rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for Web 2.0
August 21, 2010 at 5:31 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing, Web 2.0
PDC10 is coming up in late October. I signed up for it knowing it was Azure-centric, but I am glad to see that there is also a .NET track. I hope this will include non-Azure server side technologies (e.g., EF, AppFabric for Windows Server and the like). Of course these other pieces all have their place (or counterparts) in Azure, but I don’t think I’ll be using Azure directly over the next year.
PDC’s are quite valuable to attend (access to Microsoft product teams, exposure to their roadmap, opportunity for light-bulb” moments, etc). That said, I may decide not to go after the session list is released – a simple balancing of priorities.
Anyway, I’ll likely keep my registration – I would actually love it if Microsoft could change my plans about Azure this October.
Are you going? Or not? If so, please share your reasons.
Tags: .NET, Microsoft, PDC, PDC10
November 18, 2009 at 4:05 pm · Filed under .NET, Attention, Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
Lots of great new stuff in today’s beta. A few things that stand out:
- Hosting HTML
- Context menus
- WCF and REST enhancements
- Support for RIA Services
- Drag & Drop
- Running out of sandbox for trusted apps
- Sharing components between .NET 4 and SL 4
Lot of other things too. I’m excited to start using this. Also a shout out to Tim Heuer – he has helped me on a few things before and I got a chance to meet him today.
Those of you following NewsGang will know why I am very excited about these Silverlight developments.
Tags: .NET4.0, NewsGang, PDC09, PDC2009, Silverlight
November 17, 2009 at 6:31 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing, Web 2.0
At last year’s PDC, I posted
It is the openness of this platform, the ability of developers to mix and match the different components, and to do it between the cloud and in-premises solutions that makes this such a winner.
This last point is an important one. Microsoft is in a unique position to help enterprise IT bridge to the cloud. While I don’t think Amazon and Google will cede that market to Microsoft, their current offerings aren’t a natural fit.
The offering was rich then, but since then Microsoft has continued to push these offerings forward dramatically.
At the time, my biggest concerns were the one-size-fits-all approach to their provisioning model and their lack of full trust (two things that could make it harder to deploy the Digipede Network onto Azure). Today those issues have been taken off the table and help support many more use cases, opening up Azure even more to non-Microsoft technologies and fortifying the extremely important IT bridge.
So what are the improvements in openness?
Allowing full trust opens up the door to, well anything. Unmanaged code, PHP, MySQL, Java, TomCat, etc. can all run on Azure. Matt Mullenweg of Automattic demonstrated a WordPress instance running that way. Kind of anti-climactic, because it would have been a big deal if wordpress.com was moving to Azure. Simply running a WordPress instance isn’t really that interesting.
Custom VM images are also coming to Azure which will make it much easier to put whatever you want on a VM and deploy it efficiently.
For IT?
Too many items here to enumerate. SQL Azure integrating into SSMS; Azure integrating into MOM; SQL synchronizing with cloud instances; (this list really does go on and on . . .).
Another important part of this IT bridge? Not Microsoft’s new App Server, AppFabric. Though I am excited about this – it is something that has been missing from the Microsoft stack – the key point here is that it runs on premises and in Azure.
Conclusion?
These new features in Azure push Microsoft out even further than the other cloud vendors. No one else has the depth and breadth in tool support and service offerings. No one else is innovating so quickly on so many parallel fronts.
Will Amazon and Google cede the space? Of course not, but I think they’ll need to reposition their cloud brands.
Tags: AppFabric, Azure, PDC09, PDC2008, PDC2009
October 9, 2009 at 9:59 am · Filed under Web 2.0
I control my online identity as much as I can. I don’t like using email addresses / identities that are controlled by a vendor. Like phone # portability, this allows me to switch vendors when I want without (much) disruption. That is the main reason I host my blog and email on my own domain. I used to maintain my own servers to do that (literally in-house). Then I moved them to a hosting company. Then I moved email to Google Apps for Domains (GAFD).
GAFD is pretty cool. It allows you to put many services (i.e., mail, calendar, docs, sites, chat) behind your own domain. Other Google services don’t exactly fit this model, and so they aren’t supported. For example while App Engine does allow you to use your own domain, you probably don’t need to host your App Engine development portal from within your domain. Not too big a deal.
But for the services that use your contact list (e.g., Voice, Wave, and Reader), I really don’t want to use my GMail address and certainly not the contacts list I have there.
I am at a loss to understand why Google doesn’t have a corporate policy that products must support GAFD. Isn’t GAFD an important part of Google’s business model? Obviously not as important as trying to sell us things we don’t want, but certainly strategic against Microsoft.
What gives?
Tags: GAFD, GMail, Google
August 27, 2009 at 8:44 am · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
It will (likely) be here http://www.building43.com/realtime/. While I won’t be on the show, something I have been working on should surface there.
That is as much of a pre-announcement as I can make . . . vague and conditional as it is.
Tags: Attention, GestureBank, GillmorGang
May 16, 2009 at 7:22 pm · Filed under Web 2.0
I will be attending the Internet Identity Workshop #8 this coming week (http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com for more info).
It runs Monday, May 18th through Wednesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
I’m a bit overbooked this week. The song remains the same. I’ll be there as much as I can and at the dinner Monday night at the Tied House.
If you want to meet up, contact me at robert at rwandering dot net or use the form at =rwandering.
Tags: Identity, IIW, IIW2009A, IIW8, OpenID, XRI
April 13, 2009 at 9:14 am · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
I use speech recognition a great deal – and I recently switched to Windows Speech Recognition on Vista. And I’ve been using Chrome exclusively for Google Apps, because I think it offers superior performance for JavaScript apps.
Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t support WSR. According to Rob Chambers this would be easy for Google to do, and I suspect it is just an oversight on their part (both in terms of making their software more accessible as well as following Windows best practices).
Google: when are you going to put the effort into this? The Chrome 2.0 Beta doesn’t do it either.
Rob Chambers: how easy is this really? You also said that Firefox does support WSR – maybe it does, but not in Google Docs.
So now, I’m using IE8. Google Docs with WSR works great there.
Tags: Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, IE8, Microsoft, WSR
March 19, 2009 at 1:06 pm · Filed under .NET, Web 2.0
While the changes coming to SQL Data Services (SDS) are not exactly news, I wanted to weigh in on it.
I was familiar with SSDS before I knew anything about Red Dog Storage Azure Storage. When I found out about the latter, my initial concern was that Microsoft would confuse developers by offering two overlapping services. Such overlap isn’t too surprising considering that these two projects came out of competing parts of Microsoft. At the time, there was a pretty consistent message that SDS would someday support relational operations, but to me that meant they should hold off on SDS until that day came.
Microsoft often offers multiple technologies to solve specific problems — often this is a result of legacy technologies — in this case it seemed a shame to start off with such overlap.
Because of all this, I am very happy to see this clear differentiation between the Azure and SDS services. This is a good decision for Microsoft, Microsoft developers, and given the roadmap for SDS, an excellent decision for Microsoft’s enterprise customers.
Tags: Azure, Microsoft, RDBMS, SDS, SSDS
February 18, 2009 at 12:56 pm · Filed under Attention, Web 2.0
Yesterday I posted about the change in Facebook’s TOS. I thought they might back down, but I didn’t think it would be this fast.
The old terms are back in effect: delete your account and so goes your data.
A minor success for users everywhere – even those who don’t think this stuff matters.
Tags: Attention, Facebook, GestureBank
February 17, 2009 at 6:58 pm · Filed under Attention, Web 2.0
Plenty of people are up in arms about the recent Facebook TOS change.
The change? Before Facebook relinquished their rights to your data if you deleted your account. Now they don’t.
I don’t have a problem with this new policy. I do have a problem with the new part.
Of course, I’m not arguing whether Facebook can legally make this change, but it does violate their user contract. I’m not talking about a legal TOS, but of an understanding with their users. What is the problem?
- Facebook has just asserted ownership to something that they didn’t claim ownership to before. And this isn’t future data, this is past data. Data you already contributed to Facebook with an understanding that they wouldn’t keep it.
This is another example of what I call the user-beware contract – where the TOS can change at any time without notification.
So, what is the user-aware way to make such a change?
- Maintain their old policy for data in Facebook before the change. This bifurcates user data between before and after the policy. Delete your account? Old data goes away, new data does not.
OK, but this is still a user-beware contract. What else should they do?
- Require users to opt-in to the new policy. If they opt out, either delete them or let them continue the old policy.
I’m sure Facebookians (and any one hosting a large service) is rolling their eyes at this point. But just because being user-aware is inconvenient doesn’t make it infeasible.
And a shout out to Ned Sykes for prompting this post: no, I’m not concerned about Facebook stealing my tweets, but as a voice in user rights, I am interested in promoting TOS that are pro user.
BTW: The user-beware/user-aware terms are defined in my post User Contracts – Part II: User Beware.
Tags: Attention, GestureBank
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