LiveSide - News blog : PDC

On the road next week to PDC, catch the keynote Liveblog here!

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:01:00 GMT

We’re honored again to be able to bring you a group effort liveblog of the keynotes at PDC, coming up next Tuesday and Wednesday. The same gang is back again this year: Long Zheng from istartedsomething.com, Mary Jo Foley from All About Microsoft, Ed Bott from Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report, Paul Thurrott from Windows Supersite, Rafael Rivera from Within Windows, and Tom Warren from Neowin.net (Todd Bishop from TechFlash apparently prefers the November rain in Seattle to 76 and sunny in LA, go figure).

We’ll have more details and the CoverItLive widget up on Tuesday morning (the keynotes are at 8:30 am pdt (GMT-8)). You can follow along at home by watching the live streaming webcast available on keynote days at www.microsoftpdc.com

What to expect

First, we’ll be hearing from Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, Scott Guthrie, and Kurt DelBene in the keynotes:

While we don’t expect a lot of Windows Live news (we don’t expect a Wave 4 announcement, unfortunately), we should learn more about Office Web Apps and how they fit into Windows Live. Just this morning, the new Office.com website was updated, with the first official mention of Windows Live Documents:

For personal tasks: You can access your Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote files by posting your documents online to Windows Live Documents. When you are ready to edit or view the document online, simply log on to Windows Live from Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox. A Windows Live ID is required for accessing the Windows Live Document account.

Ray Ozzie will of course be talking about Azure, and we love hearing about cloud computing. Of course we’re keeping our fingers crossed for a few surprises, too.

So set your clocks and join us on Tuesday and Wednesday and join in the Liveblog Keynote madness! We’ll be watching for your comments!

Office In The Cloud

Sunshine — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:45:22 GMT

In all this excitement of PDC, cloud computing (Azure) and Live Mesh updates, there is one piece of cloud related news we haven’t told you about.

Microsoft Office will also be moving towards the cloud! We already know about the web storage of Office documents through Office Live Workspace (save, access, and share) but that is going to be expanded with lightweight versions of Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Powered by AJAX and/or Silverlight, they will be available for use in standard Web browsers such ad Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Imagine being able to edit your Office document from your PC, Mobile Phone and the Web!

Click on the thumbnails for larger images

All this will be offered through Office Live, a consumer service with both ad-funded and subscription offerings. For business customers, Office Web applications will be offered as a hosted subscription service and through existing volume licensing agreements. Later on this will also be offered as a part of the Office Suites (Office 14). There will be a private technology preview of the Office Web applications later this year. If you are interested in this, sign up for Office Live Workspace. Of course we’ll keep you updated on this too!

For a first look video, head over to Channel 9.

PressPass - Microsoft to Extend Office to the Browser
Workspace Team Blog - Microsoft extends Office to the browser via Office Live

Microsoft launches CTP for OpenID support in Windows Live ID

Chris — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:13:42 GMT

Yet another PDC announcement, and this one is from the Windows Live ID team. They’ve just opened up a Live ID test bed for those developers who want to start playing with Open ID integration. See for yourself.

There’s more info over on the WL Dev blog, or there’s a 3 minute webcast showing what this announcement means for users.

Note this is for testing only, and isn’t a full release of OpenID support in Windows Live ID.

Live Mesh: How Does Live Mesh Relate To Azure?

Sunshine — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:49:00 GMT

As Kip already mentioned, tomorrow we’ll hear a lot more about Live Mesh at PDC. Today the keynote was all about Windows Azure, a Services Platform for the cloud. But how does Live Mesh relate to Azure? The Live Mesh Blog explains:

In his PDC keynote just now, Ray Ozzie announced the Azure Services Platform. Here's the overview picture:

The Live Services box at left is home to the developer services and APIs that power the Live Mesh platform experience. Think of it this way -- Live Services provide the infrastructure, Live Mesh is a software + services experience/app built on top of those services.

So in short: Windows Azure is the base on which all is build! The bottom layer of the cake, the foundation.

I sure am looking forward to the Keynote tomorrow, which you can follow again Live at the PDC Website. Speaking of which, have you noticed the Silverlight Photo Wall? All Pictures tagged PDC2008 on Flickr and Facebook will end up there, well worth a look! And of course, just like today, Kip will be Live Blogging the Keynote again along with Ed Bott, Mary Jo Foley, Rafael Rivera, Paul Thurrott, Tom Warren and Long Zheng.

PressPass: Microsoft Unveils Windows Azure at Professional Developers Conference (includes video of the Keynote)
Edit: PressPass: Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform: Making Microsoft’s Software-plus-Services Vision a Reality

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Live Mesh Blog
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Liveblogging the keynote: Part one

Windows Azure, PDC, Wifi, and more

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:06:43 GMT

Just spent the morning listening to Ray Ozzie and company unveil Windows Azure, a combination of Amazon EC2 type hosted services, Microsoft Online Services, and tools to hook them all together, sort of. While not really Windows Live centric, Microsoft is making a big bet on “the cloud”, and many of the same services that Microsoft runs Windows Live with will soon be open to developers, hobbyists, and enterprise to make use of.

If you were able to follow along on our CoverItLive site, thanks. At one point we had about 2500 viewers (across all of our sites), the wifi stayed up, and I was personallly very impressed with CoverItLive, hope you enjoyed it. Of course today was a bit developer and enterprise centric, but tomorrow will be focused much more on Live Mesh, we’re looking forward to it.

There are about 6500+ people here in LA for PDC, and with almost all of them in one room on a wifi connection it amazingly still worked, for the most part. We should have lots more in the coming days from PDC.

LiveSide Live from PDC! (we hope)

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:04:54 GMT

The long awaited PDC, Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference, gets underway unofficially on Sunday, and then in full force on Monday October 27, with keynotes by Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, David Treadwell, and others. We’ll be there, and we’re excited to be included in an “All-Star” cast of characters who are going to attempt to live-blog the keynotes:

Ed Bott, Mary Jo Foley, yours truly, Rafael Rivera, Paul Thurrott, Tom Warren, and Long Zheng have banded together to bring you our take on the keynotes, using CoverItLive. Now if you’ve been to tech conferences before, you may know that possibly the worst place on earth to try and get live coverage of the event is from the floor, especially when hundreds of bloggers are all trying to live stream, upload video, check their email, twitter, and download bits all at the same time, all through the convention hall’s wifi system. We’ve got a couple of backup plans ready just in case, but in any event it should be a fun experiment.

In addition, I’ll try and log some reports and some video from PDC as much as I can. I’m also going to check in on Twitter, using the LiveSide Twitter account. If you’re one of the 150+ that are following us, thanks, and you’re all set. If not, you can follow us at www.twitter.com/liveside, and I’ll be checking the @liveside replies if you have a question or a burning desire.

We’ve got some fun stuff planned for PDC (and some good seats, more on that at the keynote!). Really looking forward to seeing some of our old friends, hearing a lot about Windows Live and Microsoft’s live services, and partaking in the madness that is a large tech conference (ok not so much on that one). I’ll have some LiveSide stickers so if you’re at PDC don’t forget to ask!

UPDATE: oh and one more thing: in a new side project, Mary Jo Foley and Gavin Clarke from The Register have teamed up on a new podcast called MicroBite. Their first episode is up, featuring among others, ummmm, me!, talking about Live Mesh. Give it a listen!

Ray Ozzie at the DLA Piper Tech Summit: Cloud Computing has “enormous potential”

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:29:56 GMT

Speaking today at a keynote for the DLA Piper Tech Summit, Ray Ozzie tuned up his cloud computing mantra in preparation for next week’s PDC, by talking about the potential for the internet to speed up software usability. In a question and answer session with Fortune magazine’s David Kilpatrick, Ozzie spoke about the changing nature of the internet::

Ozzie said that cloud computing has enormous potential to speed up data exchange, software development, collaboration, and ultimately, software usability. “The Internet was created during an era of 56k modems and dial-up connections. As a software [developer] you balance what's on the back end with what's on the front end.” Whether bandwith is large or small is a challenge of perspective and application.

Ozzie promised appliance-like features for devices soon:

Devices, he said, will be “appliance-like” in the near future. “You'll buy one, log in, and the data you need will be there.”

We should be hearing more about Ozzie’s vision very very soon, with major announcements about Microsoft’s live services platform expected at PDC.

Live Mesh at PDC: David Treadwell “spills the beans”

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:35:24 GMT

With PDC, the Professional Developer’s Conference and Microsoft’s big coming out party for Software + Services coming in only three weeks, news is starting to filter out about what to expect. Last week in London Steve Ballmer let loose that a “Windows Cloud” operating system would be announced, and David Treadwell will be onstage on Tuesday to keynote some significant Live Mesh announcements. Treadwell talked to Channel 9 about Live Mesh, although we’re not sure he really “spilled the beans”, as Angus seems to think he did:

Countdown to PDC2008: What the heck are Microsoft’s Live Platform Services? Treadwell Tells All!

Still, we’re getting close to the point where hopefully Microsoft will want to actually talk about products in their pipeline. Anyone care to keep count of Microsoft blog posts both pre- and post PDC?

Ballmer drops a bombshell: “Windows Cloud” coming at PDC

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:53:30 GMT

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, speaking at an IT conference in London, revealed that Microsoft will unveil a new operating system, which he dubbed “Windows Cloud”, at PDC at the end of this month. According to a post at The Register, Ballmer hinted at the new OS:

We need a new operating system designed for the cloud and we will introduce one in about four weeks, we’ll even have a name to give you by then. But let’s just call it for the purposes of today ‘Windows Cloud’,” said Ballmer.

“Just like Windows Server looked a lot like Windows but with new properties, new characteristics and new features, so will Windows Cloud look a lot like Windows Server.”

Ballmer also hinted at what would be built into the new OS, including geo replication, how to design apps intended to commingle [we think he means appeasing regulators by providing more interoperability], management modelling and an SOA model, to effectively create a new platform.

So if we’re reading this right, the new OS would be used to handle some of the issues that are unique to “cloud computing”, building in services that would have to be added or built from scratch in existing Windows Server environments. Again, if we’re reading the Ballmer tea leaves, this wouldn’t be something you would run on your desktop, but would be a special Windows Server built to manage the special needs of services in the cloud. Pure conjecture at this point, but we’ll know more soon.

Ballmer also took the opportunity to take a shot at Google, saying:

“If you talk to Google they’ll say it's thin client computing but then they’ll issue a new browser that’s basically a big fat operating system designed to compete with Windows but running on top of it,” he said.

“Steve Ballmer observation," machine gunned the fragrant CEO.

Of course we’ll have lots more from PDC, stay tuned.

New PDC sessions announced; Sinofsky, Treadwell to keynote

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:08:23 GMT

The Windows 7 and Windows Live bits are starting to come out of the woodwork for PDC, with the announcement of 20 new sessions on Windows 7, and some additions to the keynotes, including Senior Vice President of Windows and Windows Live Engineering Steven Sinofsky, and Corporate Vice President, Live Platform Services David Treadwell.

In addition to the new Windows 7 sessions, far too many sessions have caught our attention, it’s going to be a busy week. Of course we’re most interested in the Live Mesh,Live Platform, Virtual Earth, Sync Framework, and Windows 7 sessions, but we’ll be busy poking our noses into anything Windows Live related.

New PDC sessions announced: Live Mesh, Live Platform, Virtual Earth

Kip Kniskern — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:04:56 GMT

The session list published for PDC 08 just doubled, with a note that it will double again before the conference begins. Of course most of the good stuff is still under wraps, but there are a few gems, even this early:

Ori Amiga, Lead Program Manager for Live Platform Services, who introduced Live Mesh to the world at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, will present on “Live Platform: New Developer Services and APIs” where “We take a look at new and future services, protocols, APIs, and tools which enable your applications to access, store, and synchronize user data with Live services, stream media, obtain audience analytics data, work with presence, authentication, and more.”
Live Mesh Architect Abolade Gbadegesin will present on a “Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive”, featuring “FeedSync-based synchronization, accounts and security services, P2P communications, pub-sub infrastructure, and the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE).”
Mark Brown will conduct a deep dive on Virtual Earth, and talk about “the next major release of Virtual Earth”.
And of course Angus Logan will be presenting, on “Live Platform: Building Applications with Social Data”. (Man, so tempted to rickroll that last link)

Of course there’s lots more going on at PDC, including sessions on Silverlight, Windows Mobile, Windows 7, Live Mesh, and Internet Explorer, and keynotes by Ray Ozzie and Rick Rashid.

Join the Angus Logan Fan Club

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:44:00 GMT

Apparently our pal Angus spends so much time working and gets so little love that he’s been reduced to starting his own fan club. He can’t even get any love from cool new Cuil. (We’re even mean to him here at LiveSide, although he was kinda harsh about it). We kinda feel sorry for the guy, even though he kicked butt at TechReady, and except for another kick-ass speech by Ray Ozzie, sounds like poor Angus might have stolen the show. But the good news is that PDC sounds like it’s going to be great, and by then Angus may even have a fan or two! I love, I hate, I believe was a theme of Ozzie’s speech, and he had the Softies wowing and believing, even asking “Bill, who?”. So if you have a Facebook account, give our friend Angus a little love, willya? He needs all the love he can get, poor guy.

(c'mon, who wouldn't be a fan?)

Microsoft Global Exchange: Ballmer, Ozzie rock

Kip Kniskern — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:31:22 GMT

Microsoft just wrapped up its annual Global Exchange, known by one and all as MGX. This year it was in Atlanta, where 13,000 Microsoft employees, sales and marketing types, and evangelists gathered to get pumped up and ready to sell, sell, sell. And from the looks of one photo we came across, MSN and Windows Live are high on the list:

Here's a closer look at the slide:

(notice it says "Google" in the red box with the X through it)

From all the Twitter messages and various postings we've been spotting, it was a good show. Steve Ballmer was in fine form, not only doing the monkey boy dance but crowdsurfing, as you can see in this short video:

MGX Impressions 17 7 2008 - MSN Video

Attendees also apparently saw some of the new ads for Vista, coming out later this year, and one attendee "got goosebumps - just, wow" (we won't name him as he already expressed concern about getting fired ;) ). Ray Ozzie, and Microsoft Research were also apparently in fine form, with hints at plenty of cool stuff coming for PDC (yes, we'll be there, will you?).