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Python Tools for Visual Studio – Beta

Mar 102011

A new plugin for Visual Studio 2010 is available on Codeplex. From the project website:

Python Tools for Visual Studio is a free & open source plug-in for Visual Studio 2010 from Microsoft’s Technical Computing Group. PTVS enables developers to use all the major productivity features of Visual Studio to build Python code using either CPython or IronPython and adds new features such as using High Performance Computing clusters to scale your code. Together with one of the standard distros, you can turn Visual Studio into a powerful Technical Computing IDE…

Note: PTVS is not a Python distribution; it works with your existing Python/IronPython installation to provide you an integrated editing and debugging experience.

The feature overview looks quite impressive, even hints support for Windows Azure in a later version:

Advanced editing, Intellisense, browsing, “Find all”, REPL, …
Supports CPython and IronPython
Local & Cluster/remote debugging
Profiling with multiple views
Interactive parallel computing via integrated IPython REPL
Support for HPC clusters and MPI, including debugging support
NumPy & SciPy for .Net
Support for Cloud Computing (soon)
Support for Dryad (large scale, data-intensive parallel programming) (soon)
Free & Open Source (Apache 2.0)

Datacenter responds to temperature changes

Cloud, Economics No Responses »

Aug 232010

“Most people slow down as the weather gets hotter. Purdue University has applied that logic to its data center, developing software that can slow server activity as temperature rises. This technique recently allowed Purdue’s data center to continue operating during several cooling outages, throttling down server activity to prevent the room from overheating.”

Advice for IT Pro Careers

Cloud No Responses »

Aug 232010

Found this article in Norway’s Computerworld. We all know change is inevitable but like with anything else touched by information technology, things accelerate. Don’t get behind!

"The rate of change [in IT] has accelerated dramatically," says Alain Chesnais, president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and founder of Visual Transitions, which specializes in computer graphics and social networks. Consider, he says, that graphics chips are doubling in capacity every six months. That translates into a thousandfold increase in capacity over a five-year period — the average shelf life of most game platforms. "We’ve never seen anything like it in any industry," he says.

Head in the Clouds, Cost under Control?

Cloud, Economics No Responses »

Dec 132009

How to figure out what the cost implications (hopefully savings) of cloud computing are? There are as many different pricing models as there are players.

Price per service being not the sole decision criteria, is certainly very important. Most major players offer some sort of ROI calculator or cost analyzer. Here’s what Amazon and Microsoft provide.

Amazon Cost Comparison Calculator

The AWS Economics Center provides access to information, tools, and resources to compare the costs of Amazon Web Services with IT infrastructure alternatives. Our goal is to help developers and business leaders quantify the economic benefits (and costs) of cloud computing.

As part of the center they offer a couple of tools:

Amazon EC2 Cost Comparison Calculator. A more or less sophisticated Excel spreadsheet ”…designed to help you quantify the direct economic benefits (or costs) of cloud computing”.
The AWS Simple Calculator. A simple html based utility helping with understanding the basic cost structure of Amazon Services you might want to use. It also provides a few customer examples to get you started

Windows Azure Platform TCO and ROI Calculator

The TCO calculator enables companies to not only find out which Windows Azure configuration might be the best fit for they scenario, it also helps to figure out what this will cost and how this compares to your current costs.

The TCO analyzer is available from the pricing info web page for the Windows Azure platform.

The Grandfather of Cloud Computing, not

Cloud 1 Response »

Nov 292009

Over on Rough Type, Nicolas Carr’s blog, he points to a document dated from March 30, 1965. In this document Western Union describes its plan to build “a nationwide information utility, which will enable subscribers to obtain, economically, efficiently, immediately, the required information flow to facilitate the conduct of business and other affairs." Sound familiar?

I love Nicolas’ conclusion:

“When the history of cloud computing is written, it may be that Western Union will play the role that Xerox now plays in the history of the personal computer: the company that saw the future first, but couldn’t capitalize on its vision.”

When reading the blog post I was reminded of the battle between Western Union and Alexander Graham Bell almost a century earlier. Here’s a short version of that story.

Microsoft in the Cloud

Cloud No Responses »

Nov 162009

This week is the Microsoft (now annual?) Professional Developers Conference PDC 2009 in Los Angeles. We are expecting lots of news about current and future Microsoft products and news about the company’s cloud computing strategy.

Microsoft, side by side with Amazon, Google, SalesForce and maybe Yahoo! is a player in the cloud computing space and with products like Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Microsoft Online Services (BPOS), Exchange Online, certainly one of the heavyweights in everything cloud.

As always, this year’s PDC is first and foremost a conference for developers. And Steve Ballmer is right, a successful infrastructure, platform or service requires “developers, developers, developers”. So they will be getting quite an earful about the Microsoft cloud story. It will be a big coming out party.

But let us not forget we are not there yet. In today’s world of traditional computing, powered by servers in closets, server rooms or datacenters you need highly skilled and experienced IT Professionals keeping things performing, up to date and alive. But what will happen to admins, IT Pros and network and server guys once we use our apps in the cloud?

One of the goals for this blog is to provide IT Pros with the necessary insight and information about “cloud computing”:

What is this thing “the cloud”?
Who are the players in the cloud?
How do their offerings differ?
On-premise vs. off-premise
Private cloud vs. public cloud
XaaS (Everything-as-a-Service)
What should an IT Pro expect 1, 3, 5 years after PDC2009?

Stay tuned for more information about PDC and beyond.

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