mca blog

i spent the final afternoon of PDC2008 in sessions on Azure. the first, "Designing your Application to Scale" covered the basics of how Microsoft is building and exposing the "Cloud OS" for developers and users. big take away for me was to start thinking of Azure in three key parts: the data layer (SQL Data Services); the workflow layer (.NET Services), and the communication bus (Live Framework). it's clear that much of this is very fresh. likely many of the idioms described this week will change or die. new stuff will appear. but i'm impressed with the very base-level work being done here. it looks like lots of attention to detail at the low levels of the environment. it remains to be seen if this detail continues to bubble up to the front-facing parts of the system and whether the whole "Cloud OS" model pays off for Microsoft. IMO, it's too early to tell.

the second session i attended covered .NET Services and how to design and implement workflow services using the "cloud." very interesting. they have taken the existing WF model and tweaked it to take advantage of new opportunities in the cloud. for example two of the new actions supported are HttpSend and HttpReceive. that means we can craft workflows that send and receive messages via HTTP - very cool. big fly in the ointment here? only GET and POST are supported - no PUT, DELETE, HEAD. again, i'm amazed that folks are Microsoft continue to stumble at this fundamental level. why limit HTTP support? it makes no sense. and it limits .NET Services utility.

but, as i say, it's quite early in the cycle. there are lots of opportunities to change and improve the offerings. and i'm looking forward to seeing how things morph over the coming weeks, months, and - i suspect - years.