Live Mesh Wins Crunchies 2008 Innovation Award

Ray Ozzie and David Treadwell flew down to San Francisco to pick up our award.  It is great to see how Ray has helped changing Microsoft's image among the Silicon Valley crowd.  It feels good to be recognized for all the hard work for the past two years by the industry.....

Watch the award ceremony, results of the vote and other winners.

Offline Web Applications among top 10 emerging technologies

According to MIT published Technology Preview, Offline Web Applications are among the top 10 emerging technologies of 2008.  Another sign that application models like Mesh-Enabled Web Applications are becoming strategic for both Microsoft and the industry....

5 lessons learned from the first 30 years.

Interesting lessons learned from Microsoft's more successful strategies that contributed to our growth.  Directions on Microsoft is an independent organization that doesn't shy away from  criticizing Microsoft strategies from time to time (that is their job - to be independent), but when credit is due, it is due and there are lessons to be learned:

1) Question the rules. Change the game.
2) Create win-win partner situations to grow fast.
3) Don’t neglect your customers’ most important need: a better price.
4) Make it easy for partners to customize your product.
5) Business isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. Be persistent.

Full article is here: Five strategies Microsoft got right

Mesh Applications are born. Come and see them at PDC 2008

I have been busy. Extermely busy, and you will know why very soon.  I will be presenting a session on Mesh-Enabled Applications at PDC 2008 in LA.  But what are Mesh-Enabled Applications?  what can you do with them?  how do they provide pure goodness and value to developers? and why do I care....  Mary-Jo Foley seems to have some ideas but I am making no comments.  The best way to find out is to attend my session at PDC. I promise you will not be disappointed.

Here is the session description on PDC 2008 website.

Come learn how to extend your existing web applications and get them to live and breathe within Live Mesh. Mesh-enabled web applications can be accessed from anywhere through a web browser as well as run locally (and offline) on a user's desktop and can take full advantage of many Mesh value-add services such as a dedicated sandbox, online and offline synchronized storage, auto deployment and update, identity, application catalogue, social computing and more. Learn about the architecture and lifecycle of applications which live in the Mesh and how to Mesh-enable your Silverlight 2 and JavaScript application.

Looking forward to seeing you there.......

Live Mesh is Live

We just went live! 9:00PM, April 22nd 2008.  Check out our blog.

If you are visiting Web 2.0 Expo next week and work on Software+Services, drop me a line......

Microsoft Reveals a Web-Based Software System (The New York Times)

Redmond casts Mesh to catch developers (News.com)

Ray Ozzie delivers with Live Mesh (Scobleizer)

Ray Ozzie: Introducing Live Mesh (Channel 9)

Live Mesh: it’s everything we told you about (and a lot more) (Live Side)

Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 22-25

Looks like I am going.  I will write more about what I will be showing/talking about closer to the date but from the list of the sessions, It is going to be a lot of fun......... 

How Microsoft thinks about Live Services Platform

Check out how David Treadwell draws an analogy between Windows Platform evolution and our investment in Windows Live Platform, in this LiveSide interview.

Welcome Social Mesh, Device Mesh

Today, at MIX '08 keynote speech, Ray Ozzie, our Chief Software Architect, described a path that will result in the release of the project that I have been working on for sometimes. He said

“I see MIX as the first of a number of key launch milestones. Kind of on a path, with a series of events culminating at PDC (Professional Developers Conference) this October, a path that will bring many of the key elements of our software plus services strategy from incubation to life.”

Later on, he hinted more on the type of Software+Services that may be released in upcoming months. He talked about three core principles that drive the reconceptualization of our software in order to embrace the new world of Software+Services. He called the first principle “Social or Device Mesh” and went on to say how interpersonal nature of the web will ultimately impact everything we do. Everything! < Developers listen carefully....> including a “Centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications”. Finally, he talked about what I personally have been working on and feel very excited about.  He described it this way:

“Imagine an App Platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time now, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless Mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub.”

There are good reasons that I cannot give more details, but trust me, developers are in for a big treat by having the ability to build applications on this platform…can’t wait to tell you more…

TechCrunch was quick to publish this post with some screenshots of the presentation slides.....

Interesting scalability read

If you have been spending a substantial amount of time figuring out how to build massively scalable services in the cloud, you will find these posts interesting.....They basically tell the story of Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Vox, etc and their scalability challenges....

http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture

Even better (thanks Alex):

http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2007/04/29/3616/the-top-10-presentation-on-scaling-websites-twitter-flickr-bloglines-vox-and-more

Silverlight 2 is comming

During the past few months, I have been spending a bunch of time with our Silverlight team looking at their architecture and application building experiences.  I must say that I am super excited about the ability to build managed apps with Silverlight 2.  The integration with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend is truly making the development experience great.

There are changes in APIs since we released the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha but all the changes are for good.  You will get a much more .NET feel and see a more consistent API set. 

The most exciting thing for me is when we see more and more of business applications use Silverlight to deliver a truly rich user experience to business users. 

Check out Scott's first look at Silverlight 2 post and walkthrough sessions.

Windows Software-plus-Services Cloud Platform

Got to love this Steve Ballmer's qoute in eweeks interview:

“We will have a Windows software-plus-services cloud platform for people to build applications on and where they can deploy those applications.."

Significance of the Live Developer Platform Announcement

Yesterday, David Treadwell, our Vice President, made an announcement explaining the progress of some of our current investments in Live Developer Platform. I know David from back in Developer Division. He is a seasoned and inspiring leader and his deep experience with .NET platform is a great tribute to Microsoft seriousness in building a true developer platform for our Live services.

Two topics stand out for me in this announcement and here is why I think developer should care about them:

1) New API Unification strategy: We have over 30 (and growing) Live services that are publicly available today. You can expect these services continue to evolve and grow to provide more customer value over time. Today, the developer experience to build applications across these services is less than the perfect unified experience that one would hope for. We are heavily investing in making these APIs more coherent and consisted. Choosing Atom Publishing Protocol(APP) as the unifying API protocol is a big step towards a better unified Live platform. However, it is very important to note that APP will not be the only protocol that we will deliver our APIs in, but it is the common denominator protocol. Some services may decide to expose more heads (SOAP, JSON, WebDav, etc) based on their developer needs and scenarios. Even if you don’t like APP, don’t get hanged up on the fact that it is APP, think broader about the whole concept of having one way to experience many services that store different interesting dimensions of user data.

2) Delegation Authentication is a critical developer feature (which got the needed investment level): As you noticed, Windows Live ID team, now officially own and support Delegation Authentication. This is a change since what we announced last year. What this means is that we haven authentication seriously and have streamlined its scenarios into our core Live Platform Identity service. Without delegation, when applications and web sites want to access data of a Live ID user, they have to run their code in the context of user and with the same permission level. This causes a security issue not always this is the case that users trust an application do do anythin with thier system. Delegation Authentication enables a user to explicitly allow a web site to access part of his/her data within in a certain period of time. I will write another post dedicated to this and explain my experience trying to build a product using Live Delegation.

Vision is locked, finally.

During the past 8-9 months I have been working hard on what could be the first revision of the next Microsoft Software + Service Developer platform. After many, many meetings, discussions, exec reviews, prototypes, demos, etc....I finally feel that we have locked down on a super cool plan to deliver an amazing dev platform that will make the life of developers much easier when building a special class of S+S applications. Unfortunately, I cannot talk about the project publicly until later in the year where we make public annoucement of our strategy and unwrap this baby. But when we do, I will be blogging like crazy here…stay tuned….we are so close I can smell it….

London Bike Cam Demo

We used this demo internally for a long time but now it has been made available to public for some time.  It shows an interesting way of integrating Microsoft Virtual Earth APIs with a moving camera that is installed on a bike riding through London river Thames.  While the video is playing you will see the bike location is moving on the map below.  Check it out here (Select "London River Thames" from the "Rides" menu).

Windows Live Messenger Web Control

We just released the Instant Messenger Web Control and presence APIs...The control allows web sites to establish IM sessions and chat with over 300million Windows Live users, using nothing but JavaScript....Adding the control to your web site is a piece of cake....to prove it....here is mine... which took me under 5 minutes to create....to get yours go here....

Now if I am online....you can send me messages right from here.....I am currently

Big smiles....

Redmond is finally sunny after a few weeks of rain…..the stock trade software worked flawlessly over night…some articles mentioned the fact that our profit is as big as Google entire revenue….. and our admin arranged a festive team get-together this afternoon……may this day be remembered forever (well, until the next big spike in the stocks)……

Replacing Google link in my IE tool bar with Live Search

Live Search has consistently been returning the right results, fast…..Since I am not getting any better results from Google....today, I officially replaced all of the Google Links in my IE tool bars with Live Search. I want the search to be fast and relevant (and free) so don’t really care who is the provider……today, it is Live Search.

Hats off to Live Search team….nice work…..

Protect your application's IP (on Dynamic CRM or any other platform)

One of the biggest feature requests that I have heard from ISVs, over and over, is the ability to protect their Intellectual Properties (IP). For example, Dynamics CRM ISVs typically implement the custom business logic of their application as a callout managed library(dll) that plugs into CRM execution pipeline. These dlls are part of the ISV solution and should be protected against reverse engineering and illegal copying. Often these solutions are sent to customers for evaluation and after a period, customers may decide not to make a final purchase or stop renewing the ISV license.

The problem is that although ISVs are legally protected by their End-User Licensing Agreement (EULA) against such cases, in practice, most ISVs are not wealthy enough to bring a litigation case against every such customer. So what is the solution? Shouldn't we have a software solution to this problem instead of relying on legal documents?

Here is one possible solution: Microsoft Software Licensing and Protection Services (SLPS). SLPS uses a selective .NET code transformation technology that help ISVs protect their IP with a higher level of protection. There are already some other solutions out there but I highly encourage you to check out SLPs and see how different it is. One caveat is that CRM solutions have more than just dlls. They have xml files that contain customization and client side scripts. What about those non-.NET files? Technically SLPS will not help there a lot and since CRM platform reads and processes these xml files, one place to put a gate would be in the CRM platform itself…..

I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially from the folks who have tried SLPS with Dynamics CRM. Did you manage to get it to work? what was your experience?

5k charity run was fun

Annual Employee Giving Campaign is underway at Microsoft these days and you will see lots of posters up around the campus and various auctions and events happening every day. Last Friday David Treadwell, our Vice President, arranged a 5k charity run for Microsofties on the Red West campus which got me out of the bed at 6:00AM and helped break my recent bad habit of getting to bed late at night(3:00+ AM) and getting to work late in the morning. The run was fun and I managed to finish it without bumping anyone off the track or tripping over a colleague's foot. Now I am seriously considering finding a buddy to do more running………..

Rapid Javascript generation for folks who like C#

If you have never heard of Script# (Pronounced Script Sharp) check it out. It is a C# to Javascript/Ajax compiler that allows you to write your code in C# and then convert it into Javascript.  It is not really new but I bet a lot of folks haven't heard of it.  It comes very handy if you have to write a lot of client side business logic in Javascript. 

For me, writing in C# is much easier than writing in Javascript and I know almost 99% of developers share the this view.  But often you are forced to write your code in Javascript. Yes, we have the glorious managed Silverlight but still there are times that you have to write in Javascript.  Microsoft CRM form programming is one example where writing Javascript is needed (well, for now).  The product that I am working on uses a lot of Script# for some of its features.  It is pretty cool......