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Port 25

Welcome to Port 25: Join the community & get insights, technical tips and blogs from the open source community at Microsoft.

Developers, developers, developers...October 27

It's all about developers, all the time - well, at least for the next week here in Los Angeles at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference.

The first day of the show started off with an opening keynote by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who welcomed the more than six thousand attendees, thanking them for their commitment to the company and for all their hard work, saying that "without you, there would be no Microsoft."

He also pointed out that, although there had never been more platform choices for developers than are available today, Microsoft's platforms remained the most compelling for a number of reasons.

These included the fact that the company always builds its own key applications to ensure that its platform works well, end-to-end, for its customers; that, because of the scope of Microsoft's reach, its key platforms have a good chance of reaching critical mass, providing a stable foundation for developers; and that the company never loses sight of the fact that its partners have to be successful in order for it to thrive and flourish.

There is also new value to be had for users, developers and businesses, through the combination of the best of software with the best services, Ozzie said, before announcing the Azure Services Platform, which he described as a new service in the cloud and a new Windows offering a

Live ID to support OpenIDOctober 27

More good news coming out of PDC today! Windows Live ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

This means that Windows Live ID accounts will be able to be used to sign in to any OpenID Web site. The Windows Live ID OpenID Provider (OP) enables anyone with a Windows Live ID account to set up an OpenID alias and to use that alias for identification at an increasing number of OpenID 2.0 relying party sites-for example: Plaxo, Pibb, StackOverflow.com and Wikispaces.

Also, in his blog earler today about the Azure Services Platform, Sam Ramji talked about how, as part of Microsoft's commitment to openness and working with open source communities, he asked the Open Source Technology Center (led by Tom Hanrahan) to come up with some specific examples that show how open source communities can access Windows Azure.

This work has resulted in several ‘proofs of concept' which show

Opening Day: Azure Platform DebutsOctober 27

Today at PDC in Los Angeles, Ray Ozzie unveiled the Azure Services Platform, which will enable developers to build the next generation of applications - spanning all the way from the cloud to the enterprise data center.  My team's focus has been on making sure that this platform treats open source development technologies as first-class citizens.

A key components of the Azure Services Platform is Windows Azure, an infrastructure that provides core capabilities such as virtualized computation, scalable storage, and automated service management. Developers will be able to build or extend parts or complete service-based applications using Live Services, .Net Services and SQL Services.

They will also be able to choose from a range of open source development tools and technologies, and be able to access Azure services using a variety of common internet standards, including HTTP, REST, WS* and Atom.    

The Azure platform's goal is to support all developers and their choice of IDE, language and technology.  We are also providing programmable components that can be consumed by other applications, and Microsoft is funding and sponsoring open source software development kits to enable Java and Ruby developers to take advantage of Azure.

This is significant as this is the first time we are delivering cross-platform software development kits at the same time as Microsoft Developer Network software

InteroperabilityOctober 24

Getting external feedback is always a good thing, and something that Microsoft has been trying to do a lot more of, particularly with regard to its focus on openness and interoperability with various open source communities.

So it was with great interest that I read the trip report for the CIFS Conference and AD Plugfest, by Andrew Bartlett of the Samba Team, which is a candid assessment of the great challenges, successes and frustrations that are part and parcel of such complex arrangements.

But all that has been achieved so far is in large measure due to the passion, commitment, dedication and tenacity of the Samba team, and their openness to working towards a shared goal. This is truly a great example of how Microsoft and those in the open source community can work productively together.

While there has been some skepticism that Microsoft's focus on interoperability is simply for compliance sake, the reality is that the work the company has been doing with Samba and others are concrete examples of our commitment to openness and to working with open source communities.  

So, the background to this is that, in late 2007, the Protocol Freedom In

Open MessagingOctober 24

We've been working with a range of open source projects in the last few years, and each one has taught us something - both what to do more of, and what to change. One of the things we've learned in listening to very specific customer needs, is that there is an emerging pattern of shared software development that will drive changes in how companies buy vs. build software.

Messaging (and I mean enterprise messaging, rather than email) is an area that is of keen interest to customers like JP Morgan Chase and Credit Suisse First Boston. As they run their businesses on real-time messaging, they need to be deep experts, and drive changes in their messaging platforms to fit their business. Along with companies like Cisco, Novell, iMatix, RabbitMQ, WSO2, and Red Hat, these industry leaders have built a standard for ubiquitous messaging: AMQP. 

The Advanced Message Queueing Protocol is an open specification supported by open source communities and currently implemented by Apache QPID, RabbitMQ, and OpenAMQ.  The contributors established the AMQP Working Group as a body to manage the process of developing the specification.

It's my pleasure to announce that