iPhone 4

Unless you've been living in a cave for the past couple of months, you can't have missed the announcement from Apple of the iPhone 4. Gosh, doesn't it make your current 3GS look ugly and slow?! Hope you're not stuck in the middle of a two year contract, that's a long time to wait before you can upgrade…

Obviously, there's plenty of coverage on the internet of the new features and how Apple consider this new version 'Changes Everything. Again'. Does it really? Is it really such a game changer as the original iPhone? I'm not convinced. Better certainly, assuming you hold it correctly (!), but hardly revolutionary.

Adobe, meanwhile, have been whinging quite a lot over the exclusion of Flash from Apple's devices. They've got a lot of valid arguments and I agree with a lot of what they say. I even feel slightly sorry for them that they are being marginalised, but then I remember how truly terrible the Flash plugin actually is in terms of performance, security and privacy. Come on Adobe, if you really feel that Flash is a valid part of the web, then at least produce a version of your plugin that isn't awful.

HTML 5 and VP8

All this talk of how Flash is rubbish and web standards are all that are needed to make rich user interface for web applications is focused on the next version of the HTML standard, version 5. Now, HTML5 isn't even a standard yet but browser makers are already implementing the new features that the new standard will cover. This is great for web developers as they can produce such rich interfaces without the need for reliance on proprietary plugins, but a complete replacement for the likes of Flash is still a way off. There's some interesting commentary here, especially in the comments section: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/05/05/HTML5-and-the-Web

One area of HTML5 that has produced considerable controversy is the new <video> tag, which allows displaying video within a web page much like Flash does. There's been a lot of back and forth over which video codec(s)[1] should be included in the standard and whether they are open enough for use in such an important standard such as HTML. Even the web browser manufacturers were sticking their oars in with competing manufacturers only supporting competing codecs. So for a while, it did look like there wouldn't be a proper, cross-browser standard for the <video> tag.

Google have now upped the ante by releasing their VP8 codec as an open standard (called WebM) that all browser manufacturers could support. They claim that they have checked the standard for patents and believe it to be patent-free. Independent analysis has shown that it is very similar to the proprietary H.264 standard[2] previous pushed as the standard for video encoding in HTML5. So, things are still not clear in this area, but then HTML5 isn't yet a standard as I previously pointed out. Interestingly, Microsoft have announced that they will support playback of WebM video in IE9, so things are looking up for standard, Flash-free video on the web.

IE6 - 9 Year Old Milk

A lot has been covered on the internet in recent years about the continued use of Internet Explorer 6, especially its use in corporate environments. Web developers hate having to continue supporting IE6 when modern web browsers (including newer versions of IE) have much better support for web standards. Excluding support for IE6 means that a lot less effort and cost is required to support access to a web application or site from multiple modern web browsers. Some major web sites have even started presenting a warning to users of IE6 when they access those sites, telling them to upgrade.

Up until recently, Microsoft have stated that they continue to support IE6. They still support Windows XP, and IE6 came with that operating system, so why would they not continue to support it? That is, as I said, until recently. Microsoft (admittedly their Australia operation, but this is still an official company announcement) have since compared using IE6 to drink nine year old milk. Lovely. http://hothardware.com/News/Microsoft-Likens-Internet-Explorer-6-To-Spoiled-Milk/

Office Web Apps

After a couple of months of product releases to a great fanfare Microsoft have been relatively quiet in the last month. One interesting piece of news from Microsoft that happened without all the noise of, for example, the Visual Studio 2010 release is the release of Office Live. This service allows you to view, edit and manage Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint documents through a web browser.

This does appear to be a reaction to the threat that Google Docs has on their core Office business, although Microsoft don't tend to publicly admit that they see Google Docs as serious competitor rather talking about the rich feature set that Office has and how so many of those features are missing in Google Docs. It is interesting to note, however, that the new Office web apps have very similar online collaboration facilities that Google Docs have, allow multiple users to edit the same document online.

Details can be found at http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/06/07/office-is-now-live-on-skydrive.aspx or you can just go to http://office.live.com and log in with your Windows Live account.

SQL Azure Database Size

I've previously lamented the maximum size of a SQL database instance on Microsoft's Azure platform and how the transparent scaling capability promised by cloud computing is not easily achieved with this service. Microsoft have recently announced that they are increasing the maximum size of a single SQL Azure instance to 50GB, up from 15GB[3]. This would certainly help when migrating some SME-sized applications to Azure, but they still need to work on making it easier to scale across SQL Azure instances.

Talking of Azure, I recently came across a free eBook covering working with Azure: http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/06/23/windows-azure-platform-articles-from-the-trenches-volume-1.aspx I haven't had the opportunity to review all the content but on first inspection it does look like it provides some interesting advice gathered from real-world experience.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec

[2] http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377

[3] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2010/06/07/10020947.aspx

Our 40-strong workforce at MSM's head office in Exeter will be able to watch England play Slovenia on June 23 - the only one of England's group games which has an afternoon kick-off.

Managing director, Thomas Coles, said: "We have been very lucky to have built an extremely good team at all levels and it's good to give something back. A few non-football fans would be working as usual, with non-English members of the team happy to watch the match."

Thomas Coles added: "We thought that it was better to embrace it rather than fight against it. On the day, productivity will be reduced, but in terms of productivity over the course of the month, I would expect a greater sense of buy-in. Overall, I think the effects will be positive."

Associated press articles

http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/news/City-staff-set-cheer-World-Cup-hopefuls/article-2286847-detail/article.html

http://www.thisisdevon.co.uk/news/Software-firm-puts-football-office-s-TV-programme/article-2287051-detail/article.html

Although the build up to the Apple iPad launch was quite quiet (I have to admit that most of the blogs/sites I read are Microsoft centric, but there has been some coverage), once released there has been all sorts of coverage of the new iPad, both good and bad. Many of the negative reviews have been around the fact that the iPad is locked down and doesn't come with a full operating system. This was one of my issues with the iPad when it was first announced. Having bought a netbook in the past and then very quickly realising that I didn't want a device to just browse the web with, I installed a full operating system and now I have a nice mini laptop that's not doing what it's designed for and is, basically, slow. The return rates on Linux based netbooks, in my view, show a similar story. Consumers didn't want a limited device that they could only browse the web with (and a few other functions), they wanted a cheap, small laptop. When the iPad was announced, I thought it would be a passing fad: consumers want fully working computers. I recently came across a great article that covers why I'm wrong on this front, especially when it comes to tablet PCs ( http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tablet-islate-ipad-netbook-notebook,9929.html). Tablet PCs with a full operating system on them are rubbish! For an effective tablet, you need a user interface that is specifically designed for touch and tablet PCs didn't have that. They were also VERY expensive.

There's a great, balanced (and long!) review of the iPad at ars technical ( http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2010/04/ipad-review.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss). What I find really impressive is the real world battery life statistics that they have gathered. Not quite in the same league as the dedicated eBook readers, but much better than a lot of the laptops I've used.

Of course the iPad, like the iPhone and iPod Touch, don't have Flash available for them so you will still be missing that full 'web experience'. Steve Jobs recently posted his thoughts on the subject (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/). He has a lot of good points and some dubious ones (paraphrasing: 'Flash is a closed technology, that's bad. Apple technology is also closed, but that's ok, I'm only talking about the web here'). Much has been written on the internet about this one post and I'm not going to reiterate any of it. I think there are two key points in the article.

1. Adobe haven't yet made a version of Flash that can achieve a good battery life on a portable device. This is so true, anyone who's seen Flash on one of the more recent Android phones must agree. It's painful.

2. Most Flash applications haven't been designed for a touch interface and so won't work that well. This is very true however not a complete show stopper, you can use Flash with just a touch interface and without relying on rollover effect.

He's right on both those points and it's understandable why Apple don't want Flash on their portable devices. Although, if Adobe can produce an efficient version of Flash, a lot of Steve Job's arguments couldn't really be used to justify not including Flash support in their products. Flash is a big part of the web currently and HTML 5 is still a long way off being a full replacement.

Internet Explorer 9

There have been a few blogs on the status of the next version of Internet Explorer. In themselves, not really worth inclusion in a 'top 5' list, but seeing as IE still has such a large user base, progress on the next version can't be ignored. Especially the fact that Microsoft are actually working on another version!  There's some great news for developers of web applications like us in that IE9 will support more web standards such as SVG and HTML 5 features. What I found most interesting, though, was that Microsoft have confirmed that IE9 will not support Windows XP ( http://hothardware.com/News/Microsoft-Confirms-IE9-Wont-Come-to-XP/). A great quote from the article is: '…since it could be 6-12 months before we even see IE9 ship. After nearly 10 years it's time to let XP totter off and die with dignity'. Now that Microsoft have provided us with an operating system worth upgrading to (Windows 7), the author is right. Perhaps it is time to stop using XP.

SQL Azure

As mentioned in last month's article, I've been looking into Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. One thing that I came across was some interesting information about the relational database service that is available as part of Azure, SQL Azure. This is essentially a hosted SQL Server facility, with some constraints. What is most interesting from our perspective is that there is a limit on the size of each SQL Azure database of 10GB. This is hardly the transparent scaling that we have been promised when using a cloud service. Microsoft's recommendations when working with SQL Azure is to partition your data into multiple SQL Azure instances and to handle that data partitioning logic within your application. Clearly, this is a version 1 service. Hopefully Microsoft will be developing this service and provide facilities to partition data for each application. They are currently talking about expanding the 10GB limit to 50GB in the future so they are moving in the right direction.

One thing that this makes very clear is that when intending to use such a cloud service, your application must be designed for the cloud and you can't just take any application that you've already written, install it in a cloud service and expect 'free' scalability.

There's a great set of presentation slides that cover SQL Azure available at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/archive/2010/04/21/sql-saturday-sql-azure-april-2010-deck-update.aspx

NoSQL

Over the past year or so, there has been a growing momentum behind a concept called 'NoSQL', or more pretentiously 'Post-Relational' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosql). The idea behind this concept is that RDBMSs, SQL and the relational model of data can't scale out, introduce too much overhead and bog down application performance. Applications would be better off not using an RDBMS and instead using some other data store that is lightweight, simpler to manage and easier to scale. Look at Google and their use of BigTable to store all of their indexed web data, proponents of NoSQL often state.

NoSQL as a concept does raise some interesting questions about the use of RDBMSs, but really discussions can be boiled down to using the right tool for the right job. Not every application needs the full set of facilities provided by a modern RDBMS and some applications have requirements for massively parallel processing of data, such as Google's search technology, where the use of an RDBMS would be inappropriate.

I recently came across an article on the subject that I have to agree with: http://teddziuba.com/2010/03/i-cant-wait-for-nosql-to-die.html (I'm not quite sure what a rollerblading Batman has to do with any of this…)

For business applications, one cannot understate the importance of the ACID guarantees that a modern RDBMS provides. Yes, there are situations that data would be better stored in a data store that isn't an RDBMS, but to always go one way or the other is completely inappropriate. As I've said above, the right tool for the right job.

Microsoft Software Launches

Microsoft have been very busy this month. The following new versions of software have been released to a great fanfare:

• Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 (both Released To Manufacturing - actual launch date is May 12^th)
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4
• Silverlight 4
• SQL Server 2008 R2

I say a great fanfare, but actually SQL Server 2008 R2 came out quite quietly. It was clear when the new versions of Office and .NET were going to be released but the latest version of SQL Server caught me slightly off guard. Although it's only an 'R2' release rather than a new full blown version, there's a lot of new functionality in 2008 R2. Why it's not SQL Server 2010, I'm not quite sure. Microsoft have released a free eBook that covers a lot of what's new and it makes for interesting reading:

http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_press/archive/2010/04/14/free-ebook-introducing-microsoft-sql-server-2008-r2.aspx

Once again, what is certainly not clear is what Microsoft are going to do around service packs and cumulative updates for these new releases. We certainly won't be using these releases out of the box without any quality reviews (I've been burnt by that in the past!), but Microsoft knows that people often wait for the first service pack before deploying a new technology and so are tight-lipped about any plans, trying to encourage companies to review these new technologies now rather than waiting six months for them to stabilise.

When Microsoft released version 3.5 of the .NET framework, along with Visual Studio 2008, they included a new data access technology called LINQ. This technology is their Language Integrated Query capability. LINQ allows a developer to query lots of different data sources with the minimum code. This was certainly interesting to us as we are always looking for technologies that allow us to do more with less effort, thus providing more value to our customers. The part of LINQ that communications with SQL databases, LINQ to SQL, is similar to the data access technology that we currently use very, NHibernate. Both provide Object-Relational Mapping (ORM[1]) functionality. ORM allows our developers to work with data coming from a database in an Object-Oriented way, making them more productive and the systems we produce better structured and more maintainable.

While one team at Microsoft were developing LINQ, another team were developing the Entity Framework. The Entity Framework was not production ready when .NET 3.5 came out and was released with the first service pack to .NET 3.5. There is a large overlap with the functionality between the Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL, as both provide an ORM facility. LINQ to SQL is aimed at getting developers working quickly with Microsoft SQL Server databases, while the Entity Framework has much more flexibility for mapping objects in code to different data structures. This created some confusion for developers as Microsoft were effectively pushing two different technologies that provide the same function. This concern has been resolved by Microsoft[2] and LINQ to SQL has been effectively deprecated in favour of the Entity Framework. This does not affect any other aspects of LINQ, e.g. LINQ to XML is still going to be developed going forwards and in fact there is a LINQ provider to the Entity Framework so developers can write LINQ queries in their code that use the Entity Framework for data access. Microsoft's clarification made it clear that our investigation work should focus on the Entity Framework.

The Entity Framework brings with it a number of benefits, which make it an attractive technology that we would be interested in using. The Entity Framework comes with .NET 3.5 SP1 so there is no separate download that has to be deployed to servers. This also means that in future .NET developers will be more likely to have familiarity with this technology. The tools available to work with the Entity Framework are built in to Visual Studio 2008 so managing the data objects in a project will be an easier process. The Entity Framework is actually structured in a very similar way to NHibernate. This means that the learning curve to get our developers up to speed with the new technology will be quite small. The Entity Framework has also been developed from the ground up to support other database systems, rather than just MS SQL Server. LINQ to SQL can be used with other database systems but this appears to be an afterthought in the design process. The Entity Framework was designed from the start to work with several different database systems. This is very important to us as we often work with Oracle as well as SQL Server and having a common data access technology that all our developers understand aids supportability.

All the available information looks very positive. The Entity Framework would be a great fit with our development process, providing our developers with productivity gains and helping with maintainability of the systems that we write. Our investigation into the Entity Framework has uncovered a number of problems however. Most of the problems that we have come up against are related to the fact that the entities created by default by the Entity Framework tools are too closely coupled with the Entity Framework itself. This close relationship means that we'd have to structure our applications in such a way as would constrain our developers too much. Writing n-tier applications would require significant amounts of code and place considerable constraints on what our developers could do. This would certainly not improve our developers' productivity or improve maintainability of the systems we create as the problems that we have discovered in our investigation of the Entity Framework are not ones that we currently experience using NHibernate.

We have had to come to the conclusion that although on paper the Entity Framework looks very good, in practice we would not see any benefits over using NHibernate for our data access. It would constrain our developers considerably and ultimately increase the cost of developing and maintaining a system. Fortunately, Microsoft are aware of these shortcomings and it looks like Microsoft have put considerable effort into the next version of the Entity Framework that would resolve the majority of our issues with it. Once version 4[3] of the Entity Framework, included with .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, has been released we will again look at this technology to see if it would provide us with the productivity benefits that we are looking for.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping

[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/10/29/update-on-linq-to-sql-and-linq-to-entities-roadmap.aspx

[3] Actually the second version of the Entity Framework, but numbered version 4 to be in sync with the version of the .NET framework that it is released with.

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 24^th 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 12^th April.

Jon Stace
29/03/2010

Cloud computing is the next step on from grid computing. It may build on grid computing, or it may have little or no centralised infrastructure. Currently, the architecture of the cloud consists of a number of reliable services delivered through data centres, utilising servers with differing levels of virtualisation. These services are accessible anywhere that has access to networking infrastructure. The Cloud appears as a single point of access for all of the users needs. Commercial Clouds typically offer service level agreements to their customers. A large amount of the foundation for Cloud has been provided from the Open Source community.

Customers using the Cloud are renting usage of the system, paying by usage or subscription. This reduces infrastructure cost and gives the customer much more flexibility in regards to expanding and contracting their IT needs.

There are currently a number of providers of Cloud Computing in the marketplace. This report will focus on the following providers:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
This is a part of the Amazon Web Services. EC2 is a web service which allows customers to create and manage different server instances.  S3 is a web service providing scalable data storage and Elastic MapReduce is a web service which provides data crunching/analysis services.

EC2 allows multiple AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) which can be Windows Server 2003, 2008 or any of the AMIs available from Amazon. Persistent data is stored in the EBS (Elastic Block Storage) which can be utilised across instances of the AMIs. The deployment procedure is very command line based, but this could potentially be automated to make life easier.

IBM Blue Cloud
An initiative which builds on their Tivoli industry management software by providing a Cloud to existing/new customers combined with extensive consulting / training to help customers successfully move to Cloud computing.

IBM is providing their Information Management, Websphere and Lotus products as Amazon AMIs for developers to work with.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is a new operating system, originally codenamed "Red Dog". The system consists of four "pillars"; storage; the "fabric controller", which is a management system for modelling, deploying and provisioning; VM / virtualised computation and a development environment. When Azure is deployed on one machine, multiple instances of it can be duplicated on the rest of the servers in the Cloud using virtualisation technology. This is achieved using simple Xcopy deployment.

Azure contains four layers:
Layer zero is Microsoft's Global Foundational Services (GFS). This is the lowest level of the software that interfaces directly with the servers.

Layer one is the base Azure operating system. This layer networks and controls the Windows Server 2008 machines which comprise the Microsoft-hosted cloud.

Layer two is a set of services which run on top of Azure. The initial set of services provided include Live Services, SQL Server Data Services (now known as SQL Services), .NET Services (formerly know as "Zurich"), Sharepoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services. Developers can use these services as required, or use the lower level Azure services to construct Cloud applications, or use the services from normal hosted web/Windows applications.

Layer three is defined as the Azure-hosted applications. Some of these are from Microsoft and include Sharepoint Online, Exchange Online and Dynamics CRM Online. Microsoft is also currently working on Forefront Online (a security product) and System Center Online (a management service of IT pros). It should be noted that the Sharepoint Online offering is very much more lightweight than MOSS 2007 and is missing a significant number of features. These Azure hosted applications will function in the same way that Salesforce does currently

When writing an application, the developer will still be using Visual Studio. The Azure libraries are downloaded and provide new cloud application types. Once a project is set up using the Azure web site, the application can be published to Azure using the standard Visual Studio publish function. When creating the project, the user is provided with UAT and Live URLs for the given project.

Sharepoint Services would allow us to add services for storing documents, provide InfoPath forms, control document security and provide complex search capabilities across the document storage. Dynamics CRM Services provide extensibility for Dynamics CRM. An application will be able to manipulate information stored on a Dynamics CRM 5 based system by using the CRM service. The use of these services would enable us to provide software which uses CRM and Sharepoint functionality in our own applications.

One of the differences with Azure is that you no longer use a SQL database for data storage. There are already tools appearing to migrate from SQL server databases to SDS storage. Microsoft provides two data storage methods; SQL Data Services (SDS) which is an entity-based storage service, and Azure Table Storage (ATS) which is a structured table based service. SDS offers more flexibility and security. There are some considerations with using these services. Being web-based, they are slower than SQL server so caching is more important. They do not support stored procedures, grouped queries and you cannot return partial records, ie. just an ID column from a query. It appears that Microsoft is pitching ATS for session storage and SDS for long-term data storage. Essentially this means that as long as an application only references SQL in the Data Access Layer, this should make the transition to Azure easier.

Azure uses familiar tools, Visual Studio, SQL Server, IIS7, etc. It provides a non-downtime upgrade facility by upgrading instances of an application one at a time. Deployment is managed by the Azure Portal, which allows Live and UAT environments to be scaled and configured and provides one-click deployment from UAT.

Azure uses a consumption based pricing system, although they have not released the tariffs at the current time.

One caveat of Azure is that the SDK is only supported on Vista and Server 2008.

SalesForce
As well as providing CRM, SalesForce has provided a platform called force.com, which provides a platform built on Eclipse to build applications mostly through customisation, with a purpose built IDE. Services provided by force.com are security, data, Integration, logic, user interface and application exchange. Force.com is licensed per user, application and month.

Citrix Cloud Center
The Citrix Cloud solution is provided using XenServer Cloud Edition, which is a virtual infrastructure solution. This manages any combination of Windows and Linux environments. Usage is metered rather than time based. Management is provided by Citrix Workflow Studio. This allows for burstable clouds. Citrix Workflow Studio integrates with Visual Studio to provide tools for developing and deploying activities (which are services) to the cloud. The system provided is very similar to the Amazon offering, but offers metered rather than time costing.

Zoho
Zoho offer a number of cloud-based web applications for doing common business tasks such as CRM, document management and project management. Zoho offer free utilisation of the products for low usage (ie. up to 3 users of the CRM product), and then charge per user per month.

Google Application Engine
Google offers a suite of APIs in Java/Python which provide the ability to host web application using Google's cloud space. Data storage is provided by an API. The google model provides quite generous free quotas before switching to the billed system. Payment is driven by usage rather than time.

Training
Using any of the Cloud systems would inevitably involve an element of retraining. The way that data storage, view state information and file management are handled in Cloud computing are very different to the model that we are used to. However, most of the offerings strive to make the transition as painless as possible and offer very visual tools for deployment and configuration.

Microsoft, as usual provide a lot of tutorials and online training for Azure. Out of all of the cloud providers, it provides the best resources. Amazon also provides reasonable resources, and its system seems to be starting to be used by other vendors.

In terms of the tools that we are familiar with, Azure is probably the most painless transition from our current development arena.

So what does this all mean?
The main advantage of Cloud based computing is that you no longer have to worry about scaling, load balancing or downtime of the application. Deployments should be much easier. There are some concerns around the limited ability to rollback applications, should they be found to be causing problems (for instance, Azure currently only allows you to swap the Live and UAT environments, so if you had a new UAT deployed, this would not work).

The removal of load balancing and scaling issues should result in time savings in-house, as many of the support tasks associated with a deployment would become the responsibility of the cloud provider. However, the different pricing structure would have to be evaluated against the current costs of hosting a system.

Where we envisage writing a system which has large amounts of data usage or many users of a system, Cloud computing looks to be a viable way to offer applications which can scale up or down discreetly as required. There are great possibilities to mix and match normal web applications which use Cloud based services for handling data which could be required by a large number of users in different locations. Alternatively, the whole application and data can be deployed to the Cloud.

The porting of existing system might prove to be problematic in regards to data migration. For instance in Azure there will be no migration implementation until Visual Studio 2010.

The security levels offered by most of the major systems available should meet the criteria that we need for secure data transmission and generally have lower attack vectors than hosted environments.

There have been mentions in the media about the reliability of cloud computing when compared with traditional hosted systems. The statistics on reliability show that cloud computing has been as reliable, and in some cases more reliable than hosted systems due to better redundancy for dealing with hardware failure, etc.

The only issue with going with a particular cloud provider is the cost of retraining and recoding involved in changing if the pricing structure becomes untenable. However, with the amount of competing products, it's likely that pricing will stay competitive.

• Earn up to £10,000 for the charity of your choice for every project we win.
• Earn a £20 donation to the DEC Haiti Earthquake appeal for each verified recommendation you make.

It couldn't be easier to earn money for your favourite charity and the Haiti Earthquake Appeal.

What you need to do:

Email refer@msmsoftware.com with the following information about the person you want to recommend to MSM:

• name
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• your chosen charity

And we'll take care of the rest - it's that simple.

What we'll do:

• We'll verify all the recommendation that you send us.
• Once we have verified your recommendation we'll donate £20 to the DEC Haiti Earthquake Appeal.  We'll do this for the first 100 verified referrals we receive.
• We'll also donate 2% of the first 12 months revenue, up to £10,000, to the charity of your choice, for each successful referral you give us.

Remember that you can make as many recommendations as you like. So don't delay as we can only pay the £20 donation to the Haiti Earthquake Appeal to the first 100 verified referrals.

Email refer@msmsoftware.com to recommend someone now.

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2. You will refer opportunities that you identify amongst your network of contacts to us for us to handle and we will have a normal commercial relationship with the client encompassing all normal terms and conditions including payment terms and so on. 
3. We are best placed to sell our service.  For this reason, we will handle the relationship with the client as soon as possible once the lead is identified. 
4. We reserve the right to decline any opportunity you offer us.
5. We will not interfere with or impinge on your commercial relationship with the client and will never "pinch" your clients. 
6. You will likewise not interfere with our commercial relationship with the client.
7. We will not pay for any lead if:
   a) We were already in touch with the client
   b) We were already aware of the lead
   c) We will only donate to your choice of charity if we win business from the client.
   d) However if your referral does not result in won business but the client subsequently contacts us within 12 months of your referral we will treat it as still arising from your referral however the client actually found us.
8. We will pay your nominated charity 2% of the revenue that we receive from each client you refer to us, for the first 12 months of our relationship with them.  This will not be limited to services we provide related to your recommendation, but will also apply to all services we provide to the client.  This will be calculated on a net invoice value basis at the end of the 12 months.  We will donate the money to your nominated charity once we receive payment from the client. 
9. All work we undertake will be subject to our terms and conditions to be set out in contract(s) from time to time with the clients.  You will not have liability for our work.
10. You agree that your name may be used by us when contacting the client and in any marketing or publicity material.  We may also separately seek your co-operation for publicity activity.
11. We both agree not to divulge to any third party any of our commercially confidential information or that of any client or potential client.

This award represents the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies and is only given to companies with the closest working relationships with Microsoft.

The criteria for gaining this award are tough but worthwhile as it enables us to give our customers improved delivery quality and reduce project risk.

Here are just some of the reasons why it's better to work with MSM - a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner:

• We have demonstrated our expertise. All our developers have either achieved or are working towards becoming Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCPs).  This means that they have a demonstrated level of technical expertise and the proven ability to deliver solutions featuring Microsoft products. MCPs must pass certification exams developed by Microsoft.
• We have a broad-range of experience. Our developers have technical expertise including data management, office automation, e-commerce, collaboration, business intelligence, and other leading edge disciplines.
• We have direct support from Microsoft. To ensure minimal disruption we get 24 x 7 support from Microsoft for your project.
• We offer a real world perspective to your technology strategies. We have experience gained through conducting similar projects since 1998.

We are already planning further improvements to ensure that we continue to deliver the highest quality service and support to our customers throughout 2010.

As part of MSM Software's annual customer satisfaction survey, a donation of £500 to a charity of the winner's choice was used to incentivise participation. Andy's company, Kbase Connect Ltd, was drawn from the hat at random.

Andy had no hesitation is selecting St. Peter's Hospice and commented, "I'm very pleased to have been given the opportunity, through MSM, to donate this money to St Peter's Hospice and in doing so give something back to the organisation which gave so much support to my father.

Picture: Left to right: Andy Strange of Kbase Connect Ltd, Thomas Coles, MD of MSM and Vanessa Hull of St. Peters Hospice.

"I especially want to thank Vanessa, who not only provided nursing support during Dad's final months, which enabled him to remain at home, but also helped him deal with day-to-day tasks like local authority paperwork. I feel that we will never be able to thank Vanessa and her colleagues at St Peter's Hospice enough but I hope this donation goes some way towards expressing our gratitude for their warmth, compassion and unwavering dedication during a very difficult time."

It's wonderful to be in a position to help make a small yet significant contribution to such a worthwhile local cause. Andy is proof of the difference St. Peter's Hospice makes to hundreds of families. Being able to support the charity to do this for others is definitely good for the soul and we fully intend to provide this opportunity to our customers again next year.

Google has ingeniously used traditional techniques to provide this, which include active server pages and client scripting. The quality of the various user interfaces is quite stunning. Furthermore, Google has ensured that these applications are compatible with the plethora of different browsers and platforms currently in use. However, this all comes at a price, as Google invests millions of dollars into its software development.

This then brings us to the question of 'Is there a way to create these rich applications within a more modest budget?' The answer is 'Yes' and one of the technologies that allows us to do this is Silverlight from Microsoft. In brief, Silverlight allows us to create web applications using methods and practices similar to those that we already employ for the desktop applications (i.e. Windows) that we create. However, the inherent technical challenges found in the traditional methods are not present. Furthermore, since the application runs in a browser plug-in, the issues over compatibility with different platforms and their browsers is not present. These two advantages remove many of the technical challenges when producing high quality web applications. They allow us to concentrate on the real content of the application to deliver real tangible benefits to our customers and their businesses.

Silverlight's flexibility also bridges the gap between web and desktop software, enabling applications to easily be started from the browser and on to the Windows Start Menu.  Some applications may even be used when offline.

By using Silverlight our developers can uniquely use their current .Net Development knowledge, and also use the C# language. This familiarity ensures that our developers produce first class code that continuously exceeds our customers' expectations, on time and on budget.