I'm headed home and am in a tired sort of jelly-like state after 4-days at PDC 2008.  I went in with high expectations and came away with those expectations mostly met - for the first time in my relatively long career of attending conferences.  Umbraco Codegarden is the notable exception - these rock!

All in all I'm impressed and thrilled with the direction of the Azure Services Platform and believe this has enormous potential.  If you've read my blog posts over the last year you've no doubt noticed that I'm an enthusiastic booster of cloud computing in general.  To me, the offerings from Microsoft evolve the platform to a more approachable level and open the door to additional opportunities.  I don't know if Microsoft's platform will be the "best" platform in the end, but at this point it is the most real platform.  Obviously, if you're looking for simple cloud computing virtual machines you have many viable choices - Amazon AWS and GoGrid to name a few.  Interestingly, there was only passing reference to this type of virtual machine resource from the Azure Services team.  I'm still not clear if this is part of the offering.

I had many terrific conversations with fellow attendees and Microsoft attendees/speakers.  I don't think I'll be at PDC 2009, but who knows.  The breadth of technology covered at PDC is tremendous...I think a year to digest, process and implement the most compelling items after evaluating how they fit into/disrupt the current technology stack is barely enough time.  I expect PDC 2009 will be focused on Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 - certainly important technologies.  I am, however, planning on attending MIX 2009.

Following is my take on the best and worst of PDC 2008, it's one person's experience:

Best Sessions

• Asp.Net MVC Framework (PC21) video
• Making your app more Social (BB20) video
• A Lap Around Live Services and Live Mesh (BB04) video
• The Future of C# (TL16) video

You can see all of the sessions and videos here.

Highlights

• The 'aha!' moment with regard to the elements of the Live Framework/Live Mesh/Azure (formerly known as Strata).
• Sketching a conceptual design for a distributed Umbraco cache with the project Velocity team
• Making my first Mesh App and actually seeing it run in Live Mesh and on my laptop
• Learning that Live ID will be a provider for OpenID authentication
• Getting a better understanding of Microformats and the available tools

Lowlights

• Keynotes - I find it hard it to believe that the keynotes are for the developers in attendance and not for broader media/investor appeal.  While the keynotes do help set the context for the rest of the conference, they are (in my opinion) hugely disappointing.
• I saw no public presence of any of the very cool open source support initiatives from Microsoft (CodePlex, Web Application Installer, etc...).  It's possible that I just missed these given that scale of the PDC, but I was disappointed at the lack of visibility.

See you at MIX 2009 and/or Umbraco Codegarden 2009.

Today Amazon launched the public beta allowing Windows Server 2003 instances on the Elastic Computing Cloud - something they announced a while back and that we've been asking for.

Amazon is applying their simple 'pay as you go' model with the default instance being $0.125 per hour ($3.00 per day).  The default instance is specified as 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit,160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform.  This runs an IIS server nicely.  There are also larger instances available, including 64-bit and SQL Server.

If you saw my talk at Umbraco Codegarden US you saw a demo of Umbraco running on an IIS server at GoGrid with a MySql server running at Amazon.  Now one can create Linux and Windows instances at both Amazon and GoGrid - like apples.

GoGrid has a clear advantage in terms of a friendly management interface.  Amazon provides a command line interface, though third-party tools such as ElasticFox do help a bit.

Not being one with much patience I have already started a Windows instance at Amazon and have installed Umbraco with SQL Express.  The process took 15 minutes or so - not bad for a first go.  As soon as Umbraco v4 Beta 2 is available I will create a public AMI with Umbraco installed and ready.  All you'll need to do is start the instance, navigate to the public DNS name, and Umbraco will be available.  Instant gratification - which I favor.  I'll post the AMI link here and you'll also be able to find it in the public AMI list from Amazon.

With Microsoft's PDC coming up next week in LA it'll be interesting to see what they unveil in terms of offerings similar to Amazon and GoGrid.  I'll be at PDC and will post here as soon as I know.

The feedback is that the first US Codegarden was a huge success.  With about 30 participants it was two days packed full of learning, sharing, and fun.  Umbraco v4 highlighted by Niels and Per in the opening keynote set the tone with Umbraco firmly established as a robust CMS up to any task.  We had sessions on topics ranging from using Flash with Umbraco, to running Umbraco on cloud-based computing platforms, and lots of great demos, discussions, and coding sessions.

Our Open Space sessions were well attended and the participation from all attendees was fantastic.  We've created a book to hold the session output here.

A tradition at Codegarden is the package coding contest.  We had entries ranging from an XSLT-extension for Commerce for Umbraco (the package also known as XSLT-Error) to complete site packages aimed at getting an Umbraco site running in just a few minutes.  John took home the XBox prize for his node-based form generator.

A huge thanks from me, and all the Codegarden organizers, to everyone who came and participated.

See you at Codegarden in 2009!

-Paul