Well, I’m at the Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) 2008 at the LA Convention Center in LA.

The keynote session is happening at the moment – Ray Ozzie has just announced Windows Azure, the new name for the cloud-services platform (I had heard that they would call is Windows Strata, but there you go!).

Azure look fairly cool, although the development environment is just VS.NET.

What’s new is that they host your services for you, including (in the future) SQL Services i.e. hosting your databases, which will be fairly cool.
When you create an Azure service in VS.NET, and then choose deploy, the service is packaged and you’re taking to the Azure Developers Portal, where the service is uploaded.

Bear in mind that this Microsoft’s answer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Apps – Microsoft are joining the party late, but I’m hoping that they have learnt something by being able to watch from the sidelines.

I’m also interested in all the Oslo sessions – for those of us in the BizTalk world, Oslo gives us information about what future versions of BizTalk will look like (post BTS 2009).
What’s important to realise is that Oslo is the code name for a whole suite of tools, as opposed to a single product.

I imagine this means that there will be a whole lot of products that come out under the Oslo codename/brand.