As some of you may know from the tweets I’ve been posting for nearly 3 weeks now, I was invited to attend the very first edition of the JumpInCamp organized by Microsoft in April 2010.

The goal of this camp was to get the European PHP community leaders together and learn about the new products and new ideas Microsoft are working on. For those of you who read about the Microsoft web developer summit that took place in Redmond in December 2009 you might think it was the same thing however you would be utterly wrong.

While the camp in Redmond was very informative and we are learnt a great deal of new features coming up with Microsoft, it was vastly different than the JumpinCamp in Zurich where the focus of the camp was to get the developers to interact with the actual Microsoft developers instead of only learning about new features. The point of the JumpinCamp was to get your hands dirty in code so we all got a few hours of lectures, then sat down and worked on either implementing those solutions into our respective Open Source projects or even discussed and raised concerns we might have regarding some of their products.

I thought it might be nice to share some of the projects I’ve started working on while I was over there and what I had interests in:
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As many of you know, Helgi Thormar and I have been exchanging with Microsoft for a while now trying to give what we can in order to help them improve their open source approaches and ideas.

Last summer we were invited to Seattle for the Microsoft Web Developer Summit (Which was a blast thanks to Microsoft) and as soon as we came back to Europe, I got a call from Yuri from Microsoft who wanted to organize some kind of workshop/camp/developer summit for European developers and Microsoft altogether. (more…)

Note: This post is for PHP and Ruby Developers based in or near Dublin, Ireland.

There’s no denying that Cloud Computing has been a particularly hot space for the last year. I’m sure many of you have given Amazon Web Services (Infrastructure as a Service) and Google App Engine (Platform as a Service) a go by now, if not actually using them to run software of your own making.

In the last year the buzz from Microsoft on their Azure offering has been gradually getting louder, to the point where they are now rolling it out. Microsoft’s proposition is interesting as, in simple terms, it’s a like a mix between the IaaS and PaaS models that are pursued by Amazon and Google.  As part of their drive to let developers know about Azure, Microsoft have been reaching out to development communities that would traditionally be non-Microsoft centric — in particular PHP and Ruby. (more…)

This year, David Coallier and my self were invited to attend the annual Microsoft Web Developers Summit, or WDS for short. For David this was his first time there but for me it was a 3rd year running, and as ever I was excited like a kid in a candy shop.

What is WDS? In short, it’s a summit where Microsoft invites a selective few (roughly 25 people) from the PHP community, during which they basically ask the attendees questions, show case a few new features to get feedback on and utilize the time to help figure out how Microsoft can better serve the PHP community at large. These people tend to be various leaders of either community sites or big open source projects and will thus have a lot of insight into how people use their software on Microsoft platforms and the problems they have. (more…)