Two weeks ago I visited the Pre-Conference of the Microsoft TechDays 2009 in Antwerp.
The last session of the day I visited was given by Miha Kralj, one of the only senior Architects at Microsoft.
Hi talk was about “How IT will change in the next decade”. The presentation was great, covering various topics which have changed over time in IT.
Certainly when he started talking about the evolution in hardware and servers I was really impressed.
He talked about the evolution of servers and also the size of servers.
We at our company recently upgraded all our servers, from standard pcs to rack servers, but we seem already outdated :-(.
19" Rack Server
When he showed the latest “Container Servers” Microsoft was using, I was really impressed.
The image he showed was from an Hp POD (Performance Optimized Data Center), which can serve 3500 compute nodes and 12000 hard drives.
The outside:
Hp POD: Outside
The inside:
Hp POD: Inside
The servers:
Hp POD: Servers
The really cool thing is, that this server only has 3 cables to be connected:
- Power cable
- Network cable
- Water cooling cable
The support model for those kind of servers is also easy.
They allow 10% of the cpu units to die before anyone even thinks on opening the box 
His final statement was that Microsoft almost has 500.000 servers available, which are managed by only !35! people.
So far the future of system administrators, happy I’m not one of them.
On youtube you can find a video with a Tour of the inside and outside of the POD.
Kristof Rennen Hardware Hardware, Hosting, Microsoft, Review, TechDays
What a week for Microsoft users and fanatics.
In my 2 previous posts, I already mentioned the releases of Silverlight 3 Beta and ASP.NET MVC 1.0, but ont he same MIX09 event Microsoft also release Internet Explorer 8.
The new features look promising:
- Accelerators (map to an address, translate a word, find someone on facebook, …)
- Compatibility view (render a website in IE7 when its not fully ready yet for IE8)
- Enhanced tabbed browsing (tab groups, tab colors, …)
- A better back button (for RIA applications support)
- Smarter address bar
- Increased performance (even faster than it already was ;-))
- Web slices (to keep up with frequently updated sites from the favorites bar
- And much more …
I haven’t installed this new version yet, and I will probably wait until I have some feedback from other users.
Its not really a good idea to upgrade to another browser when the web applications you are developing still need to support older Internet Explorer versions.
More information can be found on the official website.
The application can be downloaded from Microsoft’s website.
Kristof Rennen Software Browser, Explorer, Internet, Microsoft, MIX, Software
Great news for the Silverlight fans out there since Microsoft already released the first beta of Silverlight 3 at MIX09.
Its a preview release which continues Silverlight’s track record of rapid innovation, introducing 50+ new features.
Some of the nice new features include:
-
Support for higher quality audio and video (more formats, 720p+ streaming, HD, content protection, …)
-
Empowering richer experiences (animation effects, enhanced control skinning, perspective 3D, …)
-
Improving RIA productivity (60+ controls with source, Search Engine Optimization, improved performance, …)
-
Out of the browser capabilities (life outside the browser, shortcuts, auto-update, …)
Together with this beta release of Silverlight 3, Microsoft also released a first preview of Expression Blend 3.
More information can be found on the official Silverlight website.
The windows developer runtime can be downloaded from Microsoft’s site.
Kristof Rennen Development .NET, Blend, Expression, Microsoft, MIX, Silverlight
Yesterday Microsoft released version 1.0 of its ASP.NET MVC framework.
It finally is production ready, supported and lets hope stable.
I don’t have any experience yet with this new technology, but I’m sure I’m going to check it out somewhere between today and a few weeks.
I will use this opportunity to finally create a proper website for my band Jessie’s Five.
The current version of the website is a temporary one, containing all information but in an ugly shell using static ASP.NET.
The new version of the website will be dynamic and containing an Administration section.
The other band members will be able to update the site themselves, resulting in a more updated site and me not forgetting to do it anymore.
I hope my host Mochahost will support the MVC framework soon, so I can start using it.
For more information on the ASP.NET MVC Framework: http://www.asp.net/mvc/
Version 1.0 can be downloaded from Microsoft’s site.
Kristof Rennen Development .NET, ASP.NET, Jessie's Five, Microsoft, MVC