http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsofts-plan-to-increase-its-focus-on-developers-the-full-internal-memo/9327

Good luck to ScottGu. I liked how he did things and the stuff built under him has been a great boost to my job. Hopefully the good will continue under new leadership.

Does any of this affect Channel 9?

The relevance of this news is therefore not so much about who's in charge, but more about the indication that Microsoft now apparently regards the primary business purpose of its web stack to be drawing developers to Azure (much like Internet Explorer being part of Windows organizationally shows that the business purpose of IE is to support Windows). That means that the future direction of ASP.NET will be Azure-centric, which could be bad for .NET web developers who prefer to avoid Azure.

2 hours ago, Michael Butler wrote

The second biggest news story of the day.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsofts-plan-to-increase-its-focus-on-developers-the-full-internal-memo/9327

Good luck to ScottGu. I liked how he did things and the stuff built under him has been a great boost to my job. Hopefully the good will continue under new leadership.

Does any of this affect Channel 9?

 

Nope. Just that our VP has a new boss. It makes good sense that C9 be a part of the Developer Division...
C

I am avoiding Azure because of the pricing, but, if 3rd party can do Azure and have cheaper offering, or MS offering much cheaper offering, I would be fine with it.

Cheaper Offering means 80 bucks a year for everything (or 100 bucks a year including 4 GB of DB), except domain registerations. I don't care much about traffic right now because usually it is low before I make it big, this happens to most people too.

27 minutes ago, contextfree` wrote

The relevance of this news is therefore not so much about who's in charge, but more about the indication that Microsoft now apparently regards the primary business purpose of its web stack to be drawing developers to Azure (much like Internet Explorer being part of Windows organizationally shows that the business purpose of IE is to support Windows). That means that the future direction of ASP.NET will be Azure-centric, which could be bad for .NET web developers who prefer to avoid Azure.

About two months ago I received a phone call purported to be from Microsoft. It was a guy with a cockney accent who was doing interviews with registered Microsoft partners (which I am) about why they aren't using Azure.

I spent about half an hour running through my reasons: largely related to cost, but also of control and the perceived benefits. I discussed how it's still cheaper to go co-lo or even managed/dedicated and those options give you far more control over the final solution. Other reasons included how applications had to be ported to the platform specifically, and how I personally didn't see Azure being around for more than 10 years and so it would be a waste of time to build for a platform that no-one (at least to me) was asking for to begin with.

He said that all those reasons were valid and were, in fact, the same reasons he heard from nearly everyone else he had spoken to so far.

The moving of the ASP.NET people to Azure is concerning, as if Microsoft is betting the farm on the success of their cloud offering.

1 hour ago, contextfree` wrote

The relevance of this news is therefore not so much about who's in charge, but more about the indication that Microsoft now apparently regards the primary business purpose of its web stack to be drawing developers to Azure (much like Internet Explorer being part of Windows organizationally shows that the business purpose of IE is to support Windows). That means that the future direction of ASP.NET will be Azure-centric, which could be bad for .NET web developers who prefer to avoid Azure.

Not sure I see it that way. The Gu is moving to Server and Platforms. ASP.NET is now being treated as a platform, rather than something from the VS folks.

AppEngine seems to me years ahead

I admit my knowledge of Azure is from videos on Microsoft sites, but from what I see, Google's offering is years ahead. Google's solution IS PaaS. When you watch Azure videos, they claim it's PaaS, but it's a weird PaaS/IaaS mix. You hear talk about _routing_, instances, and whatnot. Not even funny.
Google's approach and advice is simple: 1) don't use SQL, as it is not easily scalable. Use a NoSQL server from the start. 2) Write a web-page and Google will scale it. Simple. Smart. And did I mention CHEAP! You can run a medium traffic site for FREEEEEE.

So if you aleardy have an SQL site up and running, you might want to give Azure a look, otherwise by going Azure you'll just create something that you'll have to rewrite tomorrow (as a microsoft developer i bet you're used to that).

My prediction: Microsoft will copy AppEngine to the letter, replacing Java with dotnet. Microsoft developers, why wait? use AppEngine today

32 minutes ago, fanbabywrote

Google's approach and advice is simple: 1) don't use SQL, as it is not easily scalable. Use a NoSQL server from the start

8 hours ago, fanbaby wrote

AppEngine seems to me years ahead

I admit my knowledge of Azure is from videos on Microsoft sites...

No need to read after that.

I think you have an extra closing div tag in your last post that's screwing up the rendering below it.

Where I work we've been discussing lately how complicated it can get to deploy an application internally. We have to find a web server, find a sql server, make sure they are configured correctly, and deploy everything.

It's not too terribly complicated, but if we could manage out internal apps in an Azure-like environment, it would make my life a whole lot easier.

5 hours ago, cbae wrote

@W3bbo:

I think you have an extra closing div tag in your last post that's screwing up the rendering below it.

I cleaned it up

16 hours ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

No need to read after that.

So there aren't many developers who can have an opinion about Azure

7 hours ago, fanbaby wrote

*snip*

So there aren't many developers who can have an opinion about Azure

You're free to have an opinion about anything you want. Everybody else is free to ignore it.

1 day ago, fanbaby wrote

Here's a copy of a post I made in a zdent MaryJo article:

AppEngine seems to me years ahead

I admit my knowledge of Azure is from videos on Microsoft sites, but from what I see, Google's offering is years ahead. Google's solution IS PaaS. When you watch Azure videos, they claim it's PaaS, but it's a weird PaaS/IaaS mix. You hear talk about _routing_, instances, and whatnot. Not even funny.
Google's approach and advice is simple: 1) don't use SQL, as it is not easily scalable. Use a NoSQL server from the start. 2) Write a web-page and Google will scale it. Simple. Smart. And did I mention CHEAP! You can run a medium traffic site for FREEEEEE.

So if you aleardy have an SQL site up and running, you might want to give Azure a look, otherwise by going Azure you'll just create something that you'll have to rewrite tomorrow (as a microsoft developer i bet you're used to that).

My prediction: Microsoft will copy AppEngine to the letter, replacing Java with dotnet. Microsoft developers, why wait? use AppEngine today

So, you are effectively saying that Google's solution is super-duper-dee-awesome and it's FREE, but you'll need to rewrite your application so that it doesn't work with a relational database and you'll need to 'Write a web-page' whatever that means.

You are, at best, oversimplifying this comparison.

Honorable chap though.

19 minutes ago, vesuvius wrote

@ScanIAm: don't be expecting any complex reasoning, thus far I have seen nothing to indicate anything apart from a passionate and respectable proclivity for FREE.

Honorable chap though.

It's interesting that the freetards will lap up anything produced by Google despite the fact that their core products are all proprietary.

Want to talk about vendor lock-in? Have fun migrating your system to any other platform after locking yourself into GAE and BigTable. Not only are you locked into the software, you're locked into the infrastructure.

With Azure, you can at least migrate the bulk of your work to your own hardware if you get tired of renting the infrastructure from Microsoft.

So, it's clear to me that fanbaby is more interested in "free as in gratis" than he is in "free as in freedom".

Either that or he's clueless about the implications of using GAE when it comes to vendor lock-in.

And, I still don't understand what is meant by 'Write a webpage'.  Is it raw HTML?  Is there some other framework behind the HTML that allows for business logic or is all of it in JavaScript?

1 hour ago, ScanIAm wrote

*snip*

So, you are effectively saying that Google's solution is super-duper-dee-awesome and it's FREE, but you'll need to rewrite your application so that it doesn't work with a relational database and you'll need to 'Write a web-page' whatever that means.

You are, at best, oversimplifying this comparison.

Like I said, if your app is already written in dotnet against SQL, go Azure

I am not advocating NoSQL, but it seems to me Google knows knows a thing or two about web-hosting. Being naive, I believe them .

RE 'write a web-page', I meant you DO NOT have to learn about instences, ramp-up or down, routing, balancing. For example, write a simple page to show retrieve a data-point from BigTable and you are done. Google takes care of scalability and promises that BigTable will scale. It's so simple and revolutionary, that MSFT must and will copy the idea.

By making fun of AppEngine only you stand to lose. I recommend watching Google developers videos on youtube. They also address the (what you called) vendor lock-in problem from the start.

44 minutes ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

So, it's clear to me that fanbaby is more interested in "free as in gratis" than he is in "free as in freedom".

If that was the case, i'd be downloading VS express and develop Silverlight apps.

6 hours ago, ScanIAm wrote 

Saving this in some NoSQL flavor is convenient and easy to understand, but when your store is a branch and headquarters wants a report on how many widgets were sold that day, the report becomes a bit more complicated.

MapReduce

May 04, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Bass wrote

*snip*

MapReduce

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, just that it's more complicated.  You have to logically implement what exists naturally when you use a relational database. 

They both have uses and some of those uses overlap, but they are not easy replacements of each other.