Having just returned from PDC in LA, here are my highlights from the week.
Windows Azure - this is the OS for the cloud. Microsoft have learnt from their experiences and created a secure, scalable platform for developing and deploying your web applications.
.Net Services - Are a set of services hosted in the cloud to help you to develop cloud based or cloud aware applications. .Net services consists of 3 main components: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow. Access control uses standards based identity systems including LiveId to help to secure your cloud applications. Whether the service is hosted behind your fire wall or in the cloud, the service bus allows you to connect your applications and services together across the internet. Workflow services is a cloud based host for your WF workflows and includes a set of management tools and api
OSLO - A platform for model driven development and consists of a modelling language called M; A tool for interacting with models called Quadrant; and a Repository which is a SQL server based database for storing and sharing models. M is used to define the domain specific data model, create a grammar for entering data and create a way of visualising the data.
Dublin - this is the codename for Microsoft's Application server. Dublin is a robust and scalable host for WF and WCF applications and will be used to support the OSLO modelling technologies.
Visual Studio 10 - There are some nice cool features in VS10 including impact analysis, historical debugging and better test management. Impact analysis looks at the code that has been changed and identifies the unit tests that are affected by the changes , allowing them to be run easily. Historical debugging allows debugging to be carried out after a fault has occurred and rewind backwards and see the state of the system rather than stepping forward through the system. Some issues are difficult to reproduce or step through without affecting the system. Having the ability to replay the sequence after the fault has occurred and interrogate the data will help the developers to fix problems more efficiently. Historical debugging can be tied into better test management by allowing the testers to run through their test scenarios and when a fault occurs, mark the test as a failure and then send the whole test information including a video (if selected) and the historical debug information through to the developer to fix. This will also help to eliminate the faults that can not be reproduced in the development environment.
Windows 7 - Another version of the windows operating system that should use less memory and be faster than Vista. In addition there will be multi desktop support in Remote desktop and on the fly virtual hard drive support which can then become bootable if required and better home networking.