PDC2008 Report, Day 1 (Monday)

The PDC formally began today, as usual with a morning keynote talk by a number of Microsoft executives. Due to excessive LA morning traffic it took my hotel shuttle over an hour to get to the convention center which cost me the first half hour of the keynote but I was there in time for most of it. Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia are excellent presenters.

As expected, the cloud computing platform has been officially announced and is the star of the PDC. The platform is being called Windows Azure and sports a light blue Windows logo.

Here's the architecture:

• Windows Azure is the cloud operating system This includes a utility computing infrastructure, a basic API for things like storage, a new app model, and a powerful portal for uploading and managing cloud services.
• Azure Services are building block services for applications. This includes Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services, and CRM Services.
• Above that are Software as a Service (SAAS) applications from Microsoft. The consumer ones are branded with Live and the business ones are branded with Online.

There is a web site for Azure, azure.com.

After the keynote, the sessions kicked off many of which explore the cloud computing platform in more detail. But that's not the only thing at the PDC. There's also Oslo (about modeling applications), Dublin (making Windows Server into a superior app server), Surface (awesome table-top interactive graphical surface), .NET 4.0, and more.

I've known about the cloud computing platform details for about 6 weeks but was under non-disclosure. Now that the platform is public I can discuss it openly.

A national cloud computing user group community has been started at http://www.CloudComputingUserGroup.com (not a Microsoft web site).