Fabric and loathing in Vegas: what happened at MS Mix

Radio Reg Microsoft's Mix was intended to introduce developers to the company's cloud platform - Azure Services Platform. Just days before, though, Azure suffered its first outage - 22 hours of darkness.

Microsoft blamed an over-active Fabric Controller for the problem, saying it had taken down healthy server instances instead of just the server instances affected by a network problem.

Sounded suspiciously like the Azure Fabric Controller was learning, and testing our defenses.

It was noteworthy that this Mix saw Azure and Silverlight 3 overshadow the release of the next version of Microsoft’s browser - Internet Explorer 8. Azure and Silverlight also blurred IE in terms of raw sessions - more than 30 compared to four.

It was all so different two years, even a year back, when Microsoft used Mix to launch an IE 8 beta and tried to convince developers to get on board. Even Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer didn’t bother this time around.

In this latest MicroBite, The Register’s software editor Gavin Clarke and All-About-Microsoft blogger Mary-Jo Foley report from Mix, look at why IE took such low billing, and at how Microsoft's focus has shifted to Silverlight 3 and Azure.

Among this show's highlights:

• Microsoft’s search for legitimacy on IE 8 – why Microsoft turned to sponsored reports and its own research to support claims the browser is safer and faster than Firefox
• Why these reports are targeting the wrong people
• Microsoft’s IE chief stressed Microsoft is now committed to web standards on IE 8, and how that had one Mix Tweeter "rolling on the floor laughing my ass off"
• The company's finally going to be getting in Adobe's face with Silverlight 3, which delivers video and audio outside the browser
• How Azure's about to get a whole lot bigger - really quickly
• The coming war on the human race by Skynet Azure

You can catch this week's show in the player below, or in MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format.

MicroBite 7