The Morning Brew

Yesterday marked what is being hailed as ‘The Dawn of the Third Age’ of computing at Microsoft, with the public announcement and release of Microsoft Windows Azure, taking Microsoft deeply into the world of Cloud computing.

As predicted yesterday, today’s edition of the Morning Brew is an absolute monster, with special sections dedicated to PDC specific content, Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4.0, Oslo, and of course Azure. In addition to this I’ve attempted to keep the core of the Brew, as despite what the Microsoft Community might think there were other things going on yesterday other than PDC, so Information and Sotware sections feature as usual

PDC

• PDC2008 Professional Developers Conference October 27-30, 2008 – The official PDC site is the best source of information about the PDC, with links to the latest videos from channel 9
• Windows Live ID Becomes an OpenID Provider – The official announcement and technical details for the Windows Live ID Open ID Provider, including links to the CTP release
• ANNOUNCEMENT: Live ID OpenID Provider technical preview + see the screencast – Angus Logan talks about the Live ID Open ID provider announcement, and shares a screen cast which shows the experience.
• Session = "The Future of C#" – Joseph Guadagno shares his notes from Anders Hejlsberg session on C# 4

Microsoft Windows Azure

• Azure Services Platform – Microsoft’s official Azure site, containing links to the key parts of the platform and documentation.
• Getting Started: Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio – The Cloud Computing Tools Team has a nice post gathering together the downloads, tools and some information about the tools and SDK
• A Lap Around Windows Azure – Paul Gielens shares some notes of Azure, including the details of the contents Technology preview available to PDC attendees.
• Welcome Windows Azure – PDC Day 1 Keynote Recap – Jim O’Neil gives a nice summary of who said what in the PDC keynote, along with links to the speakers and any related technology that was demoed.
• .Net Services Team Blog : Welcome to .NET Services! – The Azure announcement is accompanied by a number of new sites and blogs, this one is focused on the Microsoft .NET Services (of which Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow Services) are the ones which have been released as a CTP.
• Azure: Microsoft .NET Service Bus – Clemens Vasters writes one of the longer and more detailed looks at Azure, taking about a number of the key components and technologies
• Windows Azure – Getting Set Up – Dominic Green talks about the setup of the Azure SDK, and what components you require as pre-requisites
• Microsoft Unveils Windows Azure at Professional Developers Conference – The official press release announcing Microsoft Windows Azure, their new cloud based services platform.
• On Demand Stream of Ray Ozzie Keynote – So much of the content for PDC is bring streamed, and you can catch the KeyNote from yesterday by Ray Ozzie on demand, and watch as Azure how announced

Oslo

• Oslo Developer Center – Micorosoft Code Name Oslo is the platform for Model Driven Applications, and yesterday its Developer Centre lauched. Here you can learn about the Oslo Framework, and the M language.
• Oslo SKD – The CTP SDK for Oslo is also available now – this is a direct download link.
• The Oslo Developer Center: Letter from the Editors – Chris Sells Kent Sharkey give the lowdown on the different parts of Oslo in this nice introduction
• MODELS remixed. – The Connected System Division released their new website about Oslo yesterday.

Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4.0

• Download details: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP – Microsoft have opened up the latest CTP of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 to the general public, although at a 7GB download and requiring 23gb of diskspace this Virtual Machine takes serious commitment. My download has just finished extracting and I’m hoping to fire it up later today!
• 2010 Feature Preview for TFS : VSTS 2010 – David Starr shares his notes from the PDC session on Visual Studio 2010 features
• Visual Studio 2010 – Ayende shares his first impressions of Visual Studio 2010, exploring (with screenshots) a number of the new features which will ship with 2010

Software

• Announcing the WCF REST Starter Kit! – Kent Brown announces the release of the Windows Communication Foundation REST starter kit on CodePlex. This release is a preview of what is to come in WCF 4.0, allowing you to try out the proposed features now.
• Downloading jQuery – jQuery JavaScript Library – The latest release of JQuery now includes a release which is the Visual Studio documentation release of JQuery, showing the first influence of Microsoft on JQuery.
• Practicing patterns : Prism V2 – Drop 4 – Erwin van der Valk announces the release of Prism Version2 Drop 4 on CodePlex. This update to the Composite Application Guidance package for WPF and Silverlight includes some features ported back from V1 and also a new form of composition called Top Down Composition.
• Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Releases! – The Windows Embedded team announce the RTM release of Windows Embedded Standard 2009, the latest generation of Windows XP embedded
• SubSonic MVC Addin Updated for Beta 1 – Rob Conery announces an update to his SubSonic MVC Addin which creates scaffold like MVC code for Linq to SQL data access, has now been updated to produce ASP.NET Beta 1 code.
• What’s New for Performance Profiling Tools for WPF – I believe this is a new update to the Windows Presentation Foundation Profiling tools, a great looking (visually as you’d expect for a WPF product) and feature rich set of tools for working with and identifying performance issues in WPF
• CodeRush Xpress announced and available – Julian M Bucknall, CTO of Developer Express announces the release of a joint venture with Microsoft. Code Rush Express is a free refactoring tool (drawing on functionality in Code Rush and Refactor! Pro) which works in all non-express edition Visual Studio, and best of all is FREE!
• Announcing CTP2 of Microsoft project code name "Velocity" – Velocity, the Microsoft project to create a distributed cache has reached its CTP2 release, as announced at PDC yesterday. This new release has a bunch of really good sounding features including x64 support and a number of Availability and Performance related changes.
• The GDR RC Is Here! – Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR has gone to release candidate, as announced by Data Dude at PDC

Information

• Not at the PDC? Participate Virtually Here! – Jason N. Gaylord highlights a website which aims to coordinate a Virtual conference using Microsoft Shared View, Live meeting and Twitter, with a number of interesting non-pdc sessions.
• Batching NHibernate’s DML Statements – Davy Brion looks at the batching of statements in NHibernate allowing NHibernate to send multiple statements to the database in a batch thus cutting down the round trip time dramatically when executing large numbers of statements,
• Testing Hibernate mappings: Where to test from? – Mark Needham ponders the testing of (N)Hibernate Mappings and looks at three types of test you can apply
• Programmatically managing Virtual Server using C# – Saurabh Singh taks about programatically controlling Virtual Server 2005 virtual machines, showing how you can power up, down restore, etc all from the comfort of C#.
• Writing a good Debug.Assert – Marcelo talks about the use of Debug.Assert, what its for and how to use this relatively unknown (in my experience) feature of the platform.
• Silverlight 2 and Localisation/Globalisation – Mike Taulty takes a look at Internationalisation in Silverlight applications
• Announcing CodeRush Xpress for C# – Mark Miller – Mark Miller looks at a number of the features of Developer Express’s new Free refactoring tool
• Specifying Injection Constructor using Unity Fluent Interface for Loose Coupling and POCO – David Hayden looks at how the Unity IOC framework determines which constructor to call when creating instances of an object, and shows how you can influence this decision with attributes.
• Composing Statements with Expression Trees in .NET 3.0 – Chad Myers explores Expression Trees in preparation for a talk at the Alt.Net workshop, sharing an illustrative example along the way.
• Software + Services: The Greater Sum – Yesterday saw a number of new Microsoft websites getting launched, and following the Azure site, I think this is another of the key ones.

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