Last week we hosted a couple hundred of our top partners in Redmond for the Platform Strategy Review. This is always a high quality event, providing our top partners access to Microsoft executives and product groups. I was fortunate to have the entire ISV Architect Evangelism team fly out for the meeting (except for 1 who was home anticipating a newborn).
We heard a lot of interesting news but far and away the best reveal was Windows Phone. It has been a closely kept secret internally for months and this was the first partner event where the strategy and demos were revealed. Today was a great day as the feedback from the public announcement has been overwhelmingly positive.
We’ll talk more about developing for Windows Phone at MIX next month. However, if you are building a consumer application that could go viral, wouldn’t you want to have a scalable backend infrastructure? Say, something like the Windows Azure Platform? I think the Windows Phone and Azure combination could be huge (although I haven’t seen any sessions on this combo posted the the MIX session list yet).
Note that all partners have a significant window in which to kick the Azure tires before the promotional periods ends:
Check it out!