Ray Ozzie: Reflections on Azure

The Discussion

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  PDC 2008 is really great event. I wish I could be there, in LA to witness what Microsoft is doing.
  
  I’ve been developing with Flash and Flex for few years and now with Silverlight 2 as well. Last year, December I attended Artists in Residence programme at Microsoft Campus. We learnt there about Silverlight 1 and little bit about upcoming Silverlight 2. But as the months passed I started being sceptic where all these RIA things are going, not only with Silverlight but also with Flex and AIR. For a long time we’ve seen shifting from the desktop to the browser based apps. Then, when Adobe Flex took over that trend was even more noticeable. Next Adobe released AIR. I think many people was like “what? So you’ve been telling us the web is the way and you want us to shift back to the desktop?” But this year’s PDC makes it clear, at least for me. There is no boundary. Everything is one huge ecosystem, across devices, across operating systems, based on widely-accepted standards such as REST, SOAP. No need for things like AMF... SOAP and REST work well with AJAX applications. Perfect. We can leverage these for next gen apps. Silverlight is getting strong, with all the great controls released by Microsoft it is real competitor to other technologies. I’m sure we all will see many SL applications popping out all over the world shortly. Silverlight, WPF, Mesh, Live Services, Windows Azure, Windows Vista or 7, there is even space for Flex there as long as developers use well accepted standards. The confusion is gone. I’m back on track now. You guys rock.
  
  BTW: what Microsoft and BBC did on iPlayer is really great stuff.
  

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  The Ozzman Cometh!
  I've been watching the keynotes and keeping up with Long's liveblog, I can't wait to get my hands on the PDC build of Win7
  
  Not to winge (more) but Jeff said via twitter that Tees would be available in limited supply after PDC, was wondering if you could keep an Ozzman one for me (I asked via @JeffSand on twitter, but I didn't get a reply so I just want to make sure )
  
  Keep the cool stuff coming Ozzman
  

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  Great interview Ray and Charles. Thanks for sharing.
  
  You are EVERYWHERE, jamie

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  Recent post on setting up Azure and the development fabric for Windows Vista:
  
  https://blogs.msdn.com/domgreen/archive/2008/10/28/windows-azure-getting-set-up.aspx#comments

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  Exciting stuff!  I can't wait to see the results of how the teams (SQL, Live, NET) were able to URI-ify their service offering. 
  

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  You can find more information related to Azure here http://www.azurejournal.com

  
  

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  Don't chug the kool-aid too quickly. Ask them about the glaring problems between WPF and SL. There are technical differences with data binding, styles, templates (see Dino Expresso). Platform differences here force us to write the same stuff over again for each app type. A little off topic but I think this is a big problem that they're not talking about enough.
  
   
  
  

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  i just saw this on jeffs blog
  
  
  LOL

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  Three cheers for jamie.
  
  Keep coming back Charles, I think Ray is beginning to like appearing on Channel 9.

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  Indeed he is.
  C