Saturday, January 03, 2009

The SQL Data Services Team’s Recent Silence Isn’t Golden

The silence of the S[S]DS team since PDC 2008 has been deafening. There hasn’t been a new post in the SQL Data Services Team Blog since Microsoft Announces Windows Azure and Azure Services Platform of 10/27/2008.

Soumitra Sangupta responded to my “A Vote for Transparency” Guest Opinion for Visual Studio Magazine’s August 2008 Issue post of 7/29/2008 and editorial with his On going quiet and transparency in the design process post of 8/15/2008 as follows:

I am very hopeful that post PDC, we will be progressively be more open about our features and design.

Evangelist David Robinson hasn’t posted since Performance gains running your queries in parallel of 11/8/2008, and normally prolific Ryan Dunn has only made a couple of on-topic announcements following his Refreshed REST library for SQL Data Services post of 11/11/2008. 11/11/2008 is the date of the last post to the .Net Services Team Blog.

The vast majority of current Azure-related Microsoft posts and sample projects are devoted to Blob Services, Table Services and, less frequently, Queue Services and LiveID authentication.

The third-party developer community is still waiting for news of a SDS sprint that implements SDS schemas, full-text search, the ADO.NET provider model and other promised features.

What’s up, folks?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would guess that some teams are busy preparing for, or in the midst of, the [rumoured] upcoming MS reorg/RIF.

You can see that not only SSDS but also many other MSFT teams have not posted much (or any) new stuff in their blogs, e.g. ado.net, oslo etc have been fairly quiet lately too.

My personal guess would be that more than one of the 'new things' from PDC 2008 will not see daylight, at least not in 2010. <- disclaimer: pure speculation

Roger Jennings (--rj) said...

@Kris,

I doubt if any Azure technical teams are suffering from an impending RIF, especially SDS. Azure appears to me to be at the top of MSFT's current priority list.

It's hard to pick the "keepers" in the feature lists, especially in the Live list.

--rj

Anonymous said...

Roger,

We've been a bit more silent than usual because the features we've been focusing on have been more of a operational nature (and therefore not customer facing). This should explain the recent silence (along with the holidays).

Hope it helps,

--Jeff--