W14 What is Microsoft Dallas?

11/17/2010

1:45 pm - 3:00 pm

Level: Introductory to Intermediate

Prerequisite: None

Michael Stiefel

Michael Stiefel

President

Reliable Software, Inc.

Michael Stiefel, principal of Reliable Software, Inc. is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals. His current work involves: o Distributed application development and implementation such as Software as a Service o Software best practices in Microsoft .NET o Technologies such as Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, and SQL Server. o Advising on IT strategy and planning, including budgeting, hiring, and growth management, including the appropriate use of Agile development o Requirements analysis and project planning As a member of an OASIS Technical Committee he helped develop a core SOA Reference Model and related Reference Architectures. He was a Lecturer in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his research and teaching focus was understanding how people build mental models in order to solve problems. As Adjunct faculty, Stiefel has taught graduate and undergraduate software engineering courses at Northeastern University and Framingham State University. Michael Stiefel's education is from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a Interdisciplinary Ph.D degree in Nuclear Engineering, Political Science, and History of Technology; M.S. in Nuclear Engineering; and B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He is an active member of the IEEE Consultants Network.

Dallas is a data information service built on Microsoft Azure. Dallas accesses a variety of data from government, news, financial, traffic, and other sources. By providing a uniform method and format for retrieving and offering data, Microsoft has created a data marketplace.

Both large and small data providers can provide access to data to large and small development organizations in an environment where otherwise it would be highly unlikely or impossible for these groups to partner. Potentially this could lead to the democratization of data, where data can be combined with other data, in ways that could not be foreseen by the original providers. Since this data is available through a REST API, the applications that consume the data do not have to run on any particular platform.

You will learn:

  • How to use data provided by Microsoft Dallas in an application
  • How to integrate Microsoft Dallas data into an Excel spreadsheet for data analysis
  • How to make data available to others in Microsoft Dallas
  • How to get the rights to use data available in Microsoft Dallas