Introducing AppFabric

AppFabric is a new feature from Microsoft that has recently been released in Beta format. It allows devs to write cloud apps as if they were working on the desktop. AppFabric is an app server that runs in the cloud. It can do thing like providing caching services.

AppFabric is a part of Azure. As you may know, Azure is Microsoft's entry into the cloud services arena. Azure is also in beta. It provides an entire platform for developers. You know this is no joke as Amazon has released an SDK for its EC2 cloud service that targets .NET development.

Silverlight 3

Microsoft has released Silverlight 3. This is a technology for web presentation. Silverlight has come a long way since its inception. First it melded HTML and video in version 1. Then it included .NET in version 2.

Version 3 brings many enhancements. You have 3D graphics as well as shading. There is support for themed apps. You have support for SEO.

The goal is to bring desktop style apps to the web. You need to know your XAML to work with this tech. If you want to put video on the web and do it well, you need Silverlight 3. And it will get taken to an even higher level with Silverlight 4.

Business Productivity Online Suite

Do you know what BPOS stands for? It is Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite. This is their software as a service offering.

BPOS has Exchange, SharePoint, and Live Meeting. The cost is $10/month/seat. Users get 25GB of e-mail space.

Competitors include Novell GroupWise and Google Apps. I don't know whether $120 a year is a good deal for such a service. It seems a bit high. Both my company and main customer have workstation based Microsoft Office. Their license fees are probably $120 per person until we upgrade.

Visual Studio Mono Tools

Novell has announced a commercial add-on to Visual Studio called Mono Tools. It allows you to develop applications for non-Windows platforms using Visual Studio. For example you can target the Linux operating system.

Recall that Mono is an open source implementation of .NET for non-Windows platforms. It implements the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and C#. There will be some scenarios where Mono does not accurately mimic the .NET behavior. The Mono Tools for Visual Studio help you deal with some of these differences.

There are three versions of Mono Tools: (1) Professional, (2) Enterprise, and (3) Ultimate. The cost ranges anywhere from $100 to $2500. Although these are not Microsoft tools per se. Mono is a high visibility project. So I thought I would cover the Mono Tools here today.

Virtual Server Ownage

Info Week magazine did an article on infrastructure as a service. You know. This is where you rent out CPU processing power. The sad part of the story was that less than 10% of the people surveyed were using Microsoft's Virtual Server.

The majority of respondents use either VMware or Xen hypervisor. I guess VMware beat the rest of the industry to market. And the Xen hypervisor gets zen points for being open source. Even if Microsoft provides a free alternative, it is hard to get market share.

Renting CPU power is cheap. The article I read said you could get time rented for as little as 1.5 cents/hour/CPU. Delicious. People like this renting to do web hosting, testing, and development. There are still concerns over security when you apps run on somebody else's box in the cloud. However I wonder how Microsoft can get more people to use Virtual Server. Why do they need to do? Buy VMware?

Presenting ReSharper 4.5

This month's Visual Studio Magazine presented products awards. There was one product that got user and editor awards. It was ReSharper 4.5 by JetBrains. I had never heard about this tool before. That was strange so I did some research.

The tool is a plug-in to Visual Studio. It does error highlighting (analyzes your code without compiling to determine errors). It also has all kinds of code refactoring options. ReSharper assists with unit tests. And it does formatting as well as code generation. This thing is multi purpose.

That's when I found out why I was in the dark about ReSharper. It works with languages such as C#, XML, and XAML. I guess it is a .NET type of thing. This thing does not support C++. And since I specialize in C++, I would not be using or really know much about the tool.

ReSharper has a number of price points based on how you use it. A personal copy costs $199, while the business version goes for $349. An academic license will run you $49. I was disappointed that there was no free academic version. Us starving college students don't have a lot of cash. The goal of this tool is to produce higher quality code. Maybe if I get more into C# I will give it a try.

The FCC

When my cell phone company gave me the run around, I got tired of dealing with them and reported them to the FCC. That got some action. It also helped that I sent a letter to the company's CEO.

It is bad business to be at odds with the FCC. For Microsoft, it helps if the FCC has their sights aimed at other companies that are behaving badly.

This blog post excerpt from Jason Calcanis, reprinted with permission here, is a rant against the machine known as Apple Corporation.

Apple took Google’s innovative and absurdly priced phone offering, Google Voice, out of the App Store and is currently being investigated by the FCC for this action. This point is similar to the browser issue, in that Apple wants to own almost every extension of the iPhone platform. How long before Apple decides to ban a Twitter client in favor of an Apple Twitter-like product? Seems crazy, I know, but by following Apple’s logic you should not be able to use Firefox or Google Chrome on your desktop.

Simple solution and opportunity: Let people have three or four phone services coming in to their iPhones and perhaps charge a modest licensing fee for those types of service. Or, just simply stop being jerks and let the free market decide how to use the data services they’ve BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. That’s the joke of this: you’re paying for the data services that Apple is blocking. You pay for the bandwidth and Apple doesn’t let you use it because, you know, they know better than you how you should consume your data minutes.