Monday, October 13, 2008

Silverlight 2 to be released tomorrow

A few week after the Release Candidate, Microsoft announce the final release of Silverlight.
Tomorrow, Oct 14th the final release will be available for download on the official Silverlight website.

We are all eager to see that final release...

Thursday, October 2, 2008

EC2 Will finally support Windows

Amazon announced that they will support Windows operating system later this fall. This is indeed great news for ASP.net developers. It will give them a chance to leverage the rock solid infrastructure of Amazon.
EC2 has been continuously improving, adding static ip addresses, Multiple Locations and more recently the long awaited Elastic Block Store (EBS). They've also expanded the number of instance types available, adding High CPU instances for computer intensive applications.
All those features made EC2 "ready for prime time" when using a *NIX OS and it is not surprising to see that Oracle recently announced its partnership with Amazon and allowed migration of existing licenses to EC2.

Amazon is now going to compete with other Cloud providers that were supporting Windows OS such as FlexiScale, Mosso or GoGrid to name a few. We have yet to see how Windows will perform on EC2 and especially how it will connect to EBS. Some will argue that Windows was already supported by using QEMU, however everyone that tested that configuration will agree with me in saying that it was not suitable for production use.