Microsoft’s developer love-in Tech.Ed kicked off with a bang on Wednesday with MC Jonathan Biggins in a racing Speedo outfit (don’t visualize) and a troop of Parkour artists jumping and running around the stage. The 3500 attendees where then introduced to the big Microsoft theme this year by the General Manger of Live Mesh, Amit Mital.
Live Mesh introduces Microsoft’s take on cloud storage services. Anybody with a Live account will get 5gb of online storage. A site on the web or plug-in installed on a PC, mobile and other devices will create a shared environment that allows the seamless transfer of files between devices and also with friends and family. The product is now in Community Technology Release, which means we are free to play but not free to complain. Another cloud initiative supplies hosted database services in a cloud, potentially giving online initiatives with a new way to virtually host and scale their back-ends.
The bigger news from many of the other 200 sessions is more subtle Microsoft is opening up access to third parties to its services in a big way and is encouraging us all to use these “Software + Services” as they call them. For example Live Mesh, as well as supplying a file sharing integration with your PC, supplies a standards based web service that allows content to be pushed into any shared space. Microsoft is also touting its love of all things open source, with sessions on running open source web frameworks on Microsoft¹s web servers. As one of the presenters noted, only two years ago discussing such things at a Microsoft convention would have been considered sacrilegious.
Web 2.0 mashups are also in abundance, with Windows Live identities used as a login to third party sites, Windows Messenger IM launched from web pages and virtual earth supplying maps. Microsoft has its own spin on this, opting for Silverlight and its own ASP based technologies over AJAX while still supporting AJAX for those that “insist”.
Silverlight has seen packed sessions, showing off just how designer and developer friendly it is. Here lies Microsoft¹s real battle in the online media space not the developers, who are the same ASP.NET people interactive agencies already employ and who are already sold, but the creative and ad people who know and love all things Adobe, and who are not at Tech-Ed if a show of hands was any indication.
Meanwhile, the only Microsoft “Surface” computer outside the USA is making a showing in Sydney during Tech-Ed 2008 to the obvious delight of the crowds. This extension of Microsoft Vista allows interaction by touch in much the way that Apple does, but with the added twist of allowing many people to participate at once on a screen much like a table top video game console from the 1980’s. Media Agency Amnesia is part of the show, with Amnesia developed demo apps decorating the tactile top of the device. Unique features are the ability to read codes on the bottom of physical objects that are placed on the “Surface”, such as the passes used by delegates at conferences or playing cards. The applications for this kiosk on steroids seem to be vast, with casinos in the USA amongst the first cabs off the rank to utilize the $10,000 system commercially.
