Wednesday night was our “free night” to explore the Gold Coast, that will have to be it’s own blog post, on a private web server, that’s not actually connected to any network…

Thursday had this in store for me:

COS230 – Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Overview

What it is, is like:

• Service Bus.
• Net Event Binding
• Direct Connectivity
• Just like WCF bindings

Current customers are using AppFabric to achieve:

• Service Remoting – extend soa to cloud eg large mobile workforce.
• Eventing (pub sub).
• Protocol Tunelling.

What’s coming in the future

• Less linked to WCF.
• Additional service bus protocols.
• Large scale/quantity of device connectivity.
• Service integration.

WEB204 – Internet Explorer 9 and HTML5 for Developers

Tatham Oddie gave a great overview of CSS 3 and JavaScript features and how they relate to Internet Explorer 9’s capabilities in particular as part of HTML 5 compliance.

Takeaways:

• The power of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) will improve what can be displayed in HTML without the need for browser plugins
• CSS 3 has a lot of power to help achieve dynamic styling through properties like ‘max-width’.
• User-Agent info on IE 9 is improved (less cluttered).
• IE 9 ACID 3 tests are on par with the other browsers now.

DEV426 – The Art and Engineering of Supple Enterprise Applications

Another of the extensive thought required before blogging presentations. Stay tuned for a separate post link.

COS310 – Location-Enabling the Cloud – Spatial Data Support in SQL Azure

Takeaways (learnt from working with spatial data):

• The web is not your development environment, develop locally…
• Then deploy to the web.
• Queries should not return large quantities of data.
• Spatial indexes should be created on unpopultated base tables
• The SQL CLR isn’t supported in SQL Azure.

DEVIL302 – Introduction to Managed Extensibility Framework

Instructor lead lab:

SEC308 – How do you secure a cloud?

This session turned out to be much broader discussion of security concepts in terms of risk management and general, I went in with expectations of a technical in depth security discussion in terms of software solutions. Reflecting on this, that may have been less than desired, as it would just be repeating known security techniques used everywhere, cryptography, SSL, ect. Instead this was a presentation about how Microsoft delivers/hosts/manages it’s cloud data centres.

Takeaways

• Security is only risk management (in that all IT solutions have security considerations).
• Microsoft goes to great lengths for physical security of their data centres.
• Microsoft also has an extensive procedure for secure destruction of hardware at the end of its life.
• The data centres are quite an interesting piece of server configuration; setup, deployment, cooling methods.
• Microsoft is investigating running servers at ever increasing temperatures to study mean-time-to-failure.