to learn about how Windows Identity Foundation can be used to secure your Web Roles hosted in Windows Azure, how you can take advantage of existing on-premises identities and how to make the best of features in our cloud offering, such as certificate management and staged environments.

SIA317 | Securing the Microsoft Cloud with Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Forefront Families of Products

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Security, Identity & Access
• Speaker(s): John Howie, Mark Estberg
• Level: 300 - Advanced

The infrastructure that supports Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise cloud offerings, including Azure, Bing, BPOS, Hotmail, and Messenger, runs on servers in datacenters world-wide. Running as many servers as Microsoft does presents challenges for any management software, including Microsoft’s own, yet there is a need to meet compliance burdens and ensure the ongoing security of the systems that keep customers’ data both secure and maintain their privacy. In this session hear how Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services security and compliance team meets statutory and regulatory compliance requirements, and keeps systems secure using Systems Center Configuration Management, Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager products, and Forefront Identity Manager and Endpoint Protection products. Also, learn of uses that these products are put to, that might surprise you, and many of the tricks and techniques used to overcome the problems of scale and geographic distribution, and how you can apply the same to your own systems and networks.

WEM201 | Discover Windows Embedded Standard 7 as Your Next Application Platform

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Windows Embedded
• Speaker(s): Alexander Wechsler
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

"Did you ever dream of building highly interactive and robust next generation applications on a platform that can be tailored exactly to your needs? If so, this session is just for you! Discover how Windows Embedded Standard 7 combines the power of Windows 7 with the ease, flexibility and dedicated functionality of the Embedded branch of the Windows family (predecessors: NT 4.0 embedded, XP embedded, WES 2009). Join us for a wild ride across a lot of technologies such as Silverlight 4.0, Sensor & Location PLatform, Enhanced / File Based Write Filter, Windows Azure, Gadgets, Powershell, Dialog Filter, the new managed DPWS stack, to name just a few. The time to design the next wave of smart connect devices is now!"

WSV310 | What Does the Cloud Mean for the IT Professional?

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Windows Server
• Speaker(s): Joey Snow
• Level: 300 – Advanced

Do cloud services make the IT pro obsolete? Join us in this informative session to discuss the role of IT pros with regard to Windows Azure. Discover what’s changed and what hasn’t for the IT professional including how to manage services in the new cloud environment and what tools are available to help manage the application lifecycle.

Interactive Sessions

COS02-INT | Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Patrick Butler Monterde
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Windows Azure allows any developer or business access to extreme scale computing and storage capacity. This session provides developers insight on the underpinnings that make Windows Azure well suited for computationally intensive/burst applications, as well as design principles for loosely coupled scale out applications that take full advantage of the Windows Azure platform. A typical example from the financial modeling industry is given to illustrate.

COS03-INT | Deploying, Managing, and Monitoring Cloud Applications on Windows Azure

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Ryan Dunn
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Microsoft understands that cloud computing needs to provide the same level of manageability and serviceability as existing premises applications. This session provides IT pros and businesses guidance on best practices around management and deployment of Windows Azure applications to meet service level agreements and application upgrade requirements. Microsoft provided tooling is used in some cases to illustrate.

COS06-INT | Migrating Existing Applications into the Cloud with Windows Azure

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Mark Kottke
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Windows Azure provides developers and businesses the benefit of lower TCO through fully automated service management, while providing instant scale out of existing applications. Come learn how to identify which existing LOB and Web apps make good targets for easy migration to the cloud and create a plan to migrate between on-premises to Windows Azure.

COS07-INT | Using Microsoft SQL Azure as a Datahub to Connect Microsoft SQL Server and Silverlight Clients

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Sean Kelley
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this session we demonstrate how the Sync Framework is being used to enable a new series of exciting scenarios made possible by SQL Azure. First, we demonstrate how the Sync Framework is being integrated with SQL Server to make it easy to extend data to SQL Azure in only a few clicks. We then show how customers can drop down to lower levels in the stack in an effort to customize the behavior of that data movement without having to rebuild the application from the ground up. Finally, we demonstrate how the Sync Framework is being enhanced to expand our offline client-side reach beyond traditional Windows Presentation Foundation/Winforms applications by adding support for Microsoft Silverlight, HTML 5, Windows Phone 7, and other devices such as an iPhone.

COS13-INT | Database Performance in a Multi-tenant Environment

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Liam Cavanagh
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Microsoft SQL Azure presents unique opportunities with regards to performance. The key distinction is multi-tenancy where every user database is co-located with multiple other databases on the same machine. Since your database no longer runs on dedicated hardware, activities of your neighbor databases could impact your performance. When the neighbors are quiet, your database has the luxury to utilize all the resources on the machine. However, when the neighbors get busy, your database performance may be affected. In this session, we show you a case study in which we quantify the multi-tenancy impact on performance. We give you some guidelines to monitor such effect on your database and what you can do to make your database performance more predictable.

Hands-on Labs

COS01-HOL | Introduction to the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus

• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

This lab covers the basics of the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus. It shows how to connect clients and services via SOAP and REST over the Service Bus using the AppFabric SDK. It explores the different bindings you can use, shows how to expose a MEX endpoint, and also how to handle message security and binary data.

COS02-HOL | Introduction to the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Access Control Service

• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

The Windows Azure platform AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) is a service designed to secure REST Web services. ACS allows a REST Web services to integrate with both simple clients and enterprise identity technologies using a single code base.

COS03-HOL | Introduction to Windows Azure

• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this lab, explore the basic elements of a Windows Azure service by creating a simple GuestBook application that demonstrates many features of the Windows Azure platform, including Web and worker roles, blob storage, table storage, and queues.

COS04-HOL | Introduction to Microsoft SQL Azure

• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this lab, walk through a series of simple use cases for SQL Azure such as: preparing your account, managing logins, creating database objects, and querying your database.

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 8:15 AM View Comments  

Labels: Access Control Services, AppFabric, Azure, Azure AppFabric, Azure Blob Storage Services, Azure Data Services, Azure Table Storage Services, Cloud Computing, Cloud Computing Security, Codename "Dallas", TechEd NorthAmerica 2010

A search with OData as the keyword shows six breakout sessions, one Birds of a Feature, and one Hands-On Lab (HOL) sessions scheduled as of 4/23/2010 for TechEd North America 2010:

• ARC306 | Open Data for the Enterprise
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Architecture
• Speaker(s): Jonathan Carter
• Level: 300 - Advanced

In today’s Web applications, data is no longer locked up behind a Web site, but is now exposed via a set of service APIs that allow for third-party developers to create an endless number of experiences on a variety of platforms and devices. The OData protocol will usher in a more open and programmable Web by creating a common funnel to expose rich data, thereby creating a world of customized consumer mash-ups; a world where government data is transparent and accessible to any citizen; a world where you can ask a question and know, “There’s a feed for that.” Not only does this impact how we make data available on the Web, but it can have a profound impact on how we make data available in the enterprise. The OData ecosystem is composed of consumers and publishers, including Microsoft’s own implementations in WCF Data Services as well as integration into our products such as SharePoint and Excel. In this session, we discuss the OData protocol and show how it will change the way we think about exchanging data inside and outside the enterprise.

• DEV2 | Open Data for the Open Web
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Douglas Purdy, Jonathan Carter
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

There is no shortage of valuable data being generated by applications, reports, tools, Web sites, etc. Unfortunately, this leaves many of us wishing we could programmatically access the data and logic behind an app, report, or Web site. To break down data silos and increase the shared value of data and its associated business logic through the Web, Microsoft has recently announced the Open Data Protocol which enables exposing any data source as a Web-friendly data feed. Join this session to understand what the Open Data Protocol (OData) is and how it adds end-user and developer value to many of Microsoft's leading products and services (such as SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Codename "Dallas", Windows Azure, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel, Visual Studio, .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, etc.) and is accessible from a range of platforms such as Java and PHP.

• DEV202 | Implementing RESTful Services Using the Microsoft .NET Framework
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Ron Jacobs
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this session we present how .NET developers can reuse their Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) skills to take advantage of the integrated tooling and rich extensibility of a single WCF distributed programming framework including WCF WebHttp Services for RESTful services, WCF Data Services and OData and WCF RIA Services for end-to-end Microsoft Silverlight application development.

• DEV303 | Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Stephen Forte
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Applications today are expected to expose their data and consume data-centric services via REST. In this session we discuss what REST is and have an overview of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Data Services and see how we can REST enable your data using the Open Data Protocol (OData). Then we cover how to leverage existing skills related to Microsoft Visual Studio, LINQ and data access to customize the behavior, control-flow, security model and experience of your data service. We then see how to enable data-binding to traditional ASP.NET controls as well as Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010. We then turn to consuming SharePoint and other OData-based applications in Microsoft .NET as well as from a non-Microsoft client. This is a very demo intensive session.

• DEV323 | Best Practices: Creating OData Services Using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Data Services
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Alex James
• Level: 300 - Advanced

The OData ecosystem is a vibrant growing community of data producers and consumers using the OData protocol to exchange data. The easiest way to become an OData producer and join the OData community is using WCF Data Services. In this session, learn WCF Data Services best practices so you can do it right. We cover security, performance, custom business logic, and how to expose your unique data source using OData.

• WEB311 | Building Rich AJAX Applications with jQuery and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Web Platform
• Speaker(s): Dan Wahlin
• Level: 300 – Advanced

Abstract appears to be missing.

• BOF710 | PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?
• Session Type: Birds-of-a-Feather
• Track:
• Speaker(s): Andrew Brust

Microsoft's forthcoming PowerPivot product is nominally a BI offering. But if you’re a developer or IT pro, the story’s much more important than that would make it seem. On the dev side, PowerPivot is the rich client for consuming OData (Open Data Protocol) feeds, which is what the Entity Framework and WCF Data Services produce. On the IT side, PowerPivot lets end-users do analytics in Excel, but allows those spreadsheets to be secured, stored, serviced, and monitored on the server side with SharePoint. PowerPivot is not about BI in the conventional sense – it’s about analytics on relational data that developers can produce and IT can manage. What does this shift in BI approaches mean for Microsoft, its Office and SharePoint franchises, developers, IT and the BI industry in general? No one knows the answer, of course, but the discussion, and your participation in it, may well provide important insights to help us all prepare for the change. Are you using analytics in your applications? Should you be? Come join in the discussion!

• DEV13-HOL | Building Applications and Services Using Open Data Protocol
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Developer Tools, Languages & Frameworks
• Speaker(s): Diego Vega
• Level: 400 - Expert

In this lab, learn about the Open Data Protocol, the ecosystem where it works, and why developers should write applications and services using the Open Data Protocol as their Data Access protocol. Also, learn how to create simple applications in various technologies that manage OData feeds.

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 1:38 PM View Comments  

Labels: OData, Open Data Protocol, PowerPivot, SharePoint 2010, TechEd NorthAmerica 2010

Microsoft Tech•Ed North America 2010 offers three Microsoft Access and 53 SharePoint 2010 sessions as of 4/22/2010.

Here are the details of the two interactive sessions and one hands-on lab that are specific to Access 2010. The breakout sessions are SharePoint-only; there are no Access-specific breakout sessions:

• OSP01-INT | Microsoft Access Services: Under the Hood
• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Kerry Westphal
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Access Services introduces a new toolset to develop Microsoft SharePoint-connected applications. Learn how Access Services works with SharePoint to deliver a new user experience. We discuss the data caching model that Access Services uses to optimize queries with larger sets of data. We also look at the internal workings of the Access Services Query Processor to show you what it can do.

• OSP05-INT | Microsoft Access 2010 and IT: The War Is Over
• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Russell Sinclair
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Access enables end-users in business units to develop applications quickly at low cost. This agility is valued by large organizations around the world. However, some of these same organizations struggle with managing the myriad of Access databases in use. This session covers the new tools and techniques now available to keep IT firmly in control. The best of both worlds is possible: you can satisfy the need for agile development from your business units and still rest assured that the data is secured, backed up, and managed appropriately.

Note: I don’t think the war is or will be over.

• OSP01-HOL | Building Solutions with Microsoft Access 2010
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

This lab acquaints you with the new developer related features of Access 2010 with a keen emphasis on understanding the differences between developing database objects that will work in a Web database versus objects that work only in a client database. This lab helps you understand the benefits of starting from templates, learning basic data design modification for Web databases, developing an understanding of Web form modification and creation, learning how to use navigation forms and learning how to use the new data macro editing environment.

Following are the SharePoint sessions returned by using the keyword Azure:

• OSP306 | Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Solutions with Claims Authentication
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Paul Schaeflein
• Level: 300 - Advanced

SharePoint has built-in user authorization so that a site owner can specify what access particular users have to resources. Authentication is the identification of who the user is and this is provided by other software external to SharePoint such as Active Directory. There are many authorization and authentication requirements in custom solutions and this session helps to explain the technology landscape for developers. Topics include Authorization by Claims Authentication, Anonymous Access and Blog Commenting, ASP.NET Membership Provider, and Live ID Authentication.

• OSP309 | Developing with REST and LINQ in Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Todd Bleeker
• Level: 300 - Advanced

SharePoint 2010 has new and improved ways to work with data. LINQ to SharePoint lets a developer work with data from SharePoint lists in a strongly typed way that preserves relationships between lists. Integration of ADO.NET Data Services provides a way to get data from SharePoint remotely using REST-style Web services. The new Client APIs provide a programming model for SharePoint lists that doesn’t have to run on the server. This session demonstrates how to write code that uses each of these new data-oriented features and shows some new SharePoint platform data-oriented features along the way. We also explain how to choose which data access technology is best for different custom development scenarios.

• OSP311 | From N to Z: Authentication and Authorization in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Richard Taylor
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Perhaps the most important considerations when planning a SharePoint deployment are: how do I authenticate my users and how do I ensure they have access to the content they need? This session describes the investments made in SharePoint 2010 as related to Authentication and Authorization, where one method merits consideration over another, and why.

• OSP312 | Help! My Users Are Everywhere: Designing (Developing) for a Global SharePoint Audience
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Joel Oleson
• Level: 300 - Advanced

As Microsoft SharePoint secures its position in the Enterprise, it has never been more important to ensure its global reach to drive information worker adoption and productivity. Today’s global workforce requires access to information fast to rapidly respond to ever-changing business conditions, poor performance and perception can mean the difference between success and failure.

Following are the breakout sessions returned with SharePoint as the keyword:

• OSP202 | Business Connectivity Services in Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Overview
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Juan Balmori
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) – the evolution of the Business Data Catalog – is a key feature of SharePoint 2010. In this session we discuss the new improvements to this functionality for this release. BCS now enables you to bring external data into SharePoint and Office, reuse it, and empower end-users to gain insight into the underlying data in a reusable way. This is all done within the browser with full Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) operation support, tighter integration with Office client applications, and better tools for modeling business entities. Learn about the major BCS improvements and see a detailed demo of how to build a declarative solution using SharePoint Designer, InfoPath Designer and the SharePoint SDK -- without using a developer, or requiring you to write any code. The solution we demo for you connects to back-end systems to both present data and to allow interaction with this data from within SharePoint and Office applications (such as SharePoint Workspace, Outlook, and Word).

• OSP203 | Designing Governance: How Information Management and Security Must Drive Your Design
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Richard Taylor
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

You’ve read the white papers, you’ve “Binged” governance, but how, exactly, do you design a SharePoint implementation that will support governance, security, and information management? Join SharePoint MVP and consultant Dan Holme for a practical, nuts-and-bolts look at the close relationship between your information management requirements and SharePoint’s manageability controls, and the demands that relationship places on your design and infrastructure. This session is focused on architecting a logical design of SharePoint that effectively supports your information management requirements and governance plan—the “technical” side of governance. Learn how to align your governance requirements with SharePoint farms, Web applications, and site collections. Discover why some third-party applications are a “design poison pill” and what Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 offers to greatly improve the deployment of a governable design. Gain a deeper understanding of the intricacies and challenges of designing the logical structure of SharePoint, and take away practical, blueprint-like guidance to what a governed SharePoint implementation might look like in your enterprise.

• OSP204 | Developing for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Online: Understanding the Boundaries
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Chris Mayo
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

SharePoint Online is quickly becoming a great cost-effective way to manage SharePoint in the 'cloud' that can complement the way you architect and deploy your on-premises instance of SharePoint 2010. This session focuses on defining what the developer can and can't do with SharePoint Online to help you understand where the boundaries lie.

• OSP205 | ECM for the Masses: How Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Delivers on the Promise
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Richard Riley
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Tired of hearing statistics about the high rate of failure for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) initiatives? In this session, learn about the new features in SharePoint 2010 and discover how Microsoft is changing the game in ECM by bridging the worlds of traditional content management, social computing and search; all delivered seamlessly through Microsoft Office, Web browsers, and mobile devices.

• OSP206 | Getting to know FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Erik Schwartz
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Search connects people to the information they need to get their jobs done. General productivity search solutions connect a broad set of people to a broad set of information. High-value search applications drive measurable ROI by helping a specific set of people make the most of a specific set of information. High-value search applications share the following characteristics: They address a specific business problem and drive measurable ROI; they are designed for use by a well-defined set of people; and they “add structure to unstructured information” and enrich the target data set through advanced content processing. In this session, learn how FAST Search for SharePoint delivers the best general productivity search on the market AND makes it easy and economical to build high-value search applications.

• OSP207 | Integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Girish Raja
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

As SharePoint adoption grows, many companies want to increase their integration of CRM data into their SharePoint assets. This session provides an overview of how you can integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM data and processes with SharePoint 2010 using Microsoft Silverlight and some of the new SharePoint APIs. If you're interested in seeing a demo-heavy session that walks you through the development of this integration, then you can't miss this session.

• OSP209 | Microsoft Project and Project Server 2010 Overview 
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Christophe Fiessinger, Jan Kalis
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

This session provides an overview of the key investment areas and capabilities of Project Server 2010 and Project Professional 2010, including demand management, portfolio analysis, time tracking, business intelligence/reporting, and other better together capabilities, by being built of top of SharePoint 2010 Enterprise features.

• OSP210 | Microsoft Visio 2010: The IT Pro Love Story Continues
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Chris Hopkins, Kapil Tandon
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Learn how Visio 2010 will revolutionize the way IT pros work; how it will save valuable time and money with the enhancements made to the product. The is the best Visio release in 10 years. Learn how it will impact infrastructure specialists, application developers, and IT managers. Learn how it works together with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

• OSP211 | Overview of Social Computing in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): David Pae
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Technology innovations keep getting better and better, so what’s new in SharePoint 2010 for social computing? Find out what is new, improved, and the business value of social computing in this session. As the tools are tied closer to communication, content management, business insights, and search capabilities, social computing in SharePoint 2010 will allow end users be more productive and efficient.

OSP212 | Overview of the SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Paul Andrew
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

SharePoint 2010 has many new developer oriented features. Developers can build collaboration applications on the platform features of SharePoint 2010, the new tools for SharePoint 2010 make developers more productive and new hosting options for SharePoint solutions provide more flexibility in deployment. This talk is a lap around SharePoint 2010 for developers providing a brief look and code-based demos of the major new features in building user interfaces, building on the data platform and in general programmability.

OSP213 | SharePoint and Azure: How Do They Play Together?

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Steve Fox
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

There is immense opportunity for you to build and deploy cloud-centric solutions using the new Windows Azure platform. However, what does that opportunity look like vis-à-vis Microsoft SharePoint? In this session, see the different ways in which you can integrate Azure services with SharePoint to extend your SharePoint solutions into the cloud.

• OSP214 | SharePoint Security: Permissions, Identities, and Objects
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Dan Holme
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

The SharePoint security model can be confusing, with its deep hierarchy of securable objects, granular permissions and policies, and clunky user and group management interfaces. This session demystifies SharePoint security by dissecting each of these components and presenting best practices for implementing and managing security. Learn when and why it makes sense to leverage Active Directory groups or use SharePoint groups, and take away options for new permission levels and settings that address common business requirements.

• OSP215 | Think Big! Topologies for Enterprise Environments, Planning, and Preparation
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Joel Oleson
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Communities, Composites, Content, Insights, Search, and Social are the tenents of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The product has been designed to provide capabilities not seen in previous versions and extends its reach to solve even the most complex of business requirements. As Enterprises become more dependent on SharePoint as a mission critical application, its footprint will undoubtly grow.

• OSP217 | What’s New in Enterprise Search in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Erik Schwartz
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Search connects people to the information they need to get their jobs done. General productivity search solutions connect a broad set of people to a broad set of information. They deliver a great search experience out of the box and are designed to be easy to set up and maintain. Most general productivity search solutions allow some amount of customization and extensibility, but they don’t provide many “information management capabilities.” In this session you learn about the new enterprise search capabilities in SharePoint 2010 and how to support general productivity applications.

• OSP218 | Customizing Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Jeff Fried
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

FAST is Microsoft's super-charged enterprise search and will be integrated into the SharePoint 2010 experience. This session explores the different ways in which you can customize FAST to optimize the end-user experience around FAST.

• OSP301 | Building Rich Internet Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Bob German
• Level: 300 - Advanced

The combination of the great presentation and user interface capabilities of Silverlight and the rich collaboration platform of SharePoint create an unbeatable combination for making developers very productive in building rich internet applications. SharePoint 2010 features new tools that make it easier to build with Silverlight, including a new Silverlight object model and REST services. In this session we show how to combine the capabilities of SharePoint and Silverlight together to create Internet magic. We start with a few basic warm-up scenarios, and move to more full-feature line-of-business and social applications that leverage the best of these platforms.

• OSP302 | Building Solutions with Business Connectivity Services
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Scot Hillier
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Business Connectivity Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 enables integration with line-of-business applications and other enterprise and Web 2.0 data sources. It was known in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as the Business Data Catalog (BDC) and has been significantly improved in SharePoint 2010. This session shows building BCS External Content Types with both the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 designer and with Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010. This provides multiple ways to expose line-of-business data, from a variety of sources, as SharePoint 2010 External Lists.

• OSP303 | Deploying and Upgrading to Microsoft Project Server 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Christophe Fiessinger, Rolly Perreaux
• Level: 300 - Advanced

This session provides an overview on how to deploy a Project Server 2010 Farm. Specific topics discussed includes upgrading and migrating from prior version (2007 and 2003), how to architect and configure Project Server within the context of a SharePoint Server 2010 Farm, capacity planning, and more.

• OSP304 | Developing and Branding with the New User Interface Features in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Paul Stubbs
• Level: 300 - Advanced

SharePoint 2010 has new improvements for customizing the SharePoint user interface. The new Ribbon interface is fully extensible, allowing you to add or remove pieces to easily customize the experience. Also, new user interface controls such as the dialog framework and the status and notification area allow you to inform or interact with the user without taking them out of the context of their task or the look and feel of SharePoint. This session shows you how to use EcmaScript to interact with these new user interface controls, using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. It also describes the options for branding a SharePoint site including CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and Master Pages support.

• OSP305 | Developing Document Sets in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Content Management
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Andrew Connell
• Level: 300 - Advanced

In this session, learn about a new capability in SharePoint Server 2010 that allows users to create a single work product that is comprised of many components: Document Sets. This session begins with an introduction of the out-of-the-box capabilities of document sets and then moves into how developers can customize and extend document sets for unique solutions.

• OSP306 | Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Solutions with Claims Authentication
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Paul Schaeflein
• Level: 300 - Advanced

SharePoint has built-in user authorization so that a site owner can specify what access particular users have to resources. Authentication is the identification of who the user is and this is provided by other software external to SharePoint such as Active Directory. There are many authorization and authentication requirements in custom solutions and this session helps to explain the technology landscape for developers. Topics include Authorization by Claims Authentication, Anonymous Access and Blog Commenting, ASP.NET Membership Provider, and Live ID Authentication.

• OSP307 | Developing Office Business Applications with Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Michael Kiselman, Steve Fox
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Office Business Applications (OBAs) have evolved and with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 there are new platform services to make these productivity solutions more powerful and connected to more data. This session shows what an OBA is and what the fundamental architecture of an OBA looks like. Learn best practices for building OBAs and how to use new features in Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

• OSP308 | Developing with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Sandboxed Solutions
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Scot Hillier
• Level: 300 - Advanced

SharePoint 2010 adds a new deployment model for SharePoint called Sandboxed Solutions. It is a controlled solution packaging format that offers SharePoint Server Farm owners a way to easily mitigate risk that custom code will cause issues for them. It does this by restricting the APIs that can be called and governing resources that can be used. Because of this, Sandboxed Solutions provide a solution package that can be easily deployed to a shared server environment. This session describes what Sandboxed Solutions are, it demonstrates how to create them with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and how to deploy and monitor them on SharePoint farms.

• OSP309 | Developing with REST and LINQ in Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Todd Bleeker
• Level: 300 - Advanced

SharePoint 2010 has new and improved ways to work with data. LINQ to SharePoint lets a developer work with data from SharePoint lists in a strongly typed way that preserves relationships between lists. Integration of ADO.NET Data Services provides a way to get data from SharePoint remotely using REST-style Web services. The new Client APIs provide a programming model for SharePoint lists that doesn’t have to run on the server. This session demonstrates how to write code that uses each of these new data-oriented features and shows some new SharePoint platform data-oriented features along the way. We also explain how to choose which data access technology is best for different custom development scenarios.

• OSP310 | Fine Tuning Your Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Environment
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Mike Watson, Shannon Bray
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Tuning your SharePoint environment is an important step in optimizing its performance and enabling an efficient deployment that reduces overutilization in resources and in turn provides the best possible user experience. In this session, Mike Watson will demonstrate techniques to improve the capacity of your SharePoint 2010 environment and discuss ideas and solutions to include software boundaries, caching options, and remote BLOB storage.

• OSP311 | From N to Z: Authentication and Authorization in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Richard Taylor
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Perhaps the most important considerations when planning a SharePoint deployment are: how do I authenticate my users and how do I ensure they have access to the content they need? This session describes the investments made in SharePoint 2010 as related to Authentication and Authorization, where one method merits consideration over another, and why.

• OSP312 | Help! My Users Are Everywhere: Designing (Developing) for a Global SharePoint Audience
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Joel Oleson
• Level: 300 - Advanced

As Microsoft SharePoint secures its position in the Enterprise, it has never been more important to ensure its global reach to drive information worker adoption and productivity. Today’s global workforce requires access to information fast to rapidly respond to ever-changing business conditions, poor performance and perception can mean the difference between success and failure.

• OSP313 | Microsoft Office 2010: Developing the Next Wave of Productivity Solutions
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Jill Maguire, John Durant
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Microsoft Office 2010 expands your productivity solution options by offering improved development options and tools, simplified solution design, richer programmability for Office data and formats, and deeper integration with SharePoint platform services. Learn how to use Microsoft Office and related products to address a wide variety of scenarios with custom solutions.

• OSP315 | Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 As a Social Computing Platform
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Ted Pattison
• Level: 300 - Advanced

This lecture focuses on the developer interfaces for the Social Computing API and Web services for SharePoint 2010. Social Computing with SharePoint involves creating people-aware applications that take advantage of User Profiles, Social Data, and Personalization built into SharePoint.

• OSP316 | Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for the Microsoft ASP.NET Developer
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Eric Shupps
• Level: 300 - Advanced

SharePoint is the development platform that many developers with ASP.NET background are moving to. Because SharePoint is entirely built on ASP.NET it is a natural way to get access to higher level features. This session outlines the areas that an ASP.NET developer needs to learn to get used to developing for SharePoint. During the talk, see various ways that existing ASP.NET code can be migrated to SharePoint, and demos focused on migrating commonly used ASP.NET project templates.

• OSP318 | SharePoint is Down: Solutions for High Availability and Disaster Recovery
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Bill Baer
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Data recovery is non-negotiable; you can't buy back lost data. Learn why IT continuity management is important, how to protect your content, and investments in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to get you there.

• OSP319 | Upgrading and Improving Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 WCM Sites to SharePoint Server 2010 Web Content Management
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Andrew Connell
• Level: 300 - Advanced

SharePoint Server 2010 delivers a rich new environment for managing and authoring Web content, along with a wide range of platform improvements. In this session we demonstrate a live upgrade of a SharePoint site from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. Along the way, we discuss key upgrade considerations, review the changes required to implement the fluent UI for content authoring and show how to enable new features like video streaming, tagging, ratings, and wikis in a publishing scenario.

• OSP320 | Workflow Development in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Jon Flanders
• Level: 300 - Advanced

SharePoint Server 2010 includes new workflow features and there are many improvements in the tools for workflow. SharePoint 2010 now supports workflows that can run without a SharePoint list item. SharePoint Designer 2010 has a new designer for building workflows and these workflows can be exported directly to Visual Studio 2010. Visual Studio 2010 also has workflow tools improvements with a new workflow form designer, support for Sandboxed Solution workflow activities and the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint tools packaging designer. This session describes the new workflow features and demonstrates these tools.

• OSP401 | Upgrading Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Shane Young
• Level: 400 - Expert

Itching to upgrade your SharePoint Server 2007 farm to SharePoint Server 2010? Then this is the session for you. In this session we cover the upgrade methods that are available, and explain how to determine which one is the best way for you to get your content into your shiny new SharePoint 2010 farm. Finally, we show you the way to reduce the amount of downtime you'll have. Your users will love you for that.

• OSP402 | Windows PowerShell Made Less Scary for the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Administrator
• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Todd Klindt
• Level: 400 - Expert

PowerShell is the command line admin interface for SharePoint Server 2010. It can be pretty scary for SharePoint admins who haven't used it before. In this session we provide PowerShell basics, then show the amazing things you can do to SharePoint 2010 with PowerShell. By the end of this session you may never open Central Admin again.

Following are the interactive sessions returned with SharePoint as the keyword:

• OSP01-INT | Microsoft Access Services: Under the Hood
• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Kerry Westphal
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Access Services introduces a new toolset to develop Microsoft SharePoint-connected applications. Learn how Access Services works with SharePoint to deliver a new user experience. We discuss the data caching model that Access Services uses to optimize queries with larger sets of data. We also look at the internal workings of the Access Services Query Processor to show you what it can do.

• OSP08-INT | Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture
• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Bill Baer
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Server virtualization technologies have taken front stage recently and many organizations have begun to replace physical servers, including SharePoint servers, with virtualized machines. Virtualization of the 2007 wave of SharePoint Products and Technologies has been supported for some time, and many 2007 farms have been successfully virtualized over the years. With a new version of SharePoint, however, come new best practices and new techniques for virtualization of SharePoint. This session focuses specifically on SharePoint Server 2010 farm virtualization, and how components of a SharePoint 2010 environment can be successfully virtualized. Included in the discussion are new virtualization High Availability options such as Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Live Migration of SharePoint guest sessions as well as time-tested design architecture examples using integrated SharePoint failover techniques.

• OSP09-INT | Whats New with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2010
• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Asif Rehmani
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

SharePoint Designer 2010, which is a free application, is “The Preferred” tool to design powerful no-code solutions and applications in SharePoint 2010. In this session, get a broad overview of the capabilities of the tool, from site customizations such as modifying Site Metadata, managing Site Security, or creating Site Content, to building List- or Site-based Workflows and connecting to a variety of Data Sources. This session also covers the new ribbon interface of SharePoint Designer 2010 and shows how best to take advantage of this application by showing the new bells and whistles that come with this product.

• OSP10-INT | Integrating SAP with Microsoft Office and SharePoint 2010
• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Donovan Follette
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this interactive session, come learn the different ways for you to integrate SAP with Office and Microsoft SharePoint 2010. We’ll keep the session open for discussion, walk through a couple of demos, and talk to the different ways to integrate the two. Specific areas of coverage include Business Connectivity Services, custom Web Parts, Silverlight, Office ribbon, and Custom Task Panes.

Following are the hands-on labs returned with SharePoint as the keyword:

• OSP02-HOL | Business Connectivity Services: Using External Lists
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) allows you to create Microsoft SharePoint applications that bring external data into SharePoint and Microsoft Office. External Content Types and External Lists are the foundation of these applications, which can then be extended to Office clients. In this lab, create an External List based on a pre-defined External Content Type and connect it to Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint Workspace and Microsoft Word.

• OSP03-HOL | Developing Reports and Dashboards with SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

This Hands On Lab covers how to develop reports and scorecards with SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services.

• OSP04-HOL | Customizing a SharePoint List Using Microsoft InfoPath 2010
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Microsoft InfoPath 2010 makes it easier than ever to design and publish electronic forms. InfoPath allows you to create powerful, interactive forms without writing any code. With just a few clicks, Microsoft Office users can customize SharePoint list forms, add custom layout elements, add business rules to validate the data, and take the list and associated forms offline in SharePoint Workspace.

• OSP05-HOL | Deploying Microsoft Office 2010 Add-ins
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this lab, use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime to deploy several add-ins. The deployment scenarios used represent real-world scenarios that require secure deployment, including multiple add-ins via SharePoint. The lab exercises include: deploying Office add-ins using ClickOnce deployment, using post deployment actions, creating deployments containing multiple add-ins and creating a WSP file to deploy an Office Document template to SharePoint.

• OSP07-HOL | Developing a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Workflow with Initiation Form in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 300 - Advanced

This lab walks through building a workflow in Visual Studio 2010 for SharePoint 2010. Learn how to add an initiation form to the workflow and use an external data exchange activity in the workflow.

• OSP08-HOL | Developing a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 User Interface with Silverlight in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 300 - Advanced

This lab walks through building Microsoft Silverlight applications for use in SharePoint 2010. Learn how to access SharePoint 2010 data in Silverlight using the Client Object Model.

• OSP09-HOL | Developing KPI's and Scorecards with SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

This Hands On Lab covers how to develop KPI's and Scorecards with SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services.

• OSP10-HOL | Introduction to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Developing a Visual Web Part in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

This introductory developer lab introduces the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint development environment. It shows how to build a Visual Web Part using LINQ to SharePoint and it shows how to connect a Web part to another Web part on the page.

• OSP11-HOL | Lap around Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Content Management
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this lab we take a tour through all the new improvements in Enterprise Content Manager in SharePoint Server 2010. This includes Document, Records, and Web content management.

• OSP12-HOL | Metadata and Taxonomy Management in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 300 - Advanced

In this lab we look at how to manage Metadata and Taxonomy in SharePoint Server 2010. This includes working with the Term Store, Document Sets, and working with information mangement policies.

• OSP14-HOL | Records Management in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 300 - Advanced

In this lab, learn about the new Records Management capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010.

• OSP15-HOL | Search with Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Query API and Query Languages
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 300 - Advanced

In this lab, learn about enterprise search in SharePoint 2010 query customizations and developing a methodology for adding these customizations to your applications. There are three topics that are covered: Query API and how it works, Query Language, and FAST Query Language (FQL) Operators and Usage.

• OSP16-HOL | Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Web Content Management Visual Upgrade
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 300 - Advanced

In this lab, take a content database backup from a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management site and upgrade it to a SharePoint Server 2010 Web Content Management site. This process involves upgrading the SharePoint content database followed by incorporating some new features and capabilities added in SharePoint Server 2010 to the site. Some of these capabilities include adding the new server ribbon, leveraging the content organizer, and adding a content ratings control.

• OSP17-HOL | Upgrade from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

This lab provides an introduction to the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 upgrade infrastructure, and demonstrates some changes and improvements in the upgrade and patching system.

• OSP19-HOL | What's New in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for IT Professionals
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

SharePoint Server 2010 includes many new features that are designed to assist server farm administrators. These include an enhanced user experience and navigation model, tools to help you manage availability and monitor performance, a more flexible service model, and full support for scripting in Windows PowerShell. This lab provides an introduction to these features.

• OSP20-HOL | Windows PowerShell in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

The objective of this lab is to introduce you to using Windows PowerShell to administer a SharePoint Server 2010 environment. The lab starts with a beginners introduction to the SharePoint 4.0 Management Console, and then explores how you can use progressively more advanced Windows PowerShell scripting techniques to administer your SharePoint server farm.

Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 10:39 AM View Comments  

Labels: Access 2010, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, TechEd NorthAmerica 2010

 
Note: This post is updated daily or more frequently, depending on the availability of new articles in the following sections:

• Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services
• SQL Azure Database, Codename “Dallas” and OData
• AppFabric: Access Control and Service Bus
• Live Windows Azure Apps, APIs, Tools and Test Harnesses
• Windows Azure Infrastructure
• Cloud Security and Governance
• Cloud Computing Events
• Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

To use the above links, first click the post’s title to display the single article you want to navigate.

Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform published 9/21/2009. Order today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble (in stock.)

Read the detailed TOC here (PDF) and download the sample code here.

Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

See a short-form TOC, get links to live Azure sample projects, and read a detailed TOC of electronic-only chapters 12 and 13 here.

Wrox’s Web site manager posted on 9/29/2009 a lengthy excerpt from Chapter 4, “Scaling Azure Table and Blob Storage” here.

You can now download and save the following two online-only chapters in Microsoft Office Word 2003 *.doc format by FTP:

• Chapter 12: “Managing SQL Azure Accounts and Databases”
• Chapter 13: “Exploiting SQL Azure Database's Relational Features”

HTTP downloads of the two chapters are available from the book's Code Download page; these chapters will be updated for the January 4, 2010 commercial release in April 2010. 

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

Danny Cohen’s Azure Storage: Asynchronous delete operations and ghost objects post of 4/21/2010 begins:

Here’s the story of my attempt to make sense of Windows Azure Storage erratic behavior when it comes to reporting an object’s existence. The short version for this post is that there is API design flaw in the way Windows Azure Storage addresses this issue, and that you need jump through a few hoops in order to bypass this flaw. The long version is described below.

I’ve been reading Steve Marx’s blog, and I examined his proposed workaround to testing for the existence of a blob. I played around with it for a while, checking whether the same solution can be implemented with a container object (CloudBlobContainer), since the required API (“FetchAttributes” method) has the same signature and apparent functionality for both objects (although there is no base class, interface or any other mechanism that connects both objects).

After playing around with it for awhile, I used the following code to examine the functionality. It basically does a create-verify-delete-verify test cycle.

CloudBlobClient blobStorageType = GetCloudBlobClient();
var name = “test-container”;
var container = blobStorageType.GetContainerReference(name);
var result = container.CreateIfNotExist();
container = blobStorageType.GetContainerReference(name);
Assert.IsTrue(container.Exists());
container.Delete();
Assert.IsFalse(container.Exists());

However, I soon noticed that the results were inconsistent with my expectations: occasionally and seemingly unpredictably I got the “container.Exists()” call to return the wrong result (both true or false).

The behavior was quite erratic and annoying. My first thoughts were that this is an “eventual consistency” issue, since the behavior was so inconsistent. However, Windows Azure Storage is consistent, so this was not really an option.

Danny continues with an explanation for the problem: asynchronous deletions.

V. J. Kumar posted his Azure Blob and Entity Table Integration, extending the Thumbnail sample sample to The Code Project on 4/21/2010:

Introduction

Windows Azure is an exciting platform from Microsoft which supports massively scalable tables in the cloud, which can contain billions of entities and terabytes of data. Windows Azure storage lets user store data in     Windows Azure Blob ( provides storage for large data items) and       Windows Azure Table (provides structured storage). A clear understanding about how to interact with entity tables and blobs will enable us to fully appreciate and utilize all the featuress of Azure.  This article describes the concepts for doing CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on Windows Azure Tables and how table data can interact with the Blobs.

Background

The Azure SDK comes with some samples which are helpful to understand the technology. There have been 2 major releases of the Azure SDK; the first one was in March 2009 and the second one in November 2009. The March release had Storage Client class to work with Blobs and Table storage in the Local Development storage as well as the Cloud. In the November release Microsoft released an API for the Storage Service and simplified things like storage string manipulation.

Some samples have come with the SDK. Two of the samples Thumbnail and the Personal Web Site give a very good flavor of the Azure development environment. The Thumbnail sample is useful to understand the Blob manipulation and the Worker role in Azure. The personal web site sample has example of how to work with tables and blobs. The thumbnail example has been modified for the new Storage Client API and the Personal Web Site has not been.

This article used the Thumbnail sample and extends it. The thumbnail sample lets you browse through an image file and save it in the blob storage. A worker role is created which creates the Thumbnail of the image you uploaded and the image and its thumbnail are stored as blobs. The web page displays the thumbnails in the blob storage and the page is refreshed every ten seconds.

In this extension the following features are added :

1. Enter a name, date and comments of the picture you are downloading.
2. Modify fields after they are stored in the Tables.
3. Delete a picture and the associated data.
4. The thumbnail in the list, when clicked displays original picture.
5. Removed automatic refresh every second and used Updated Panel to update relevant sections of the page avoiding unnecessary round trips to the server. …

The extended code described in this article produces the following default page”

image

Joseph Fultz explains Migrating Windows Service to Azure Worker Role: Image Conversion Example using Storage in this 4/2/2010 article, which I missed when posted:

In my work with Symon Communications we had to move the pieces of their solution from their current Windows Services implementations to something that would work well in the cloud. These services would run in the background to collect, transform, and prepare data. This seemed like a natural fit for the use of a worker role. The simple scenario as a means of proving out the idea was to read the images from one container, convert them, and save them to another storage container. Similar to the Thumbnails example that is in the Azure SDK, but in our case we wanted to simplify and felt the use of the queue to be overkill for what we needed to accomplish.

The setup for this is to add a worker role to your cloud solution, create source and target containers in Azure Storage, and finally seed the source storage with the files, in our case PNG files, with the files that are to be converted. This can all be done through development storage and fabric and works the same once deployed. I’ll be using “pictures” and “converted” as the names of the two containers. Thus, on the development storage they’ll actually be referenced as devstoreaccount1/pictures and devstoreaccount1/converted. Let’s get started on the code by adding a new class file to the worker role project. I named the class ImageConverter. Keeping this as simple as possible for the point of demonstration of the worker role in place of a service I use System.Drawing.Image’s built in capabilities to transform it for me. …

Joe continues with the details of his implementation. See also Joe’s Channel 9 Screencast with Symon Discussing Azure Deployment Architect post of 4/8/2010 here:

Directly related to a couple of my recent posts we (Jared Bienz and [I]) talked about it with Joshua Kurlinski from Symon.  You can see the screen cast here.

<Return to section navigation list> 

SQL Azure Database, Codename “Dallas” and OData

The SQL Server Team reported SQL Server 2008 R2 Released to Manufacturing! in this 4/21/2010 post to its MSDN blog:

We are very excited to share that today, Microsoft released SQL Server 2008 R2 to manufacturing! Customers can expect availability in the next few weeks through Microsoft’s distribution channels. For more information, visit www.sqlserverlaunch.com.

R2 Banner

SQL Server 2008 R2 enhancements continue to support mission-critical workloads providing a trusted, scalable platform, increased developer and IT efficiency and managed self-service business intelligence reporting and analytics. It is for these very reasons that SQL Server 2008 R2 is setting records for performance and price/performance on industry standard benchmarks. …

According to a 4/21/2010 conference call with Microsoft Senior Vice President Ted Kummert and General Manager of Business Intelligence Tom Casey, RTM bits will be available for download from TechNet and MSDN on 5/3/2010 and general download by 5/13/2010. The data sheet shows Express, Express with Tools and Express With Advanced Services editions have their maximum database size expanded to 10GB. You can download the Express or trial version as of 4/21/2010 from here.

Check out the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Hosted Trial; get more details from PASS: Come Play in the SQL Server 2008 R2 Hosted Trial Sandbox.

Lynn Langit’s SQL Saturday – SQL Azure – April 2010 deck update post of 4/21/2010 is brief and to the point:

Here’s the deck I’ll be presenting this Saturday in Huntington Beach at SQL Saturday – c’mon over!

SQL Azure April 2010

View more presentations from lynnlangit.

Julian Lai announced WCF Data Services for Silverlight 4 now available for download on 4/20/2010:

A couple of months ago, we released an update to .NET 3.5 SP1 and its counterpart ADO.NET Data Services for Silverlight 3 Update CTP3. I am now pleased to announce that we have shipped an updated Data Services client library with Silverlight 4. This release includes all the features that we shipped in the SL3 CTP3 Data Service release as well as support for NTLM, Basic and Digest authentication. If you are using the SL3 CTP3 release, the client library in SL4 represents the production release of that feature set. For more information regarding previously released features, check out our blog post here.

The enhanced authentication support is useful in same domain and cross domain scenarios.  To use the feature, simply specify your credentials using the new Credentials property on the DataServiceContext class. For example:

Uri uri = new Uri(www.somesampleuri.com);

DataServiceContext svc = new DataServiceContext(uri);

svc.Credentials = new NetworkCredentials(username, password, domain);

svc.HttpStack = HttpStack.Auto;   // setting this to HttpStack.ClientHttp is also supported

svc.LoadAsync(....);

More information can be found in our MSDN documentation.

Bob Beauchemin’s DAC support SQL Azure and vice-versa. It's live post of 4/19/2010 to the SQLSkills blog begins:

Last week I did a talk at SQLConnections on SQL Azure Database and Data-Tier Applications (DAC). At the time (it was the day of Visual Studio 2010 launch), I explained that conference abstracts had to be submitted 6 months ago. At the time, because of some coincidental feature correspondence (e.g. the DAC whitepaper suggests only using DAC deployment on databases of 10gb or less; 10gb is the current maximum size of a SQL Azure database) I'd actually thought that DAC and Azure were "joined at the hip" and that DAC might already be used in the cloud (internally) for SQL Azure deployment.

It isn't. In fact, neither DAC nor SQL Azure Database supported each other. *Until last week*. At the VS2010 launch, the other DAC talk (by the team) said Azure would be supported as a development/deployment environment. But, except for "import from existing database", even the RTM VS2010 didn't work with SQL Azure.

Imagine my surprise on returning home to see this blog posting by the SQL Azure team. As of last Friday, SQL Azure enhancements "enables deployments of database applications directly from SQL Server 2008 R2 and Visual Studio 2010 to SQL Azure for database deployment flexibility". So, it does hook up, after all.

DAC is a pretty controversial feature because in V1, it only supports a subset of database objects and deployment via a
"new database-copy data-rename databases" funtionality. So, its not for everyone. But, at both talks, attendees seemed to understand the target audience, the "departmental database application", the "600th database application" in a large company, the ones that usually have no DBA support because DBAs are busy with 24x7 line-of-business OLTP apps. If you've ever worked in a big company where database and software development is not the main business of the company (ie, the main business is manufacturing cars, or banking, not developing software), you can grok what exactly what a "departmental application" is.

The attendees got it. When I asked at the end of my talk if, because there are customers for it in the present, the DAC ought to be postponed until it would work with all DBMS apps, I only got 1 taker (for postponed) out of 100. Not so controversial after all. …

See the Windows Azure AppFabric Team’s New OData Service for SQL Azure Uses AppFabric item in the AppFabric: Access Control and Service Bus (next) section.

Naveen Srinivasan’s Using OData , LINQPad, Reactive Extensions (Rx) to query stackoverflow post of 4/7/2010 showed up today on a Google alert for “Odata”:

I saw this cool post from Scott Hanselman on creating a OData API for stackoverflow. I use LINQPad more often than anything.   And sometimes when I am not very busy, I also look for unanswered questions in stackoverflow.    I have been playing around with Reactive Extensions. FYI LINQPad 4.0 supports Rx. So I thought how cool will be it if I have to look for unanswered “windbg” questions from stackoverflow , so that I could answer them.  And here is the query

image

So this would essentially keep querying stack overflow ,if stackoverflow has to implement OData . And I wouldn’t have to launch and application to look for unanswered questions.

I know this will not work now. But how cool it is to combine these frameworks write very succinct code to get what we want, without having to jump through hoops.

<Return to section navigation list> 

AppFabric: Access Control and Service Bus

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team’s New OData Service for SQL Azure Uses AppFabric post of 4/20/2010 observes:

In his MiX 2010 keynote, Doug Purdy announced a new service that exposes data in SQL Azure to web based clients using the OData protocol.

The new service is exciting for two reasons:

1. It can be used to publish SQL Azure data with no code, and
2. It uses AppFabric Access Control (ACS) exclusively for authentication and authorization.

You can learn more about it from the following blog posts:

• How to Use OData for SQL Azure with AppFabric Access Control explains how to configure a SQL Azure database for publication and how to build clients that can access it.
• Silverlight Clients and AppFabric Access Control provides more detail on using Silverlight clients with ACS.
• Silverlight Samples for OData Over SQL Azure describes some code samples that you can use to get started with the new service, or with any service protected by ACS using Silverlight clients.

Ron Jacobs apologizes for video problems in his endpoint.tv – Developing Services with IIS/Windows Server AppFabric post of 4/19/2010:

To those nearly 5,000 people who tried to watch this video today… sorry.  I forgot to publish the video correctly for Channel 9 and didn’t realize it until a couple of hour ago.

As I mentioned previously in my post on Developing Services with IIS/Windows Server AppFabric it is possible to work with AppFabric directly from Visual Studio (and there is more than one way… I’ll cover that in another post/video).

<Return to section navigation list>

Live Windows Azure Apps, APIs, Tools and Test Harnesses

Steve Marx recommends Call DiagnosticMonitor.Start() Only Once in this 4/21/2010 post:

If you’re using the cloud templates in Visual Studio, you’ll see a line in the OnStart() method in WebRole.cs or WorkerRole.cs that looks like this:

DiagnosticMonitor.Start("DiagnosticsConnectionString");

You might be tempted to put this line somewhere else (like in an ASP.NET page), but please resist that temptation. At the moment, if you call DiagnosticMonitor.Start() more than once, you’ll end up with multiple copies of the Windows Azure Diagnostics process. Much like a memory leak, this will sneak up on you over time (as more processes get started), and you’ll eventually starve your role instance of resources.

We’ve seen this come up more than once in customers’ applications, and we have a bug open on our side to prevent duplicate calls to DiagnosticMonitor.Start() from starting multiple copies of the process in the future.

What About Changing Diagnostics Settings Later?

One reason you might be tempted to call DiagnosticMonitor.Start() again is to use different configuration settings. (Maybe based on an admin user’s actions or a specific error condition, you want to ramp up your logging.)

One of the nice things about Windows Azure Diagnostics is that it can be dynamically configured, and you don’t need to call DiagnosticMonitor.Start() again to do that. …

Steve continues with “code that runs in an ASP.NET web page and changes the configuration settings for the current role instance” and concludes:

If you’re going to use Windows Azure Diagnostics at all in your application, I recommend calling DiagnosticMonitor.Start() exactly once, in your role’s OnStart() method. Then use dynamic configuration to change settings at runtime.

See my Windows Azure Live DNS Brief Outage at All Data Centers on 4/21/2010 at ~ 2:30 PM PDT post of 2/21/2010 in the Windows Azure Infrastructure (next) section.

Steve Marx explains Capturing Filtered Windows Events with Windows Azure Diagnostics in this 4/21/2010 post:

If you download the source code for my Hosted Web Core Worker Role, you’ll see a few lines of code which configure Windows Azure Diagnostics to capture Windows Events generated by Hosted Web Core:

var cfg = DiagnosticMonitor.GetDefaultInitialConfiguration();
// HWC uses the event log to indicate what's broken.
// This config setting is really handy when debugging bad config.
cfg.WindowsEventLog.DataSources.Add("Application!*[System[Provider[@Name='HostableWebCore']]]");
diagnosticMonitor = DiagnosticMonitor.Start("DiagnosticsConnectionString", cfg);

When you add a Windows Event log data source, you get to specify an XPath selection criterion for the events you want to log. The Windows Azure Diagnostics documentation gives a simple example and then links to Consuming Events for more details. In neither place could I find examples like what I wanted (listening to events from a particular provider).

I was able to figure out what to put in that string by creating a custom view in the Windows Event Viewer on my laptop and then switching to the XML view to see the XPath:

image

image

It wasn’t hard from there to derive the right syntax to pass to WindowsEventLog.DataSource.Add.

Panagiotis Kefalidis pops up again with a Yes, I’m still here post of 4/21/2010:

Well, I’m still here. I know it’s been like ages since my last post but believe me, I’ve been quite busy with tons of stuff and there was no time to blog.

So, let’s catch up a little bit:

1. I’ve been awarded the MVP title for 2010 on Visual C#. Thank you very much Microsoft.
2. I’ve attended the Regional CEE MVP Summit that took place in Athens, Greece. Photos will be up soon.
3. I started playing with Cassandra DB from Apache Foundation and I’m currently looking in a way to make it run on Windows Azure. I just started and I’ll keep blogging about it. It’s really cool and I hope it will work!

I’ll believe panagiotis’ promise when I see the posts.

Lori MacVittie asserts “It’s all fun and games until application performance can’t be measured” in her Learn How to Play Application Performance Tag at Interop post of 4/21/2010:

We talk a lot about measuring application performance and its importance to load balancing, scalability, meeting SLAs (service level agreements) and even to the implementation of more advanced concepts like cloud balancing and location-based global application delivery but we don’t often talk about how hard it is to actually get that image performance data. Part of the reason it’s so difficult is that the performance metrics you want are ones that as accurately as possible represent end-user experience. You know, customers and visitors, the users of your application that must access your application over what may be a less than phenomenal network connection.

This performance data is vital. Increasingly customers and visitors are basing business choices on application performance:

blockquote Unacceptable Web site performance during peak traffic times led to actions and perceptions that negatively impacted businesses’ revenue and reputation:

• -- 78 percent of consumers have switched to a competitor’s Web site because they encountered slowdowns, errors and transaction problems during peak traffic times.
• -- After a poor online experience, 88 percent are less likely to return to a site, 47 percent have a less positive perception of the company and 42 percent have discussed it with family, friends and peers, or online on social networks.

-- Survey Finds Consumer Frustration with Web Site Performance During Peak Traffic Times Negatively Impacts Business Results

And don’t forget that Google recently decided to go ahead and add performance as a factor in its ranking algorithms. If your application and site perform poorly, this could certainly have an even bigger negative impact on your bottom line.

What’s problematic about ensuring application performance is that applications are now being distributed not just across data centers but across deployment models. The term “hybrid” is usually used in conjunction with public and private cloud to denote a marriage between the two but the reality is that today’s IT operations span legacy, web-based, client-server, and cloud models. Making things more difficult is that organizations also have a cross-section of application types – open source, closed source, packaged, and custom applications are all deployed and operating across various types of deployment models and in environments without a consistent, centrally manageable solution for measuring performance in the first place.

The solution to gathering accurate end-user experience performance data has been, to date, to leverage service-providers who specialize in gathering this data. But implementing a common application performance monitoring solution across all applications and environments in such a scenario is quite problematic, because most of these solutions rely upon the ability to instrument the application/site. Organizations, too, may be reluctant to instrument applications for a specific solution – that can result in de facto lock-in as the time and effort necessary to remove and replace the instrumentation may be unacceptable. …

Bruce Kyle reports RES Software Stores Desktop Profiles on SQL Azure in this 4/20/2010 post to the US ISV Developer Community blog:

RES Software uses SQL Azure to offer cloud storage for user desktop configurations. The company also offers on premises storage options.

Channel 9 Video: RES Software Stores Desktop Profiles on SQL Azure.

channel9logo In this short video on Channel 9, I talk with CTO Bob Janssen about how and why they company offers both SQL Azure and SQL Server storage options for their customers.

RES Software is the proven leader in user workspace management. They driving a transformation in the way today’s organizations manage and reduce the cost of their PC populations. Designed for physical or virtual desktop platforms, RES Software enables IT professionals to centrally manage, automate and deliver secure, personalized and more productive desktop experiences for any user.

For more information about how RES Software users access their desktop information in the cloud, see RG021 – How to create a MS SQL Azure Database on the RES Software blog.

Return to section navigation list> 

Windows Azure Infrastructure

My Windows Azure Live DNS Brief Outage at All Data Centers on 4/21/2010 at ~ 2:30 PM PDT post of 2/21/2010 reports a problem with live DNS operations at all Microsoft data centers covered by the Windows Azure Service Dashboard:

I received the following alert from Pingdom on 4/21/2010:

PingdomAlert DOWN:
  Azure Tables (oakleaf.cloudapp.net) is down since 04/21/2010 01:48:21PM.

and from Mon.itor.us:

image

The post includes a Dashboard screen capture during the outage.

Finchannel.com’s Harris Poll: Cloud Computing – Are Americans Ready? post of 4/21/2010 highlights consumer view of cloud-based storage:

Computers and the Internet have certainly made people's lives easier. Besides just the ability to communicate via email, pictures and music are now stored in our computers, we easily share documents back and forth and people have the ability to conduct banking online and store tax documents in their hard drives, not just in a dusty file cabinet.

However, the new problem is how to move those files in an easy manner or access them from a remote location. There is a new technology, referred to as cloud computing, that allows files to be stored, edited, or played online from any location at any point in time. But will people use this new technology?

On the positive side, just under half of online Americans (47%) say they would be extremely or very interested or interested in using this service for email, while one in five (19%) would be somewhat interested and three in ten (31%) would not be interested at all. But this technology may not be the answer as over half of online Americans say they would only be somewhat or not at all interested in using cloud computing for pictures (55%), music (59%), office documents (61%), videos (63%) or financial services such as tax files or bank records (69%).

These are some of the findings of a new Harris Poll,surveyof 2,320 U.S. adults surveyed online between March 1 and 8, 2009 by Harris Interactive.

As one might expect, there is an age difference in Americans' interest in cloud computing. The youngest generation, Echo Boomers or those aged 18-33, are more likely to say they are extremely or very interested or interested in using this technology. Over half of Echo Boomers express an interest in using it for email (56%), pictures (54%), and music (55%), and just under half say they are interested in using it for office documents (47%) and videos (46%). …

Issues with Cloud Computing

One of the main issues people have with cloud computing is security. Four in five online Americans (81%) agree that they are concerned about securing the service. Only one-quarter (25%) say they would trust this service for files with personal information, while three in five (62%) would not. Over half (58%) disagree with the concept that files stored online are safer than files stored locally on a hard drive and 57% of online Americans would not trust that their files are safe online.

But, at the same time, over three in five online Americans (63%) agree that having access to all their files wherever they are would make their lives much easier.

So what?

The concept behind cloud computing may make sense to Americans. A strong majority agrees that having remote access to their files would make life easier. So if the security issues and concerns could be resolved to the satisfaction of most people, they might be more likely to consider using it.

Matthew Weinberger quotes Unisys: MSPs Need to Go to the Cloud or Die in this 4/21/2010 article for MSPMentor (MSP = Managed Service Provider):

In a Cloud Computing Expo presentation evocatively titled “Storm Clouds: Disruptive Technologies Create the New Normal,” Unisys VP of Global Outsourcing Solutions Sam Gross explained how users have come to expect constant streams of data on demand — an expectation that’s completely shifting the market towards SaaS. Gross criticized the whole industry for being slow to adopt the cloud, but saved his harshest observations for MSPs. I was on the scene to hear him out.

“Those stick in the mud MSPs will vanish if they don’t change,” Gross said.

It’s a strong stance, and it’s hard to miss his meaning. While most of Gross’ presentation was spent talking about how Unisys had solved most, if not all, of the cloud’s security problems with their “Stealth” data-masking solution, he still made some excellent points in support of his argument.

The average customer, he says, doesn’t care how the service provider is managing their cloud platform, just that they have e-mail, phones, and whatever else they need to do business.

“It’s not the provisioning tools, it’s the content,” Gross said.

Most compellingly, Gross reiterated that cloud-delivered solutions allow for a hugely flexible business model. Basically, he says, MSPs who figure out how to combine cloud services with traditional services to be a “new breed” of solutions provider are going to be the ones who thrive in this changing IT climate.

There’s definitely something to his argument, but the fact remains that many MSPs just aren’t making money off the cloud. I suspect if you asked Gross — and I intend to — he’d say that they just haven’t hit on the right model yet, or that they’re being too rigid in their thinking. All the same, I still think it’s too early to issue a verdict on whether or not the cloud hype is justified.

Thomas Wailgum reports “A new Yankee Group study of enterprise cloud computing services finds cloud contracts full of disclaimers, ambiguous uptime guarantees, and uncertain privacy policies and compliance claims” in his Cloud-Computing Services: "Fine Print" Disappointment Forecasted post of 4/21/2010 to the CIO.com blog:

That's the crux of Yankee Group's latest research effort, Cloud 99.99: The Small Print Exposed, by VP and senior research fellow Camille Mendler.

Mendler examined the terms of service, service-level agreements (SLAs) and privacy policies for 46 software-, infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service (SaaS/IaaS/PaaS) offerings from 41 vendors. Those included stalwarts such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com

Not surprisingly, the report uncovered some not-so-good news.

"Cloud vendors offer enterprises poor service guarantees and limited financial redress if their service fails," notes the report. "Get-out clauses are rife, and worryingly, robust privacy policies are rare, potentially exposing enterprises to litigation. Enterprises must take a close look at the small print before they proceed, and develop proactive strategies to get the best out of cloud services."

Mendler offers several key areas that enterprises and CIOs need to watch closely or they could suffer:

1. Slippery SLAs: "Whatever the number of 9s offered, 'uptime' definitions vary, and service demarcation points for uptime are rarely end to end," Mendler writes. "Vendors also tend to play fast and loose with scheduled maintenance windows."

The study found that just half of service providers offer SLAs, and "none offer financial compensation when they fail to perform against them." Mendler also claims that timelines to fix site problems are typically "notional" (or conceptual), and that customers should expect "limited reparation other than service credits or the ability to terminate their contract."

2. Cagey Compliance: "SAS-70-certification is not a blanket guarantee of safety or survivability," the report states. "Enterprises should also seek ISO 27000 credentials, and check vendor adequacy against international data protection regulations."

3. Self-Serving Metrics: "Beware vendors acting as both judge and jury in determining service performance," Mendler notes. "The use of third-party performance monitoring tools must become table stakes for credibility."

The report appears to be both a warning to customers and a call to action for the growing number of cloud computing vendors.

"Cloud service providers better clean up their act fast because major investment decisions hang in the balance," Mendler says in the press announcement. "Enterprises need transparency, professionalism and certainty to invest in cloud services—few providers are stepping up."

Here’s Yankee Group’s Bottom Line and Executive Summary:

The Bottom Line:

Cloud vendors offer enterprises poor service guarantees and limited financial redress if their service fails. Get-out clauses are rife, and worryingly, robust privacy policies are rare, potentially exposing enterprises to litigation. Enterprises must take a close look at the small print before they proceed, and develop proactive strategies to get the best out of cloud services.

Executive Summary

It’s time to get steamed about the cloud’s hot air. When it comes to contractual promises to enterprises, the cloud’s earth-bound risks currently outweigh its benefits. Weak service level guarantees, derisory financial redress and lack of operational transparency are all-too-common flaws of many cloud services offered to enterprises today.

Yankee Group’s assertions are the result of an investigation of 41 software-, infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service (SaaS, IaaS and PaaS) providers collectively marketing 46 different services. Included in the scope of research were standard terms of service (TOS), service-level agreements (SLAs) and privacy practices. We find that only half of service providers offer SLAs, and none offer financial compensation when they fail to perform against them (see Exhibit 1). Timelines to fix problems are often notional, and customers can expect limited reparation other than service credits or the ability to terminate their contract.

Cloud service providers must clean up their act fast: Major investment decisions hang in the balance, according to Yankee Group’s enterprise surveys. Cloud service outages are routinely hitting the headlines, driving sharper attention on the minutiae of cloud service commitments. In this report, we identify contractual risks for enterprises, as well as potential mitigation strategies.

Denise Dubie writes “Microsoft details how its management software portfolio will deliver heterogeneous orchestration and automation capabilities to help customers develop, deploy and manage applications in private and public cloud computing environments” as a preface to her Microsoft weaves management technology into cloud vision NetworkWorld report of 4/20/2010 from the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas:

Microsoft's plans for cloud computing don't stop with infrastructure and applications. Company executives say Microsoft will also provide the heterogeneous management layer that customers will need to optimize application performance on-premises or in hosted environments.

Microsoft this week kicked off its Microsoft Management Summit 2010 conference in Las Vegas, welcoming some 3,500 attendees to learn more about the vendor's products and plans for future technologies. Bob Muglia, president of the server and tools business at Microsoft, opened the event officially with a keynote speech that detailed -- with product demonstrations -- how Microsoft intends to manage customer environments from today's data centers to tomorrow's shared clouds, on-premises and off.

Starting with its Dynamic Systems Initiative 10 years ago, Microsoft envisioned an environment that would connect the workflow between development and operations, providing end-to-end management, and helping customers reduce the overhead in delivering and optimizing business applications, Muglia said. It may not have been called cloud at the time, he clarified, but Microsoft recognized the model.

"There is a huge amount of opportunity to simplify the process and reduce the costs" associated with IT, Muglia told attendees.

Microsoft has worked on products such as Visual Studio and Systems Center, partnered with vendors such as HP for storage capabilities, and utilized acquired automation and orchestration software from Opalis, to take automation to the next level to enable IT staff to work on higher-priority tasks. The Opalis technology can work across platforms and enable Microsoft in the future to provide more heterogeneous management capabilities for customers. According to Paul Ross, group product marketing manager at Microsoft, the company already broadened its management reach into VMware environments with its Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager and added Unix and Linux support to System Center as well. …

Alex Williams’ Google's Vint Cerf on Private Clouds v. Public Clouds post of 4/20/2010 to the ReadWriteCloud blog begins:

[画像:guest_cloudhole_main.jpg]The debate about private clouds continue as the traditional heavyweight enterprise software providers make their big and glossy pitches for their vision of a private cloud.

So, it may come from Google, but still, it is refreshing to hear the intellectual tone that a scholar like Vint Cerf provides. Cerf is Google's chief technology evangelist but his reflections give a sound bearing on how private and public clouds do interact.

He spoke last week at the Google Atmosphere Conference. We came across one of the discussions he had with fellow Google innovators. He repeats what we hear him say a lot. It comes down to interoperability. Private clouds are tools. Google develops tools that are distributed on the Internet. The question is how do clouds interact?

It's a contrast to what we see with Microsoft or Oracle in its quest to sell cloud computing environments into the enterprise.

In the meantime Amazon continues its own quest to dispel private cloud computing as a myth, not a reality.

Alex continues with excerpts from AWS VP Adam Selipsky’s interview with eWeek.

Bridget Botelho reports on 4/20/2010 from the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas for SearchWindowsServer.com: Microsoft pushes cloud computing on reluctant IT pros:

Though cloud computing is high on Microsoft's agenda, IT managers attending the software vendor's annual management confab here this week either aren't ready to make the transition or simply don't want to.

IT pros at the Microsoft Management Summit 2010 were pummeled with cloud imagery as the software vendor disclosed plans for its System Center management portfolio. Some IT managers said cloud computing is interesting in theory, but they are not really sure how to make it work for their organization. IT managers are also realizing that cloud is no longer just a buzzword because – ready or not - giant vendors such as Microsoft have made it a core part of their product road maps.

Bryan Nettles, a help desk administrator at BJ Services Company, a Houston- based chemical processor, said his organization hasn't yet looked at cloud computing services as an option. The cost differential between premises-based enterprise technology and the cost to build a private cloud are still unclear. Nettles said he buys servers and uses virtualization software from VMware Inc., though on a small scale. For him, cloud computing will remain an abstract idea for some time.

Cloud computing? Zzzzzz

Plenty of IT managers have already had their fill of cloud computing hype. Erik Swenson, an IT manager with a construction company in Denver, expressed his frustration over the vendor fire hosing.

"Cloud computing is the new buzz and desktop virtualization is being rammed down the throats of us small IT shops before we can catch our breath," he said. "If our CFO reads about it in some business magazine he gets all excited and comes into my office asking me 'what about this, what about that?' Companies like Microsoft employ genius marketing people to make sure the 'keeping up with the Joneses' mentality holds sway. And IT people are left constantly chasing our tails in a futile effort to keep up."

But Microsoft has embraced cloud computing, as was evident in the MMS 2010 keynote. In addition, the company's CEO, Steve Ballmer, was recently quoted saying that 70% of Microsoft is dedicated to the cloud today, but it will be 90% sooner rather than later. …

Bridget continues with a cloud-positive quote from an IT architect.

The Cloud Communications Alliance announced its formation from the Cloud Computing Expo New York 2010 on 4/20/2010:

The Internet and ubiquitous broadband created a revolution in the way enterprises manage applications giving rise to the concept of Cloud Computing.

The same revolution is now changing the way enterprises communicate giving birth to a new industry: Cloud Communications. More than simply VoIP or Unified Communications, it’s an entirely new way to build, deploy, and scale enterprise communications systems.  

The Cloud Communications Alliance brings together the nation’s leading Cloud Communications providers to create the first nationwide high-definition enterprise voice network in the cloud - with no PBX to buy and no long distance costs between cloud customers.

More information about what the Cloud Communications Alliance is up to is here.

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Cloud Security and Governance

Thomas Bittman reports “The weighted score for ‘Security and Privacy’ was more than the score for the next three concerns combined.Polling Data on Public/Private Cloud Computing” in his Polling Data on Public/Private Cloud Computing post of 4/21/2010 to the Gartner blogs:

chickenclouds2

I’ve been looking for an excuse to use this cartoon – I finally found it!

I’m finishing a research note on some polls I took recently of data center executives, managers and decision-makers. Interesting results. Here’s a summary:

(1) The first poll was focused on the top three concerns that data center professionals have with public cloud computing. The weighted score for “Security and Privacy” was more than the score for the next three concerns combined. Sometimes, when it looks like a meteor, it is a meteor (see, I got the cartoon in here)!

(2) The next two polls focused on public cloud computing plans versus private cloud computing plans. Three-fourths said that they were or would be pursuing a private cloud computing strategy by 2012 (only 4% said they weren’t). Three-fourths said that they would invest more in private cloud computing than in public cloud computing through 2012. Hype plays a part here, but we continue to believe that IT organizations will spend more money on private than on public cloud computing through at least 2012.

(3) The final poll focused on challenges with private cloud computing. Technology” was considered sixth out of seven challenges offered. “Management and Operational Processes” came in first, closely followed by “Funding/Chargeback Model.” Process, people and relationship changes will be bigger challenges with private cloud computing than technology.

Once again, thanks to Doug Savage for allowing me to use one of his cartoons (check out the others on his site).

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Cloud Computing Events

Mike Erickson announces the Windows Azure Salt Lake City Users Group’s meeting on 4/21/2010 (today) at the New Horizons Learning Center, 2355 Technology Dr., West Valley UT 84119:

[画像:Salt Lake Azure User Group]This month we will continue to cover the Windows Azure AppFabric by focusing on the Service Bus. We will discuss the various messaging patterns which the Service Bus supports. We will review the creation and configuration of an Azure project. Then we will build and run services locally which will be exposed and accessible through the internet. We will discuss the security that the Service Bus provides for these services and see how to secure access to the services. As always we will have pizza for everyone and some prizes for the lucky ones! Please register if you plan to attend so that we can plan appropriately and remember to invite your friends.

Please register so that we can order enough dinner for everyone! Register Here

My 27 TechEd North America Sessions with Keyword “Azure” post of 4/20/2010, repeated from Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 4/19/2010+, lists:

• 18 Breakout Sessions
• 5 Interactive Sessions
• 4 Hands-on Labs

scheduled for TechEd North America 2010. The posts abstracts are from the current TechEd Session Catalog.

I repeated this item because I added the item to yesterday’s post late in the day.

SRTSolutions announces a series of Windows Azure Bootcamps in May and June, 2010:

What is a Windows Azure Boot Camp?

Windows Azure Boot Camp is a two day deep dive class to get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned. ABC is more than just a class, it is also an event in a box. If you don't see a class near you, then throw your own. We provide all of the materials and training you need to host your own class. This can be for your company, your customers, your friends, or even your family. Please let us know so we can give you all of the details.

Awesome. How much does it cost?

Thanks to all of our fantabulous sponsors, this two day training event is FREE! We will provide drinks and snacks, but you will be on your own for lunch on both days. This is a training class after all.

Here’s the Schedule with dates and locations in the Midwest and Right Coast.

Cumulux presents An Hour In The Cloud With Windows Azure – Webcast, which lasts 90 minutes, on 5/14/2010 at 9:00 AM PDT:

Why is Azure important?

Have you wondered how cloud computing can bring your ideas to the web faster? Reduce your IT costs? Or be able to respond quickly to changes in your business and customers needs? If so, then you need to find out what Azure is all about!

What is this Windows Azure training?

In this Windows Azure training session you will learn about Azure; how to develop and launch your own application as well as how it impacts YOUR daily life.

What does it cost me?

There is NO cost to participate in this training.

The Agenda:

• Overview of Cloud Computing
• Introduction to Windows Azure
• Tour of the Azure Portal
• Uploading your first Azure package
• Real world Scenario
• Experiencing your first cloud app & behind the scenes
• Q & A

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Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

Alex Williams reports Fujitsu Making 537ドル Million Investment in Cloud Computing in this 4/21/2010 post to the ReadWriteCloud blog:

The Nikkei Daily in Japan is reporting that Fujitsu will invest 537ドル million in cloud computing for 2011.

That seems like a staggering investment to us but perhaps it's not at all surprising considering the metamorphosis in the IT sector.

According to The Nikkei and Reuters, the investments will be for more servers and external memory storage at data centers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and Singapore.

[画像:fujitsuLogo_cropped.gif]Fujitsu is not a name that is often thought of in terms of cloud computing. But it is one of the largest IT management services companies in the world, competing with the likes of companies such as CA and Microsoft, two providers with deep investments of their own in cloud computing. …

Alex continues with excerpts from an interview with Fujitsu CTO Dr. Joseph Reger.

James Governor asserts VMware’s SpringSource Redis and Rabbit acquisitions: A Database Play is Emerging in this 4/21/2010 post to the MonkChips blog:

The VMware Q1 financials call had some interesting futures stuff, worth quoting CEO Paul Maritz in full

“This is Paul. I would be happy if you had to come around and have a cup of coffee with me and we could discuss that for several hours. The very, very short answer to your question is that we are not trying to get into the database business per se. We are trying to be into the business of enabling applications for the cloud, both private and public. And as I said building off of our SpringSource acquisition we are adding to the repertoire of underlying middleware and technologies that we think are going to be needed to generate – to develop a new generation of applications. So, in that sense our hiring of the gentleman in question is a further indication as was the RabbitMQ acquisition of our intent to build a very compelling suite to enable you to build cloud based applications.

“If you want us to get into the whole database and date storage discussion, as I said, swing by and we can have a long and interesting debate about that.”

Developing cloud based apps will require new data management and storage models. VMware is getting well ahead of the curve by investing in Redis, a well thought of, blazing fast, Key Value store, what is being called a NoSQL database. I wrote up why RabbitMQ is interesting the other day.

Thor With The HammerWhile Maritz may say VMware isn’t getting into the database business, he means not the relational database market. The fact is application development has been dominated by relational- Oracle on distributed, IBM on the mainframe – models. Cloud apps are changing that. As alternative data stores become natural targets for new application workloads VMware does indeed plan to become a database player, or NoSQL player, or data store, or whatever you want to call it.

We have been forcing round holes into square pegs with object/relational mapping for years, but the approach is breaking down. Tools and datastores are becoming heterodox. something RedMonk has heralded for years.

As Matthew Aslett from the 451 tweeted yesterday from the NoSQLEU conference:

“#nosqleu phrase of the day: choose the best solution/tool/storage model for the job. There might be something in ‘Not Only SQL’ after all”

The enterprise is beginning to notice that the web is working differently, and that there are alternatives emerging to the relational sledgehammer. VMware is positioning itself for the change.

Bart De Smet offers links to Some introductory Rx (Reactive Framework) samples in this 4/19/2010 post:

During my last tour I’ve been collecting quite some fundamental and introductory Rx samples as illustrations with my presentations on the topic. As promised, I’m sharing those out through my blog. More Rx content is to follow in the (hopefully near) future, with an exhaustive discussion of various design principles and choices, the underlying theoretical foundation of Rx and coverage of lots of operators.

In the meantime, download the sample project here. While the project targets Visual Studio 2010 RTM, you can simply take the Program.cs file and build a Visual Studio 2008 project around it, referencing the necessary Rx assemblies (which you can download from DevLabs).

Enjoy!

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Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 4:49 PM View Comments  

Labels: Azure, Azure Blob Storage Services, Azure Data Services, Azure Queue Storage Services, Azure Table Storage Services, Cloud Computing, SQL Azure, SQL Azure Database, SQL Server 2008 R2, TechEd NorthAmerica 2010, VMware, Windows AppFabric, Windows Azure, Windows Azure Logs