Having a beer, sitting in the sun by the lake I met with Barnaby Jeans, a Microsoft Senior Development Evangelist. It was an adhoc meeting after Cory Fowler, my web developer introduced us virtually.

It is a beautiful sunny day here in Cambridge, and in the relaxed setting of the lake the conversation jumped from subject to subject. It was great to speak with Barnaby and for me he provided some insight to some of the technologies that I had yet to GROK in a meaningful way. I really like that the conversation had nothing to do with the purchasing a product, or pushing a specific solution but an open and frank communication, much of the time were I was leading and Barnaby was just listening, and absorbing my thoughts. Those who now me personally understand how frank I can be.

I have had one misconception that I wanted to clear up here with regards to Microsoft Azure. Up to this point I had this notion that Azure changes some of my development processes and that the code we write would need to target Azure specifically. I am very pleased to see that this is not a true statement and its quite possible to host a 3.5/4.0 framework based web up unchanged (except for web config changes to point to the DB).

So this left me with Azure being more of a deployment/IT thing then specifically a development concern. Some of the current products I work on cannot still host within Azure (Barnaby will get back to me) due to some legacy COM infrastructure but from a new development side the platform became a little more compelling.

Now I have to work out the dollars and cents and ensure that from business standpoint the hosting/communication costs and SQL costs justify a move over to Azure for our website.

I appreciate Barnaby’s time and look forward to further conversations. Of late I have been having a bit of concern on execution especially around  the new platforms that are coming out from the competitors, but I am still pretty much a Microsoft Stack guy.