This week I have been fortunate to attend the Professional Developers Conference in LA. The PDC is the main occasion when Microsoft reveal some of what the product groups have been working on and indicate the direction that the MS platform and dev stack will take over the next few years. This year there have been a number of exciting announcements, but for me, the main one is Windows Azure - the platform formally know as Red Dog.

I have been fortunate to have been working with Windows Azure over the last few months and have become a very real fan. I have been working with a Microsoft Partner in the UK called Active Web Solutions who have developed a safety system for the UK's inshore fishermen that will automatically alert the UK's lifeboat organisation if the fisherman gets into problems. This is a system that is currently in production has so far has saved the lives of 5 people. AWS wanted to investigate the possibility of moving the application or part of the application to "the cloud". Following a 2 day Architectural Design Session, the came into the MTC in Reading (UK) to conduct a 3 week Proof of Concept. Leading this POC has been one of the highlights of my 8 years in Microsoft. I have worked with a lot of customers in the past to save organisations and individuals time, money, resources, ... but never saving lives. Richard Prodger, AWS's Technical Director, and I have recorded a Channel 9 video where we discuss what we achieved in those 3 weeks and the experiences we gained of the Azure platform. You can find the video at:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/paulfo/Cloud-services-scale-life-critical-system/

I'm planning on posting more details, including some code, from the project on this blog, but am going to struggle to get it all posted during the PDC period.

Neil.