Now: Cloud Computing

As some of you may have noticed, this blog has gone dark for a while.  During that time it got an interesting face lift and a new title "Cloudy in Seattle".

As it turns out, I switched teams and am now a proud member of the (Cloud) Computing Tools team... but that also meant I couldn't blog about the cool things I've been working on. 

With the announcement in today's key note at the PDC, I'm happy to say I can now start blogging about it, about the Azure Services Platform and in particular, Windows Azure.

When you distill it out, Windows Azure is all about hosting your web applications, storage, management and development.  That is, you can host, scale and manage web application in Microsoft data centers.

At the same time, it incorporates some truly cool features like the Fabric controller that manages resources, load balances across your running instances (which incidentally, you can configure on the fly and as easily as editing or uploading a new configuration file) and manages upgrades and failures to maintain availability.

My part in all this?  You guessed it, I'm working on developer tools -- that's my passion.  My product: Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio.  An add-in for Visual Studio 2008 that brings the developer experience you would expect for building Cloud Applications to Visual Studio.

The tools make it easy to get started, configure, edit, build, package, debug and publish for deployment.

I'm really jazzed about what's ahead, and I'm jazzed to be able to start sharing.  Stay tuned.