BiTKOO is a small private company doing great things in the identity and authorization management space.

After working at Microsoft on Visual Studio extensions for the past 2+ years  (Windows Live Mesh app tools, then Visual Studio Tools for Windows Azure) it’s time to do something different.  I’ve learned a lot about Visual Studio innards and WPF construction techniques and worked with a lot of great people at Microsoft.

One thing I’ve learned over the years at Borland, Google, Cooliris, and Microsoft is this: The software industry is far too small to ever really say “Goodbye”.  Whether as future co-workers, clients, speakers or conference attendees, chances are good that we’ll meet again.

One of the fun things I like about BiTKOO is that it’s large enough to have a strong product line and revenue stream, but small enough that I can crash on the CEO’s couch when I’m in town.

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New features in this release:

• Full support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM
• .NET 4 support – You can now build your Windows Azure web apps and services using either .NET 3.5 or the new .NET 4.0 platform.
• Cloud Storage Explorer: browse the tables and blobs in your Windows Azure account from within VS
• Built-in Deployment: deploy your project to the Windows Azure cloud from within VS, with detailed status info every step of the way
• Service monitoring: monitor the status of your services in the cloud using the new ‘compute’ node in VS Server Explorer
• IntelliTrace support for debugging cloud service activity, with automatic log retrieval.  Requires VS 2010 Ultimate and .NET 4.0

More info on Jim’s blog post

Enjoy!

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I did a bit of proof of concept work using MEF about a year ago.  MEF is all about composition of providers and consumers.  MEF’s main job is to connect the providers to the consumers so that when the consumer code executes, the providers they require are “just there.”

As trivial as that sounds, it significantly changes how you think about programming.  It forces you to think in terms of composition instead of in terms of plumbing and bushwhacking.  As a result, you can focus more energy on solving your actual problem instead of spending the majority of your time building the plumbing and scaffolding so that you can get to the point where you can begin to solve your problem.

For example, if you’re writing some code and you require “X” to get your work done, you write your MEF code module to declare your need for “X”.  When your module is loaded by MEF, MEF will take care of the dirty details of finding a provider to fill your need for “X”.  The provider may be the one you had in mind when you wrote the code, or it may be completely different, but as long as it implements “X” faithfully, you don’t really care.  The application defines the list of providers to choose from – whether a fixed list determined at build time or a list gathered at runtime – the point is, you and your code don’t need to deal with the how, just declare the what and keep going.

MEF alters your coding thought process from

“I need to figure out how to load and connect to something to get the X that I need”

to

“I need X.  I can rely on X being here when my code executes.  If for whatever reason X isn’t available, my code won’t be loaded so I don’t have to mess with all that.”

This change in thought process is similar to the shift that can and should occur when you go from writing traditional fire-brigade error handling code to writing code in an exception handling environment. For most of the code in your app (the middle layers), you can operate under the mantra of “If execution gets this far, then everything prior to this must have succeeded.  If anything back there failed, it would have thrown an exception so I wouldn’t be here now.”

I’ll see if I can get clearance to blog about my little MEF experiment from awhile ago.

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Check it out!

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Windows Azure Tools also received coverage on Soma’s blog – woot!  Soma is Senior Vice President, Developer Division, and my nth degree boss’s boss.

While Jim is out working hard at PDC, back at the ranch we’re taking advantage of the calm following the PDC prep and product release storm to get a head start on the next round of features for Windows Azure Tools.

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