Shannon Braun's Weblog

Announced Windows Azure - Web Tier offering that can be thought of as Windows in the cloud. 

• Scalable Storage
• Scalable Computing Power
• Services Lifecycle Management

The systems that are being built today are laying the ground work for the next 50 years. 

Services platform will include the following support:

• Live Services - Acts as a bridge between devices (phones, laptops and other devices)
• .NET Services - Workflow, authorization and identity federation.
• SQL Services - Data Store
• SharePoint Services - Collaboration
• Dynamics CRM Services - Business Content

Ray pointed out, that even though they aren't the first to enter the cloud services arena (Amazon just went out of beta this week with their offering EC2), they have some key components that allow them to provider a better platform:

• Microsoft is consuming their own cloud services to build Microsoft offerings in the cloud. 
• Microsoft will use the existing tools we have today to build systems that run in the cloud.

Demo - Building Cloud Applications... was a basic demo of how you could build a ASP.NET web site and use the Azure console to upload a package (binaries and configuration meta data) to be deployed to the platform for serving up the information.

Demo - Bluehoo.com

Social Networking application that shows you who is around you based on BlueTooth protocol on your cell phone.  Similar to how you detect wireless networks... except you are detecting people that are part of the Bluehoo network.  Bluehoo is utilizing Windows Azure to support their application scalability.

m.bluehoo.com - beta is available later today.