In the sea of PDC 2008 announcements you may have missed the following two signficant developments:

• .NET Services for Java
• .NET Services for Ruby

For the past 2 months our team has worked very closely with our partners at Schakra on the Java SDK parts and with ThoughtWorks on the Ruby parts. These are the first baby steps and these two SDKs cover only a small subset of the capabilities of the .NET SDK so far. That's merely a function of when we started with these projects and how far we've gotten with the required protocol support; we want and we will take this a lot further over the next development milestones. In the end, the .NET Services fabric ought not to care much what language the senders and listeners are written in and what platform they run on. We're building a universal services platform. We're taking Java and Ruby very seriously and have a few more platforms on the list for which we want to add explicit support.

If you want to try out Windows Azure, or .NET Services, or SQL Services, you need an access code. How do you get one? By signing up here.

"Yes, I did that, but I didn't get a code, yet!"

We're onboarding new accounts slowly but steadily so that we do a controlled scale ramp-up. PDC attendees (having signed up with the same LiveID that they used to register for PDC) will be getting their access codes first, everyone else will be getting their access codes after that. We're a bit conservative with the onboarding waves and closely monitor the overall utilization once we allow a new wave in. So if you attended PDC and don't have a code it may still take a few days for us to give you one depending on when you signed up. If you didn't attend PDC we're going to try giving you codes as excess capacity permits.

Our team's PDC talks are online on Channel 9:

• Azure Platform Overview (John & Dennis): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB01/
• .NET Services Architecture Overview (John & Dennis): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB02/ 
• .NET Access Control Service Intro (Justin): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB55/
• .NET Access Control Service Drilldown (Justin): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB28/
• .NET Workflow Service Intro (Moustafa): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB27/
• .NET Service Bus Intro (Clemens): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB38/
• .NET Service Bus Drilldown (Clemens): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB12/
• Diagnostics, Logging, Debugging (Steve & Mark): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB39/ (the actual talk starts ~11min into the recording)
• Designing Apps for Scale (Max): http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB54/