TechEd Day 1 via the BizTalk Blog

My co-worker buddy Kent Weare (yes, a company where two, count them two MVPs sit side by side and don't beat the crap out of each other) is down at TechEd 2009 this week in Los Angeles. Hopefully he'll be giving a blow-by-blow report on the happenings on down there (as most bloggers are doing, all except me) so I'll live vicariously through him.

He's posted a good recap of the first day here. He talks about MEDV and APPV, two virtualization techniques that are available with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 (which has it's own offerings via Hyper-V). MEDV is the "Windows XP Mode" reported back in April where you can run XP applications on non-XP systems. It's just a virtualized version of XP which will ship with the Business and Enterprise versions of Windows 7. APPV is very similar to this but works on portions of the application rather than the entire app. Both are basically the same as what you might see with Citrix or Fusion on the Mac. Kent also talks about BizTalk 2009 and integration with "the cloud" (via Azure services). We've been looking at the cloud for awhile for using it as a service provider and deliverying regulated energy information to end users without having to be the sole keepers of the infrastructure. The cloud technologies are also very interesting from a SharePoint perspective as you can have each web front end living in the cloud sharing the load of serving up centralized application information. More details on this stuff as things get more solid in the Azure space.

BTW, if you're looking for some quality BizTalk content Kent's yer man. His blog is chock full of oodles of cool techno BizTalk babble and while the quantity of posts isn't huge (he's no Ayende, but then nobody is) his quality is top notch.