Romeo and Juliette and Windows Azure (Lucian Wischik)

1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really"
2. Romeo receives the message
3. Romeo finds Juliette looking dead, but knows she's not really dead
4. They live happily ever after

vs.

1. Juliette sends a message "I'll take a drug which makes me look dead but I'm not really"
                [the message is lost in a plague-related network outage]
2. Romeo never receives the message
3. Romeo finds Juliette looking dead, thinks she's dead, and kills himself
4. Juliette wakes to find Romeo dead and kills herself too.

Cloud computing is about distributed protocols with message-passing usually in XML. As VB developers, you'll be the ones responsible for saving Romeo and Juliette. How? The quick answer is "make your operations idempotent". For the long answer, I've posted it on my blog...