Here are the industry top 5 hot topics as seen by our Principal
Technical Consultant Jon Stace for March
2010:
Windows Azure
Azure went live in February, and there are lot of blogs articles
about people trying out writing applications for it. Mostly with
success although applications have to be written specifically for
the technologies available. i.e. a Google App Engine application
wouldn't run out of the box on Azure or Amazon EC2 and vice
versa.
MS have a new website to promote all their cloud initiatives: http://www.microsoft.com/cloud/
Interesting quote from Steve
Balmer: 'Of our 40,000 people building software, 70% of the
people at Microsoft today are working on the Cloud - 90% in a years
time'
Slightly at odds with the emphasis that they place on Sharepoint considering it's not available as
a service on Windows Azure yet.
Google App Engine Downtime
Google's App Engine service suffered a serious outage on the
24th of February. This in itself ignited the debate
around relying on one service provider, vendor lock-in and general
cloud computing reliability. Google posted a quite detailed
description of what went wrong (
https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/a7640a2743922dcf)
which was quite well received considering the detail that it
covered and the tone (accepting there were problems and explaining
what process changes would be made).
Windows Phone 7 Series
Microsoft released a lot of information about the next version
of Windows Mobile, including an interesting demo of a game that
they wrote in .NET that ran on Windows Phone 7, Windows 7 and Xbox
360. Not that you'd want to run a game designed for a phone-sized
screen on an Xbox…
There was a lot of commentary about how MS might have got it
'right' this time with Windows Phone 7 and actually have an
offering that competes with the iPhone. I'm not convinced. They've
taken far too long to get it to market. It's planned for release
'Holiday' 2010. Of course, MS have made sure that Silverlight works
on Windows Phone 7.
Interestingly, there has been very little talk about the iPad
after the initial excitement. However, the blogs and sites that I
read are mainly MS/PC focused.
Sharepoint 2010 and Office 2010 to be launched on
12/05/2010
Everyone's a bit quiet on this one, but seeing as I've now been
indoctrinated into the SP 2010 'Way' I thought I'd include
something on it. I'm a bit surprised that no one's talking about it
as the release date is not far away now.
I find the changes in Sharepoint 2010 interesting mainly because
they are very out of character for MS. The biggest changes between
2007 and 2010 is that a lot of work has gone in to making SP2010
more consistent and integrated. All of Sharepoint's functionality
is available throughout the application, rather than being six or
so different blocks of functionality that are just installed
together. Installation is simpler, cross-browser support is greatly
enhanced (everything works the same in IE as in Firefox and most
functionality works in Safari), and it also looks a lot prettier!
New functionality is actually quite sparse. It's hard to believe
that this is Microsoft working on a new product version!
What is a bit odd is that although both Office 2010 and
Sharepoint 2010 are being released on the same day, together, MS
has changed the name of Sharepoint to separate it from Office.
Instead of Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office
Sharepoint Server (MOSS), Sharepoint 2010 is now simply called
Sharepoint Server 2010. There are three editions: Foundation,
Standard and Enterprise. Foundation is the equivalent to WSS and is
freely available.
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 will be released on
12/04/2010
The final Release Candidates of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0
have been released and the final go-live release date is set for
12th April.
Jon Stace
29/03/2010