The rock and roll lifestyle is over! Neil Kidd, Simon Davies and myself have returned to the day job and the the badly lit hotel bars, over-crowded railway carriages and snow blizzards have quickly become a distant memory . . . .

Over the two weeks we visited five locations – Reading, London, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Bradford – and met and talked with well over a hundred partners about Windows Azure and the Azure platform.

The Microsoft Research offices in Cambridge is where we started the week, and where Simon’s demos steadfastly refused to work

Next it was off to snowy Edinburgh to the Microsoft offices . . .

. . . and finally to Bradford to Black Marble’s offices

. . .  where Simon’s demos very nearly all worked.

Talking with delegates its amazing how many ISVs and other partners are actively thinking about how cloud computing and off-premise solutions can help their own product planning and offerings, and how positive the feedback was around our cloud-based strategy with Azure. Its still early days for Azure – pre beta, but it is important for developers and systems architects to understand what it is, and what it can, and can’t do.

Aside from the great feedback on the feedback forms, we think we hit the right notes when one of the delegates Twittered “I finally get what Azure is”  during the briefing.

You can find the slides here, and we will be putting more links to Azure related resources on this blog . . .

. . .  and a final thought – why was Neil so unhappy:

was it a) because he couldn’t find any more Azure tokens, b) his waterproof jacket wasn’t actually very waterproof, or c) he couldn’t find a decent pub in Bradford that was open? Answers on a postcard to the usual address