Interoperability with the Windows Azure Platform
Today’s announcement at PDC2008 of Windows Azure and the Windows Azure Platform is, unsurprisingly, all over the news. There are fact sheets galore, whitepapers, transcripts, videos etc available on the PressPass Event page, I thought I’d point to this whitepaper written by David Chappell titled “Introducing the Azure Services Platform” as a good overview.
I took this snap on my phone a second or so after the name popped up.
There’s a “How does it work?” page from which I’ve taken the picture below, because I want to draw your attention to the pink “coming soon” box on the bottom right.
What’s this? Well today we also announced the Technology Preview of Cross Platform SDKs for Microsoft .NET Services. We’ve released a short document “Interoperability with the Azure Services Platform” that explains this. It starts:-
The Azure Services Platform has been built from the ground up with interoperability in mind. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple Internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and "plain old XML" (POX). This interoperability opens up opportunities to build new or enhanced applications using existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework, or with other developments environments such as Java, or Ruby.
and goes on to explain the Java SDK for .NET Services and Ruby SDK for .Net Services. These SDKs are released as open source under the BSD license on Sourceforge & Rubyforge. As you’ll surmise from the diagram, we plan to extend this to support for PHP & Python in future releases too. I believe that this is the first time Microsoft has delivered cross-platform SDKs to coincide with the MSDN SDKs.