Azure and Silverlight 4 Highlighted at PDC '09

Final announcements and details of the Windows Azure platform, which will become a commercial offering in Jan. 2010, were provided at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Nov. 2009. A beta of Silverlight 4 was released, with the announcement that the next version of the rich Internet application (RIA) platform will focus on Web media, business applications, and out-of-browser scenarios. Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 betas were also launched at PDC, along with betas and roadmaps of other enterprise and developer technologies. The new software and information should help organizations and developers evaluate and plan for future deployments and implementations.

Azure Goes Commercial

The Windows Azure platform, Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, which allows developers to deploy applications and to store data in Microsoft’s data centers, has been offered in several community technology previews (CTPs) since it was announced a year ago at PDC ’08. As promised, the Azure services will become commercial offerings for production deployment in Jan. 2010, despite having lost some of their original functionality over the past year. Azure will consist of several technologies: Windows Azure (application deployment and simple storage), SQL Azure (relational database with T-SQL support), AppFabric Service Bus (application connectivity across domain boundaries), and AppFabric Access Control (authentication and authorization federation across applications). (The two AppFabric technologies were called .NET Services prior to PDC ’09.) The Live and workflow services that were originally announced with Azure have been removed for this release. Azure could reduce the costs of deploying and maintaining applications by eliminating the IT overhead required with an on-premises solution or by providing temporary additional capacity for applications with periodic peaks in usage.