Some of you may have been heard the announcement at MIX that Microsoft will be creating SQL Server Data Services - basically on-demand data services in the cloud.  From the official SSDS site...

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) are highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing web services. Businesses use storage resources as needed transforming large upfront capital and operations expenditures into much smaller on-demand costs.

Some cool stuff to be sure.  It's is on-demand, virtually unlimited storage capacity, and its all wrapped in nice REST and SOAP interfaces along with a ready-to-use code library (C# and VB, but with XML as the primary wire format you can go to town with the language/platform of your choice).  At the time, Microsoft was just announcing its intention to deliver this type of service in the future.  Well, the future is getting here pretty quick and you can sign up now to be one of the participants in the closed beta.  You can get some more info about SSDS at the Project Astoria site. 

What am I talking about?  Well, the folks over in Microsoft Robotics continue to crank out versions of software for creating some cool robotic stuff.  They announced last week the release of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 CTP April is now available. What is even more interesting is that it appears that enterprise customers are starting to take an interest in Robotics stuff as well.  From the article..

“We’re seeing interested in the enterprise space,” Trower said, “for mail handling, financial trading, scientific modeling” and other business applications.

Businesses have discovered that the Microsoft Robotics Studio includes technology that is suited for programming multicore, distributed systems. Specifically, businesses are quite interested in the concurrency and coordination (CCR) and decentralized software services (DSS) runtimes that are currently embedded in the robotics toolkit, Trower said. These runtimes are part of the evolving multicore/distributed programming model into which Microsoft and other tech vendors starting to plow lots of money and development work.

Trower’s team has improved the distributed computational capabilities of the forthcoming version of the toolkit, he said, by building in support for distributed language integrated queries (LINQ), “which reduces network utilization and simplifies service authoring,” according to Microsoft’s April 9 press release.

“In the Microsoft Robotics Studio, you see the new programming model we are creating at Microsoft,” Trower said.

Very interesting.  I had been operating under the impression that this was kind of a "Lego Mindstorm" on steroids type of thing.  Entirely my fault and grossly inaccurate, but robotics (or hardware for that matter) has never really been my thing and I am not much of a gadget freak either, so I had not paid much attention beyond the headlines.  But after reading the article, it is obvious that some very interesting things are going on that have impact in my world as well.  After having watched Terminator 3 again this weekend (slow weekend for sure! - thanks FX) I see now that there may be a lot of "potential" to this whole robot thing, way beyond vacuum cleaners!  As a result, I'm preparing now for my role as a chrome polisher for my robotic master in the new world order.

I interview Rocky Lhotka and Shannon Braun, to luminaries in the Microsoft development world, to discuss their thoughts and impressions of the recent Microsoft MIX Conference held in Las Vegas at the beginning of March.  MIX is Microsoft's premier Next.Web/Web 2.0+ conference that features a "mix" of technology, design, and business topics.

Rocky and Shannon both attended MIX and we spend almost an hour discussing the conference, technology, Silverlight, WPF and more. 

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Yep, it's true.  If you can't make it to a launch event near you, you can now attend one via Second Life.  Heck, even if you attended a launch in person its probably worth checking out the launch in Second Life.  Hit up Zain's blog post with all of the relevant details and session agenda.  There is some stuff you want to do prior to attending, even if you are a Second Lifer already (or at least that is my impression - I have a hard enough time managing one life so I am a newbie when it comes to SL stuff).