The MicroTrain Blog

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I have not seen that movie really but my topic fits quite well.  Cloud computing, what’s the rage all about? In a gist, it’s virtualization in the Internet.

Virtualization is having a physical box with various services in it being used by the clients. Make that available in the cloud, in the Internet then you have ben doing cloud computing for all you know.

A basic example of cloud computing is when new software needs to be rolled-out to the clients; an organization has to test it first in an environment mirroring the actual computer where it's supposed to run eventually, right? This is a guarantee that it will work well as expected since it was tested in such a platform.

The only drawback however in this above example is there are times new software has to be tested not just in one platform bur rather in different ones which in the end will be costly for the company to recreate. This is when cloud computing will plays a big role. No more worry for software licensing and other related issues in setting up an environment just to test the new software. Cloud computing has different flavors following the industries requirement for it. You just have to know which one you're looking for and go for it.

There is "Software as a Service" or a.k.a. Saas. In Saas, the service resides entirely in the server in the cloud and customers are connecting to it thru the browser.

There is also an Attached Service wherein the service provided is application specific. For example, iTunes which is useful for playing music and more but when attached as a service, it allows buying of audio and video of your favorite artists.

Other type is Cloud Platform wherein the customers are developers and not just simply typical users. This type of cloud is much more powerful since it allows the developers to develop their application using the cloud in different platforms.
 
All these are considered the general categories of cloud computing. In some articles, books, whitepapers, it can be broken down further into different types or extensions of al these flavors. You may have to look for these terminologies when learning and discovering how cloud will work for you.

These are the Utility Computing, Internet Integration, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Managed Service Providers (MSP), Web Services in the Cloud and Service Commerce.

You may also want to look for cloud computing from known vendors which I listed below:
-    Amazon EC2
-    Microsoft Azure
-    ADP Payroll Processing
-    Google Desktop Apps
-    Salesforce.com

Cloud computing is still considered at an infancy stage. But bear in mind, this could be something so big in the next years to come. In my next blog on this, we’ll talk about security in the cloud and a host of different isues concerning it.

Several years back, the only technology Microsoft developers use to work with database is ADO. Microsoft has a new baby that comes with their Visual Studio called LINQ.

LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query. The idea of LINQ is to address database development in the context of Object Oriented Programming development model. LINQ has a great power of querying relational, object and XML data. Microsoft categorizes it into three parts.

1.LINQ to Object (those that are in-memory cache)
2.LINQ to ADO .NET (relational)
3.LINQ to XML (xml source)

If you know SQL querying, LINQ will be easy to learn. Below are the nicest things with LINQ:

1.No more CRUD development since you are guided as you type your code thru the Visual Studio intellisense
2.No more grueling hunt for object name change like table name references by the LINQ code
since build errors can be easily followed and corrected thru debugging

LINQ as a whole is exciting and an entirely new technology which I truly believe has good potential and will be around for a long time just like the ADO. Both of these technologies will be the platform for database development in the .NET platform.

LINQ is included in the Visual Studio 2008 with codename ORCAS.  There are virtual images that have ORCAS in it to sample your first LINQ programming. Check out the Microsoft website for more details where to download it.  It should be “Visual Studio Orcas”!