R&D Director Rob Blackwell attended the Microsoft MVP Summit at Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond last week. Every year Microsoft gathers together its Most Valuable Professional community to spend time with the product groups, share feedback and talk about upcoming features and products. A key theme this year was Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11, but there was also much excitement about Windows Azure.   Here is a group photo of...

As an Azure Circle Partner, two10 degrees together with Microsoft Services, can now offer Windows Azure Deployment Planning Services (AZDPS) to Software Assurance (SA) customers.  The AZDPS will offer the exclusive benefit of structured consulting engagements that provide training and demos of applications on Windows Azure.   SA customers can select a 3, 5 or 10 day ‘Public Cloud Jumpstart’ engagement and leverage AZDPS to: • Learn about  Microsoft’s Public Cloud offering, Windows Azure and receive...

  two10 degrees has achieved the Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner status, held by fewer than 1% of Microsoft partners around the world.  The Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Program is designed for partners that are already committed to a cloud business and who have a proven track record of delivering Microsoft Windows Azure solutions to their customers. Launched in 2010, The Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Program is designed to showcase and support...

By Rob Blackwell Packt very kindly sent me a review copy of Neil Mackenzie's Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook The problem with Windows Azure is that it doesn't stand still for long enough to document it; even MSDN has been sadly lacking at times. Anybody who takes on a book project like this has to be either brave or mad, but writing a book with such broad and accurate technical...

By Rob Blackwell Introduction Cloud computing seems like a “no brainer” for web applications. Windows Azure makes it straightforward to take an existing database-backed ASP.NET application and deploy it using WebRoles and SQL Azure. But what about Thick Client and Client / Server applications? Does cloud technology provide any benefit or opportunity there? Why thick client? With the emergence of HTML 5, you could be forgiven for thinking that thick...