LiveSide - News blog : Azure

The Windows Live Wave 4 rumor mill

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:33:00 GMT

Microsoft is keeping very quiet about the upcoming release of Windows Live Wave 4, and it’s driving us crazy. Obviously we were hoping for a release to coincide with the launch of Windows 7, but that deadline has come and gone. We’re hearing now that Microsoft is keeping the release dates very close to the vest, even within Microsoft, but that the release dates have been changing. Remember back when Windows Live first started, and those cheeky kids at Red West were going to teach Windows how to ship every 2 months? Well now Windows Live has moved out of Red West, and they haven’t shipped anything of consequence in over a year. Well we can hope for a nice big blockbuster new version that will make it all worthwhile, but this wait is killing us.

So while we wait for someone to push Windows Live out the door, we still have wild rumors, Twitter posts, and some sneak peeks to fall back on. Let’s take a look at what might be coming:

Messenger:

Will this be the release that finally gets tabbed conversations? A commenter on LiveSino.net claims to have seen just that:

# November 2009 on Tuesday, February 10: 14 pm
I have used M1 version, there is already a tab chat features

Now we’ve seen hints about tabs in previous versions, as the LiveSino post points out, so we’re not getting our hopes up. Tabbed chatting has to be the #1 feature request for Messenger, though, so we’ll hold out hope.

Windows Live Writer:

News of Writer’s demise may be exaggerated, at least in the short term. One Twitter user was quite impressed with what he saw:

The new internal Windows Live build is so awesome that I skipped a beat as I launched Writer.

Documents and Devices:

We told you before about a couple of new tabs we spotted, and it looks like Wave 4 will at least begin to bring Live Mesh and Office Web Apps more firmly into the Windows Live experience.

We’re not expecting to see a full Live Mesh experience in Windows Live this release, but at least some integration is coming

SkyDrive, “Flix”, and a return (of sorts) of Soapbox?

Ok this one is from the TOTALLY WILD RUMOR department, but as it sits right with where we think Windows Live should be heading with user-generated video, we’ll go ahead and leave you with this to mull over:

"Flix" is not intended to compete with YouTube. Will offer granular sharing controls a la WL Photos. Meant for family-sharing etc. Will be powered by Silverlight, and surfaced under the Windows Live Photos brand, WLMM plugin coming soon.
CSP is @Skydrive for all this of course and Skydrive is now managed over a Azure fabric controller. The roadmap right now apparently, is not to officially increase the 25GB cap, but up the per-file upload limit to 100 MB over the web & WLPG, 500 MB through WLMM, while LOE will use delta-sync. When the average usage level goes above a certain percentage of 25GB, Microsoft will bump it up to 50 GB, which is already provisioned but not officially marketed. And yes, ever-increasing storage is free.

Now we checked, and not only is Flix a trademarked name for computer video software, but Google bought the company that owns the trademark, so we doubt even if there is a grain of truth to this that we’ll be seeing the Flix name anytime soon. That doesn’t rule out Flix as a code name, of course. We’re planning on hearing a lot more about Azure at PDC in a couple of weeks, and will be snooping around for how Windows Live and Azure fit together. We’re being told there won’t be much Windows Live news, but you never know (and hey it’s a week in LA for a sun-starved Seattleite!).

Hopefully we’ll have a bit more than wild rumors and speculation soon. In the meantime, have you heard anything new about Wave 4?

Silverlight Streaming to be discontinued: new Azure service coming

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:45:00 GMT

In a move that should surprise no one (in case you were wondering why we didn’t use Silverlight Streaming to host video after Soapbox closed), Silverlight Streaming, a Windows Live beta service for hosting Silverlight audio and video content, is being discontinued. A blog post today on the Silverlight Streaming blog (first post since March), summarizes the changes:

Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live Beta is being discontinued and will eventually be taken down

A new Windows® Azure-based hosting and delivery service will be launched by the end of 2009, though this is not a direct replacement for Silverlight Streaming and will have costs associated with its use

You can access, retrieve and if desired remove your content that is currently hosted on Silverlight Streaming by following the instructions below

Key dates and information about the availability of the new Windows Azure functionality, and when the existing Silverlight Streaming beta service will be taken down, will be communicated in the coming weeks

More details on how to pull any content you may have off the service are detailed in the post.

We’re expecting to hear more about Live Services in general, and now this new Azure service in particular at PDC, which is only a month away now. Just for posterity, here’s the description of Silverlight Streaming from the website:

Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications. The service offers web designers and developers a free (*) and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows™ and Mac. Combined with the ability to create content with Microsoft® Expression and other 3rd party tools, web designers and content publishers wishing to integrate Silverlight applications into their online properties can enjoy complete control of the end user experience.

And yes we have some content to pull off SLS. Isn’t supporting Windows Live beta services fun?

Publish Your Photosynth To Facebook

Sunshine — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:10:58 GMT

So you got good at creating Photosynths. To share you can send the link to your friends or embed it into your blog but now there is one more: MySynth, a new Facebook app that publishes Photosynths right onto your Facebook profile page.

After you’ve added the application you can go ahead to the MySynth application page and fill out the form.

Title: the name you wish to give the Synth.
Source URL: the URL of the Synth taken from the address bar or from the embed code of the synth.
Thumbnail Image URL: the URl of the thumbnail.
This is not so obvious. Where do you find the thumbnail and its URL? You can find this by going to the user’s collection of Synths, right click the thumbnail of the Synth you wish to use and choose properties. Copy that URL.
Thumbnail Description: a short description that will be shown next to the thumbnail on publishing
Long description: will be displayed in the Synth view.
Location: where the Synth is taken.
More info URL: URL for linking to a page with more info on the URL. Example: website of the owner. this will be shown at the end of the long description.

Now make sure the checkboxes you want are checked and grant permission for Feed Publishing by clicking the link beside that checkbox, if you want it to be published to the feed. Done, click Add Synth.

Should you wish to edit or remove the Synth later, just go to the application page and click on the View/Edit Synths tab. This app can also publish Synths of others to your Facebook page if you want to share a nice one you saw.

MySynth is created by Speaktech and uses the latest cloud service features in Microsoft Azure for storage.

Source: Publish Your Photosynth to Facebook - Bing Maps Blog - Bing Community

Seadragon.com – Convert Any Image On The Web Into A Deep Zoom Image!

Sunshine — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:35:09 GMT

Ever wanted a deep zoom image of a huge image already uploaded to the web? Now you can. The Seadragon team in Live Labs has released a service that lets you easily turn those pictures into nice zoomable UIs: Seadragon. Seadragon is built on Azure and gives you the following benefits:

Images always load up really fast, no matter how big the image is
You can zoom and pan smoothly to every detail of the image

Furthermore it is so smart it even determines if it is being watched on a computer/device with Silverlight installed or not because it uses parts of Seadragon AJAX for its rendering. If no Silverlight is found it will default to using AJAX.

The usage is simple, you just type in the URL to the image and it will be converted for you. Next you can share the result on Delicious, Digg, Facebook or Twitter. Want to embed or just need the URL to the image, the embed code and URL is also given after completion of the conversion.

Now this is a very nice service for single images. If you want to make complete albums there is still DeepZoomPix (hosting, until December 31st 2009) and the Deep Zoom Composer, which allows you to either upload to DeepZoomPix or export.

BuddyFuse Web Messenger

Sunshine — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:30:06 GMT

Remember BuddyFuse, the extension to Windows Live Messenger that integrates third party (social/IM) networks into Windows Live Messenger? Well, they did it again. As we all know MSN Web Messenger retired on June 30th and you can only access its replacement, Windows Live Web Messenger, through Hotmail. So for those in need of a standalone web messenger they created BuddyFuse Web Messenger!

This early preview version of BuddyFuse Web Messenger is hosted on Windows Azure and enables you to chat with your friends on the Windows Live Messenger (MSN) chat network from your web browser. Support for other networks is planned for the future. You need not worry about your privacy either. Where other web messengers ask for their users' personal information, such as username and password, with BuddyFuse Web Messenger you submit this information directly to Microsoft as it makes use of the Windows Live Messenger library, which is part of the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit.

Besides Azure and the Windows Live Messenger Toolkit (library + UI controls), ExtJS javascript library is also used for the front-end.

As mentioned already this is an early preview version, so you might come across things that aren’t working perfectly yet (though the ones I came across have all been fixed already). For that there is the Feedback Button, so you can submit any feedback you may have right from the website.

BuddyFuse Web Messenger is available in English and Dutch. You can even switch between languages, if you wish to do so, by clicking the flag in the upper left.

More WPC09 News: Windows Marketplace For Mobile And Azure Pricing/Release Date

Sunshine — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:19:36 GMT

Whilst we are playing with the Office 2010 Technical Preview, there is more news coming out of/to be announced at the Worldwide Partner Conference.

Windows Mobile Marketplace

The following will be announced regarding Windows Mobile Marketplace today:

1. Application Submission Opens on July 27th: Windows Marketplace will open for application submissions from 29 supported countries* July 27^th.
2. Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 Support: Windows Marketplace will be available for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 by the end of 2009 (in addition to Windows Mobile 6.5 at launch in the fall).
3. Business Center: Windows Marketplace will feature a "Business Center" category for business applications.
4. Developer Contest: Microsoft will be disclosing the details of a Windows Marketplace developer contest on July 27.

Todd Brix, Senior Director for Mobile Platform Services Product Management at Microsoft, is on site at the Worldwide Partner Conference today talking to partners and presenting the Windows Marketplace strategy. He’ll also give a brief demonstration on the main stage Wednesday morning. Want to check it out now? He made a video for Channel 9 in which he covers the news and shows you a quick Marketplace demo.

* Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Previous articles about Windows Mobile Marketplace

Azure

Also (~~to be~~) announced today is the business model and release date of Azure:

The cloud operating system isn't launching in final form until Microsoft's November Professional Developer Conference, but the pricing announcement will be made at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference. According to CNET:

On a pure consumption basis, Microsoft said it will charge 12 cents per hour for computing, 15 cents per gigabyte for storage and 10 cents per 10,000 storage transactions. For network bandwidth, the software maker is charging between 10 cents and 15 cents per gigabyte.

The discount plan, dubbed the "development accelerator" comes in two forms and offers a 15 percent to 30 percent discount off the consumption charges. It requires a six-month commitment, with overage charges billed at the regular rates. After six months, the pricing reverts to the standard Azure rates.

Microsoft also announced pricing for its SQL Azure database, charging $9.99 for the basic Web edition, including up to a 1GB relational database and $99.99 for the Business Edition, which includes up to a 10GB database.

Update: the CNET article missed out on the .NET services pricing. We find that on Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog:

.NET Services
Messages: $0.15 per 100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens
Bandwidth: $0.10 in/$0.15 out per gigabyte

Official announcement by Microsoft
Previous articles about Azure

If you want to follow the WPC, check out the website. Keynotes are streamed live there! Missed out? You can watch them on demand too.

Microsoft SQL Services Is Now Microsoft SQL Azure, More Software + Services News Next Week At WPC09

Sunshine — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:23:56 GMT

Microsoft is updating the branding for SQL Services and SQL Data Services. From now on SQL Services will be called Microsoft SQL Azure and SQL Data Services will be called Microsoft Azure Database:

This name change doesn’t reflect a change in the products themselves; we will still be providing a powerful relational database foundation to the Azure Services Platform. By standardizing our naming conventions, we’re demonstrating the tight integration between the components of the services platform. More intuitive names also help to reinforce the relationships between our on-premises and cloud solutions. Ultimately, the goal is to drive simplicity and clarity for customers as they consider on-premises and cloud computing approaches for solving their IT needs.

More news and updates related to Microsoft’s Software + Services strategy will be announced next week at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans.

Long Zheng has been digging in deeper as to what might be announced next monday: Potential announcements already on people’s minds include the announcement and subsequent availability of Windows 7 RTM code and pricing and licensing plans for Windows Azure. What also might be announced is the public release of the Microsoft Office Web application that was announced back at PDC08, Long received some information that confirms this one. Can’t wait!

We’ll keep our eyes open, that’s for sure!

NewCloudApp() Azure Developer Contest: Win $5000

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:09:09 GMT

Just announced today, NewCloudApp(), The Azure Services Platform Developer Challenge, offers US based Azure developers a couple of chances to win exposure via Azure.com and major Microsoft events, Channel 9, the Structure Azure conference, and a $5000 Visa Gift Card. Judging the contest, which has both .Net and PHP categories, are Om Malik of GigaOM, and Michael Cote of RedMonk. In addition, a community winner will be chosen, based on voting to take place between June 19th and June 29th. Some details from www.NewCloudApp.com:

Contest Categories

.NET Applications

Create a .NET application running on Windows Azure. Use your creativity to incorporate additional Azure services such as .NET Services and Live Services. Or incorporate any other Microsoft or 3rd party services. A compelling user interface is key to a great application - use ASP.NET or Silverlight to author a unique web experience, or create a .NET desktop or mobile application interacting with services in the cloud.

PHP Applications

Build a PHP application running on Windows Azure. Take your application to the next level by integrating with other Azure services or 3rd party services and push the boundaries of interoperability.

Increase Your Chances of Winning!

Tell the world about your experience and the application you built through your blog and Twitter!

Please come back Wednesday 06th May 2009 to start registering applications.

More details at the website

MIX09: Silverlight 3 Beta, Tools And More…

Sunshine — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:57:16 GMT

More news from today’s keynote at MIX09:

Silverlight 3 Beta

Silverlight 3 Beta was unveiled at MIX09. This is a preview release which introduces more than 50 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications out of the browser, dramatic video performance and quality improvements.

New features in Silverlight 3 include:

Support for Higher Quality Video & Audio. With support for native H.264/Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline, Silverlight 3 brings rich, full-screen, stutter-free media experiences to the desktop.
New and enhanced media features in Silverlight 3 include: Live and on-demand true HD (720p+) Smooth Streaming, more format choice. True HD playback in full-screen. Extensible media format support.Industry leading content protection.
Empowering Richer Experiences. Silverlight 3 contains new 3D graphics, animation features, hardware accelerated effects and text improvements that enable designers and developers to create next generation Web visuals.
Additional features include: Perspective 3D Graphics. Pixel Shader effects. Bitmap Caching. New Bitmap API.Themed application support. Animation Effects. Enhanced control skinning. Improved text rendering & font support.
Improving Rich Internet Application Productivity.
New features include: 60+ controls with source code. Deep Linking. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Enhanced Data Support. Improved performance through: Application library caching, Enhanced Deep Zoom, Binary XML, Local Connection.
Advanced Accessibility Features. Silverlight 3 is the first browser plug-in to provide access to all system colors, allowing partially-sighted people to make changes such as high contrast color schemes for ease of readability by using familiar operating system controls.
Out of Browser Capabilities. The new out of browser experience in Silverlight 3 enables users to place their favorite Silverlight applications directly onto their PC and Mac, with links on the desktop and start menu—all without the need to download an additional runtime or browser plug-in. Further, the new experience enables Silverlight applications to work whether the computer is connected to the Internet or not—a radical improvement to the traditional Web experience.

Along with this beta release new tools got released too:

Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio – this will install the developer runtime of Silverlight 3 Beta, the Visual Studio project templates and the Silverlight 3 Beta SDK.
Silverlight 3 Beta developer runtimes: Windows or Mac. If you installed the tools above, you will get the developer runtime and there is no need to install it again. These downloads are being made available for test machines for the Windows and Mac platforms for your applications.
Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Preview – this is the preview version of Expression Blend that will enable authoring of Silverlight 3 Beta applications.
Silverlight Toolkit – the toolkit has been updated to provide an update to Silverlight 2 controls, a new release for Silverlight 3 Beta controls, and a new themes gallery. All of these can be downloaded at the Silverlight Toolkit CodePlex project site.
.NET RIA Services – Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations.
Silverlight 3 Beta Documentation – view documentation online or download an offline CHM help file.

Even more information can be found here and at the MIX09 session site.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio

Also announced at MIX09 today is the availability of Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio March 2009 CTP. Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure. Please note that this is a CTP release and should not be used on production systems.

Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview

On the subject of web developing, another interesting tool got released by the Expression Web Team today: SuperPreview. This tool enables developers to see how their sites look in different browsers without the need of a VM. Not with all the browsers they showed in the keynote at MIX09 today, it’s limited to IE6 and IE versions already installed on your computer, but still a handy tool. It will install on Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, be it that on Windows 7 you will not have IE6 in the browser list. The release expires on October 1, 2009. The full and final version of this product will be bundled together with Expression Web 3, sometime later this year and will run as a separate standalone application. Long Zheng has more detailed information and screenshots of this new tool.

PressPass - Microsoft Web Technologies Unveiled at MIX09 Help Businesses Deliver Return on Experience

P.S. Today’s keynote will be available on demand at http://live.visitmix.com/ later.

Azure joins the “crash club”: down for 22 hours

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:47:10 GMT

Microsoft’s fledgling Azure Services platform, a beta offering that offers cloud computing services, suffered a 22 hour outage this weekend. Azure joins Amazon and Flexiscale along with Hotmail and Gmail as web services that have suffered major outages recently. According to forum posts on the Azure forum on MSDN, the outage began about 10:30pm pdt on Friday night, and lasted until 8:30pm pdt Saturday:

UPDATE [8:24PM PDT]: This issue is resolved. Windows Azure is operating normally again.

UPDATE [3:36PM PDT]: We've identified and verified a recovery process that we're just now applying throughout the cloud. ETA is five hours to complete recovery. I'll post again when everything's back to normal.
Windows Azure is currently experiencing an outage. We are investigating but do not yet have an ETA for a resolution. A large number of deployments are currently offline, and are slow to restart.
What is affected: Applications may be unreachable or in "stopped" or "initializing" states for long periods of time.
When the outage began: About 10:30pm PST last night.
Who is affected: Potentially anyone currently running an application in Windows Azure.
We will post updates to this thread throughout the day as we investigate and resolve the outage. There is currently no ETA for a fix.

Forum poster Steve Marx promises a “root cause analysis” to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it, and plans to post a summary, but probably not until after Mix, as the Azure team will have a heavy presence there (not probably the best timing in the world to suffer an outage, if there is one). We’ll have more on Mix as it unfolds later in the week, and will update here with any new information about the Azure outage.

Steve Ballmer on Windows 7 and Azure, etc: Live from Australia

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:13:59 GMT

Steve Ballmer is about to take the stage in Sydney, Australia, to speak for the first time since the announcements last week at PDC. You can watch the video here, starting at 11:30am Thursday AEST (GMT +10), or 8:30pm Wednesday PST (GMT –8). Here are the streaming links:

Steve Ballmer in Australia 750kbps

Steve Ballmer in Australia 300 kbps

Steve Ballmer in Australia 100kbps

We should have links to the replays up as soon as they are available.