PDC2008 Summary

For the first time in a few years, I went to a professional conference. The boys are old enough now for one adult to be able to manage both of them easily, and not needing to bookend any trip with a day getting to and from Skye makes a big difference.  The  journey was pretty easy – no problems with the train from Harrogate to London, and an excellent flight on Virgin to get to LA. I’ve not flown on a Virgin plane with their new entertainment console before and was really pleased with it. I would consider flying to New York with the family on a plane fitted with this system.

I was most interested in Azure, Mesh and the Sync framework. Azure-or Azure or Ay-zure as Ozzie pronounces it. As an ISV I’m keen on Azure, but I’m not convinced that businesses will be queuing up to retire their data centres, sack their DBAs and hardware support teams, and trust it all to a company who doesn’t necessarily have their best interests at heart.

It was interesting to compare Mesh and Groove/Sharepoint. Its clear that Microsoft see Mesh as a consumer-facing option, which doesn’t compete with something built using Groove or Sharepoint. They also said that they would be scanning content uploaded to Mesh. This would clearly worry any business planning to use Mesh to distribute confidential company data.

The Sync framework has really come on quickly and I feel that most developers and very few businesses are realizing what a fantastic option it represents. I’ll be playing with sync some more over the coming months.