Starting a New Blog: Windows Azure’s Silver Lining

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you have probably noticed I haven’t been publishing much lately. That is not to say, however, that I haven’t been writing. I have. I’ve been working with a colleague (Larry Franks) to start a new blog: Windows Azure’s Silver Lining. The focus of that blog will be open source and device development on the Windows Azure platform. I’ve been writing about PHP on the Azure platform for a while now, but I’m excited to take my knowledge to a new level and to branch out into new areas. Part of my excitement stems from the vision laid out by Satya Nadella (President of Microsoft Server and Tools Business Division) for Open Source integration with the Windows Azure platform. In his words (and you can read more here)…

“…we're building a very broad tent when it comes to the application platform supported and development tools supported. For sure, we're doing a first-class job when it comes to .NET and Visual Studio. But beyond that, we also want to make sure we have first-class support for Java, PHP, and other frameworks... So, we want to have Windows Azure truly reflect our big-tent approach to developers and development platforms.”

For a while now, I’ve been a advocate for greater support for PHP (and Open Source in general) across Microsoft technologies, so it’s encouraging for me to see this sort of vision (more of which I hope to share in the future) being laid out from the top. Of course, we have a lot of work to do to turn that vision into a reality and I, personally, have a lot to learn about building applications for the cloud. But, both endeavors (turning that vision into reality and personally increasing my knowledge) are worth pursuing whole heartedly…I’m looking forward to it.

So, if you are interested in learning about developing applications for the Windows Azure platform that leverage Open Source technologies, or if you are interested in developing Azure services for devices, subscribe to our blog: Windows Azure’s Silver Lining. We’ll be learning as we go and sharing what we learn. We’d love to have questions and comments from readers.

Oh…and what about this blog? I will continue to post here (though probably not as frequently as in the past). The content I’ll post will still be related to PHP and Microsoft technologies, but I’ll post Azure-related content on the Silver Lining blog.

Thanks.

-Brian

Share this on Twitter