Nikhil Kothari's Blog

Windows Azure took center stage at PDC last week during the keynote (watch here). The cloud computing space is now really heating up with competing platform plays from Google’s AppEngine and Amazon’s recent EC2 announcements. In some sense this is perhaps the re-birth of Windows as a platform that enables developers and the ecosystem to build on a whole new set of capabilities and scale for the Software+Services world, in much the same way as Windows fueled the desktop software industry in the past "era".

The really compelling thing about this particular development platform especially combined with other technologies such as Mesh, SQL and Silverlight is that you’re likely already familiar with it - if you’ve been developing ASP.NET and .NET applications using Visual Studio, either on the desktop or your own servers or hosted servers, you’re already got a good head start in working against this new platform. Earlier in the year I blogged about the .NET spanning across different presentation tiers and ASP.NET as a common back-end. This much anticipated announcement essentially adds a new dimension - Windows and .NET as the common platform that really scales.

I am eagerly anxious to build both apps and frameworks that leverage the new possibilities. Make sure you sign up today for getting your invitation code to start experimenting with Azure Services as well.

Also, anyone notice the cool new branding and blue hues in the next generation of logos? Azure itself is a cool bluish color… I wonder if there is a connection there? :-)

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• Windows Azure PHP Development Kit