So, unless you've been unplugged from the Internet for the last 24 hours you would have seen all the stuff going on at PDC 08. Ray Ozzie announced Azure, which is basically there solution for Cloud Computer. My interest lies in SharePoint Services which sits as one of the platforms that will be in the Cloud/Azure platform.

The developer centre doesn't have a dedicated Platform Technologies section which is a bit disappointing at this stage and obviously is taking a back seat to SQl Data Services, Microsoft .NET Services and Live Services.

There is a FAQ section on their web site that covers off some things. It basically states that they are not announcing any details as yet. It looks like they're focusing on the other services in the platform first.

SharePoint Editions

The SharePoint Developer Centre has very little on it and links to a blog post by the SharePoint Team. The post links to SharePoint Online link which I'm guessing what's going to be exposed by Azure. SharePoint Online is Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 NOT Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It will be interesting to see whether they offer MOSS 2007 in Azure. A comment in the post "Microsoft SharePoint Services is a developer service that will be available as part of Azure in the future." makes me assume they'll be yet another Edition of SharePoint specifically for Azure. So we'll have:

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007;
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0;
• SharePoint Online; and
• Microsoft SharePoint Services (Azure).

The post is confusing as it talks about SharePoint Online and also Microsoft SharePoint Services, maybe they are one and the same e.g. "For example, using the Data View Web Part to surface data from an external source – this could be a web service living in Windows Azure. In fact, later in the week at PDC, there’s a breakout session that walks through the different ways SharePoint Online can be customized.".

Direction for Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

I can see Microsoft pushing to leverage the SharePoint platform even more so now that it's in Azure and is easily deployed and developed against using Visual Studio. Currently there were overheads on deploying WSS along side a ASP.NET application, now the ASP.NET application could be deployed into Azure and Windows SharePoint Services in Azure called also be turned on and used.

Hosting

One of the biggest things I've seen in SharePoint environments is custom code doing all sorts of damage to performance due to purely written and misinformed API usage. It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft let you deploy custom wsp packages up there with signed code...could it be something like Apple where they vet the code for the Platform? Do they have an automated test tool that will highlight issues (Yes PLEASE!).

I'll be blogging more about this, but I'm in the middle of preparing for my RDN presentation tomorrow night so hopefully see some of you there!