Microsoft's Hosting Summit 2007 - Day 2

Yesterday was the second day at the Hosting Summit. There are folks from around the world here. We started off with great keynotes from Michael O'Hara and John Zanni, and of course, a hilarious spoof of <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1cfb4779-b760-4884-8146-53997c802b65&DisplayLang=en">Devil Wears Prada</a> from the Exchange team. Highlights include <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=D6EF5386-0F76-4F58-A6C6-1FE7B5BE56CA&displaylang=en">WBH 4.5</a> being released and the HMC solution being driven by a new group run by Dave Thompson, with the horizon showing cool things like a migration kit from 3.5 to 4.0.

Being a technology blog, our focus is on Technology for Hosting - the presentation from Scott Guthrie was very good, Bill Staples did some amazing demos of IIS 7 and in a later session expanded on the benefits of IIS 7 for hosters. The key message being that IIS 7 is built for hosting. There are a number of design changes and features around hosting, isolation and performance. For IIS 7 Server Beta 3, there will be a go live license enabling hosters to go into production with IIS 7. Dan Winn from SQL followed up with an overview of SQL, a demo of the Publishing Wizard and info about what SQL editions to use for shared, dedicated and virtual dedicated. Their team is also working on hosting guidance for SQL and a web administration tool.

What a day... now onto Day 3, the final day!