‘ ‘ ‘ Microsoft has been talking for some time about moving applications to the Internet. ‘ ‘… ‘ ‘ ‘ Microsoft has been talking for some time about moving applications to the Internet. ‘ ‘ ‘ Companies wouldn’t have to think very hard about deployment of new applications, nor would they have that pesky problem of Office 2003 / Office 2007 interconnection. Every employee in a company or every student in a school would simply run their applications off the Internet. Everyone would have the same versions, everyone would have the same possible levels of functionality. ‘ ‘ ‘ Only recently did Microsoft actually come out with something displayable. Windows Azure, Microsoft’s new product, promises to provide a comprehensive development environment for Internet or network-deployed applications. ‘ ‘ ‘ It will come complete with promised support for languages other than the Microsoft .NET framework and will play nicely with all existing Microsoft technology. ‘ ‘ ‘ So how does Windows Azure work? Microsoft would like developers to think about the Azure development system as a cloud. Although this might cause feelings of weakness and general randomness ‘mdash; a standard across Microsoft technologies ‘mdash; the analogy seems to fit quite well. ‘ ‘ ‘ Windows Azure is an environment for deployment and not an operating system, per se. It simply is a collection of coding technologies that allow developers to write applications and distribute them on a predetermined area of the Internet for ‘consumption’ by users. ‘ ‘ ‘ Pieces of the Windows Azure cloud include the now-venerable Microsoft .NET framework, giving developers the opportunity to develop applications using their familiar Microsoft Visual Studio and their now-popular C#. ‘ ‘ ‘ Microsoft promises to plug Windows Azure into Python and the Eclipse platform to further increase compatibility and flexibility while pacifying those who want to run their software on a Windows environment but abhor the thought of using .NET. ‘ ‘ ‘ Microsoft also wants the Windows Azure platform to be fully business-friendly. To that end, Microsoft added implementations of its enterprise-level SQL Server software. Businesses will be able to deploy enterprise-level database applications on Windows Azure as easily as they deploy them on a dedicated network server. ‘ ‘ ‘ Microsoft’s new ‘Live Services’ addition to Windows Azure will also make the entire system media-friendly, giving ‘consumers’ of Azure applications the opportunity to collect, manipulate and generally work with photos, movies and music clips. ‘ ‘ ‘ With a bit of clever programming, Microsoft claims applications can be written for the Azure ‘cloud’ and even designed to run on a network-enabled mobile phone. ‘ ‘ ‘ Sounds perfect. Why does Microsoft seem to be so brilliant all of a sudden?’ ‘ ‘ ‘ Put simply, they aren’t thinking of anything outrageously new. Thin clients have been around for quite some time. Only recently has the bandwidth been made available to allow thin client systems to even flirt with feasibility. ‘ ‘ ‘ This is not to say that businesses haven’t been interested. Sun Microsystems showed off one of its newest thin-client offerings at the computer science job fair at Pitt. Like a good rooted soundly in Unix technology, the Sun system was tightly account- and transaction-based’ ‘ ‘ Microsoft also more than likely sees this as an opportunity to finally wed many companies to Microsoft technology. ‘ ‘ ‘ If enterprise-level applications are written in the .NET framework, they can stand a chance of being cross-platform. Although tools to run .NET applications on Unix, Linux and Macintosh OS X are still in their infancy and not fully supportive of the entire .NET framework, they still do provide some alternative to being completely Microsoft-centric. Applications running on Windows Azure, for now, will not only use the .NET framework, but must plug into a Microsoft SQL Server database. ‘ ‘ ‘ Microsoft is, at least, giving open source developers the opportunity to develop .NET applications with other software tools. Some people just absolutely hate Microsoft Visual Studio.