Developer's Shelf: PDC 2008

Keynote by Ray Ozzie, Amitava Srivastava, Bob Muglia

Windows Azure - Microsoft's Cloud Computing. These are services run in Microsoft Data Centers i.e. the cloud.

High level feature set:

Scalable Hosting, virtualized by Hyper-V
Security - code access, IP Filters, Hyper-V isolation.
OS - to manage global data centers, separates the app from underlying OS,
Fabric controller - enables scaling applications seamlessly, as demand rises and falls. Manages resources and services, maintain health of services, deployment, interfaces, configuration settings, channels and endpoints, roles and groups
High Availability - partitions, replication, caching, automatic load balancing
Desktop Development Environment - integrated with Visual Studio 2008, managed and native code, on-demand compute and storage to host.
Development with the Cloud:

VS Cloud Templates and Cloud SDK
Code
Debug and Test Offline with cloud on the desktop
Publish
Azure Services Developer Portal to manage apps on cloud
The BlueHoo application demo

VS and C# - no new tools
easy deployment and scalability

Open Platform

The services breakup within Windows Azure are as follows:

SQL Services - Data services on the cloud. Database, Reporting, Data Sync, Data Mining/Analysis, Reference Data
.NET services - WCF Services, Federated Identity Services, Microsoft Services Connector via Microsoft Federated Services Gateway
Live Services
Dynamics CRM Services
Sharepoint Services

Microsoft Online Services + Azure (by Dave Thompson)

Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online, Live Meeting, Dynamics CRM Online
Now available on the cloud

Download Azure CTP, SDKs, services at http://www.azure.com/. Preview will be free and commercial pricing at a later date will be competitive with the market standards.

Other stuff