Event at Microsoft

Hi All,

Today I attended the "Microsoft Solutions Day 2012" event at the Microsoft office Singapore. I chose Track 2:

• Creating Compelling App-Experiences (by Hammad Rajjoub Architect Evangelist, Microsoft Singapore) using Windows 8 and tablet
• Realizing Platform Value - Building Business Solutions with SharePoint (by Alan Dias,  Microsoft Singapore )

and jumped into Track 1

• Optimizing SQL Server 2012 for private cloud in a hybrid IT environment (by Prakash Sawant,  Microsoft Singapore)

1. Creating Compelling App-Experiences: 
   Hammad used a tablet for demonstration of Windows 8. And the demo was superb. In my humble opinion Windows 8 tablet was better than iPad 2. Microsoft had made some key investments such as
   => New Windows Runtime (WinRT) APIs.  I found a very interesting blog post that dissects WinRT. To summarize new Windows 8 Metro style is empowered by WinRT and exposed as XAML which is asynchronous. Windows WinRT are native (C/C++, HTML/Javascript and .NET)
   => New Application Execution Environment and it means that applications that are forefront for the users would be visible and other applications that user has opened but not used for a while would be suspended.   
   => New Windows Store. The store is certified, secured and would be provisioned as sandbox solution. Developers can build their own apps and deploy to store. Microsoft would charge reasonable of 20% for paid application.
   
   

   

   Windows 8 WinRT Architecture (MSDN)

2. Realizing Platform Value - Building Business Solutions with SharePoint- It was more into Visio 2010, InfoPath 2010 and for end user experience in SharePoint 2010.
3. Optimizing SQL Server 2012 for private cloud in a hybrid IT environment - Prakash gave insights for new features of SQL Server 2012 which are:
   => Mission critical confidence
   => Blazing fast performance via in memory column store
   => Managed Self Service BI
   
   Earlier Microsoft gave licence from 1997 to 2012 based on CPU. However, Microsoft licence will be NOT CPU but core. Thus, Standard edition it would be CPU and Core but for Enterprise edition it would purely be core based. Click here for more details. I asked Prakash whether next version SharePoint will be backed by SQL Server 2012. He mentioned that even in SharePoint 2010 we can use SQL Server 2012 and next version would be SQL Server 2012.      

Cheers,
--aaroh

References:
1) Windows 8 Consumer Preview
2) SQL Server 2012