Its been years in development, and even internally information was scarce until Microsoft publicly announced the release of Windows Azure at the Professional Developers Conference in LA this week.
Codenamed RedDog, Windows Azure is a platform for developers to build applications which run inside Microsofts datacentres. This is in contrast to Amazon Web Services (AWS) which provide a computing platform. For example, using AWS you’ll need to build a virtual machine image and then upload this into AWS. Azure takes care of any virtual machines, letting the developer focus on the application and less on the plumbing.
There are quite a few posts providing details on Azure, I’d suggest you looking at this post from Mary-Jo Foley, the long-time Microsoft watcher whom I met last week.
Today, Azure is running in Microsoft’s Quincy facility, which I had the chance to visit in December last year despite winter storms, road closures and avalanches resulting in a 120mile journey taking around 7 hours. Mike Manos, the man at the top of Microsofts datacentre management tree allowed the BBC to film inside recently, the video can be seen here.
A few colleagues just shared a utility they use to automatically change thewir desktop background image at preset intervals, its called John’s Background Switcher (JBS). I’ve seen literally dozens of these type of utilities over the years and have not been impressed with any of them. Eitehr because their user interface was terrible or I didn’t trust the software not to by spyware. What I like about JBS is the number of sources you can configure for photos – it supports your photos in the the Piuctures folder of your computer plus a load of internet photo sharing sites, including Flickr. What more, you can tell it to use tags, so I’ve set it up on my laptop to display photos tagged with “mountains” it finds on Flickr.
Lets see if I keep this running on my laptop for long, or get annoyed with the number of average photos it finds…
I picked up my replacement laptop on Wednesday and yesterday used Windows Easy Transfer to move my settings and data across from the temporary Windows XP laptop. The process was really simple and I was impressed with how quickly it moved my 5.25Gb of data and settings (less than 45 minutes).
The only things which failed were a 2Gb Outlook PST file which seemed to get corrupted during the transfer (I just used a USB memory stick to copy this over again) and network printers (which I needed to delete and re-install). End to end, it took me about an hour to move off my old laptop onto the new one – complete with all my IE favourites, email, address book, documents and files, desktop settings etc etc etc. I used an Easy Transfer cable which connects the two computers via USB, but you could just as easily use the network or CD/DVD/External HD/USB memory stick.
So, next time you buy a new PC don’t go and waste money paying PC World to transfer files, and don’t fall for the salesman selling you some additional software – just use Windows Easy Transfer which is part of Vista and a free download for XP.