Without Apps, there’d be Gaps – Blogging from PDC2008

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I’m here at PDC 2008 (doing a book signing today of my ‘Introducing Silverlight 2’ book, wink wink), and will try to do some blogging / thought streams live from the keynotes.

Day 1 keynote is Ray Ozzie, talking about his pre-Microsoft background. One of the things that impressed him was the fact that we at MS didn’t just build platforms, but we built apps ourselves that validate the platform. To paraphrase – he felt that without apps to validate the platform, there’d be gaps in that platform.

He’s also discussing cloud and service oriented computing – this is something particularly exciting to me, as IMHO cloud computing != thin client. The most effective system is one which blends service orientation, with smart clients build in technologies such as Silverlight, WPF and Windows 7.

Now is the time to think service orientation, as reach is expanding, and IT is being externalized.

The bottom line is that for global web reach, the fundamental architecture of your IT infrastructure is vastly different – this PDC will outline many of the technologies that will allow you as a developer, architect, business decision maker, IT architect, project manager, evangelist, and every other job role to understand how you can efficiently build, deploy, maintain, monitor and keep these systems up to date across peak conditions, failures etc. We’ve baked knowledge, technology and skill from our experience running XBox Live, Office Help, MSN and thousands more services into products and repeatable processes that you can use.

There are many tiers. The first is your PC, and it has a scale of 1. It has to have a great and reliable UX.

The next tier is the Enterprise. The scale is in the size of your enterprise (thousands).

The next tier is the Web. The scale of this tier is in the billions. It needs to rely on a broad set of services, designed for scale, and infinite capacity across the globe.

We’ve worked on a misison that utilizes our expertise to create a platform that scales across these tiers.

 

 

[More updates soon]

 

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