Microsoft shows cloud focus at TechEd

Cloud services are set to transform IT, according to Microsoft's Bob Muglia

Microsoft has made a number of announcements at its 2010 TechEd developer conference in New Orleans, highlighting an increasing focus on the cloud.

The company unveiled additions to its Azure cloud platform, including an updated Windows Azure SDK, the release of Windows Server AppFabric, and updates to SQL Azure.

Other announcements were cloud-related to a greater or lesser degree, such as the release of a Bing Maps SDK and the upcoming beta of SP1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, both of which will have enhancements for cloud computing.

Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Division, claimed during his keynote address that, in the four months since Azure's official launch, over 10,000 service providers are already using the technology to build clouds to deliver services to their customers.

Perhaps the most significant TechEd announcement for Microsoft customers is Windows Server AppFabric, which provides capabilities to develop and manage applications that span cloud and on-premise deployments.

This is now available as a free download for customers with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Microsoft also revealed that the Azure SDK now includes support for .Net Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010, including the latter's advanced debug features such as Intellitrace. Intellitrace was described by Microsoft's Doug Purdy as "TiVo for debugging" as it allows developers to replay code execution line by line to catch errors.

SQL Azure, Microsoft's cloud database service, now supports up to 50GB of storage, up from 10GB previously, and developers can now work with the Bing Maps SDK to build map-based applications hosted on Bing.com that link with other data sets.