It is not easy to keep pace with Microsoft projects and products naming. There are literally dozens of names to follow and sometimes it seems they change so fast we are already skipping some when we check them! In order to help others (and myself) with this task, I'm writing this post.
This obviously will not be a revelation for many of us, but I think it is helpful to aggregate all the names in one place so anyone can look for a specific name and get a small description of it, without having to search the web trying to understand how the whole thing fits together.
I really want to give due credit to the sources I used, so please check the links I'm referring to at end of this post and read them whenever you need to know the full details of each topic.
Azure: Is a group of cloud technologies, each providing a specific set of services to application developers.
Azure Services Platform: Can be used both by applications running in the cloud and by applications running on local systems. Its components include: Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services and Live Services. This is what was briefly known as "Windows Strata".
Windows Azure: Is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. It provides a Windows-based computing and storage environment in the cloud and is what networks and manages the set of Windows Server 2008 machines that comprise the Microsoft-hosted cloud. At the highest level, has four components: Storage (like a file system); the "fabric controller", which is a management system for modeling/deploying and provisioning; virtualized computation/VM; and a development environment, which allows developers to emulate Windows Azure on their desktops and plug in Visual Studio, Eclipse or other tools to write cloud applications against it. This is what used to be code-named "Red Dog".
.NET Services: Are a set of Microsoft-hosted, highly scalable, developer-oriented services that provide key building blocks required by many cloud-based and cloud-aware applications. Much like the .NET Framework provides higher-level class libraries that make developers more productive, .NET Services allows a developer to focus on their application logic as opposed to building and deploying their own cloud-based infrastructure services. The current services set include: .NET Access Control Service, .NET Service Bus and .NET Workflow Service. These services were previously known as "Zurich" and later as "Biztalk Services".
.NET Access Control Service: Provides an enterprise-class mechanism for enforcing access control rules and authorization as a web service. It supports federated scenarios to support enforcement of access control rules where users may come from multiple organizations or utilize different identification protocols.
.NET Service Bus: Enables secure connectivity between services and applications behind firewall or network boundaries, facilitating cross-organizational communication. Additionally the service bus allows service functionality to be exposed easily and consumed from other applications in a loosely coupled manner using a variety of communication patterns. Creating an infrastructure to facilitate this type of communication involves significant challenges related to authentication, naming, and secure cross organizational firewall traversal. The .NET Service Bus provides a hosted, secure, standards-based infrastructure that dramatically reduces the barriers to applications communicating across systems and organizational boundaries.
.NET Workflow Service: Is a hosted offering that executes user defined declarative workflows in a scalable and reliable manner, greatly simplifying the need to write complex code to orchestrate the interactions between services. The Workflow service allows you to declaratively configure a predefined set of activities and works as an agent to manage and execute the interactions between services.
SQL Services: Provides a cloud database today through SQL Data Services, with more cloud-based data services planned. Delivers on Microsoft’s Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities in cloud as web-based services. It enables you to store data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents. SQL Services will deliver a rich set of integrated services for relational database, search, reporting, analytics and data synchronization with mobile users, remote offices and business partners.
SQL Data Services: Offers highly scalable and Internet-facing distributed database services for storing and processing relational queries. It helps you develop and provision new applications quickly with REST and SOAP based web protocols. The services are built on robust SQL Server database and Windows Server technologies, providing high availability and security.
Live Framework: The Live Framework is a simple, open, and interoperable framework for developers to access Live Services from a variety of platforms, programming languages, applications and devices.
Live Services: Through the Live Framework, provides access to data from Microsoft’s Live applications and others. The Live Framework also allows synchronizing this data across desktops and devices, finding and downloading applications, and more.
Dublin: Extensions to the Windows Server application server, that provide improved server support for running and managing service-oriented business logic. Dublin extends the Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) and Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 with support for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and WF-based applications. Dublin will initially be made available for download and use by Windows Server customers, then later included directly in future releases of Windows Server.
Oslo: A group of technologies aimed at creating and running model-driven applications and more. The Oslo technologies include a repository, providing a common place to store a range of information about your IT environment; a modeling language family, code-named M, for describing that information; and a modeling tool, code-named Visual Studio Quadrant, for working with repository information.
M - The Oslo Modeling Language: Is a modern, declarative language for working with data. M lets users write down how they want to structure and query their data using a convenient textual syntax that is convenient to both author and read. This language was briefly known as "D" Language.
Quadrant - The Oslo Design Surface: Is a tool for interacting with data and it is completely data-driven. In the current supported implementation, it stores every bit of data in SQL Server. You have a canvas where you can drag everything you can work with on that canvas. Icons that are blue can be dragged out and placed on the canvas again to get a full view of that item again. That way you can drill down on all models.
The Oslo Repository: Is a SQL Server 2008 database for storing all types of metadata and models for the enterprise. The repository plays a central role in the "Oslo" vision of creating a platform for building and managing applications. "Oslo" modeling platform tools and technologies rely on models to design, develop, deploy, and manage these applications. The Repository provides a central location to store and retrieve these models, which makes it a unifying foundation for all of "Oslo" modeling platform.
Geneva Server: Is the next release of Microsoft’s Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS). It also provides broad support for claims-based identity. For example, unlike its predecessor, the Geneva Server implements an STS that generates SAML tokens in response to WS-Trust requests. Also unlike AD FS, which supported only Web browsers, the Geneva Server supports both browsers and other clients, such as those built using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). This means the Geneva Server supports both active and passive clients, while AD FS supported only passive clients. Another important difference from the original AD FS is that the Geneva Server supports both WS-Federation and the SAML 2.0 protocol, letting it work in a broader range of environments.
CardSpace Geneva: Is the successor to an existing Microsoft technology, the original CardSpace. This identity selector can be used both with Web browsers, including Internet Explorer and Firefox, and with other Windows clients, such as WCF applications.
Geneva Framework: Is a set of .NET Framework classes that implement basic functions, such as receiving a token, verifying its signature, accessing the claims it contains, and more. For situations where the Geneva Server STS isn’t sufficient, the Geneva Framework also provides support for building your own STS. One important example of this already exists: The Geneva Server itself is built on the Geneva Framework. This was previously called "Zermatt".
ADO.NET Data Services: Is a combination of patterns and libraries that enable the creation and consumption of data services for the web. The goal of the ADO.Net Data Services framework is to facilitate the creation of flexible data services that are naturally integrated with the web, using URIs to point to pieces of data and simple, well-known formats to represent that data, such as JSON and plain XML. This results in the data service being surfaced to the web as a REST-style resource collection that is addressable with URIs and that agents can interact with using the usual HTTP verbs such as GET, POST or DELETE. Many of the Microsoft cloud data services (Windows Azure tables, SQL Data Services, etc.) expose data using the same REST interaction conventions followed by ADO.NET Data Services. This enables using the ADO.NET Data Services client libraries and developer tools when working not only with on premises services created using the ADO.NET Data Services Framework, but also with hosted cloud services. This was formerly known as Project "Astoria".
Visual Studio Team System 2010: Is the next version of Visual Studio and .NET Framework. This was code-named "Rosario".
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I'll try to keep this post updated. Meanwhile, in case you want to read the whole stories, here are my sources:
Azure Services Platform FAQ
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed
Introducing Geneva
An Overview of the Azure Services Platform
Workflows, Services, and Models - A First Look at WF 4.0, “Dublin”, and “Oslo”
The Oslo Modeling Language, Draft Specification - October 2008
"Oslo" Repository Overview
"Oslo": Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience
ADO.NET Data Services
A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms