As I mentioned, I was really busy last week with the Windows Azure Incubation week held at Microsoft in Alpharetta.  The event was a week long event from Monday until Friday.

Windows Azure, a new cloud computing platform for storage, sql, and processing

The first major surprise that we learned was that the Microsoft people wanted us to use ASP.net coding and not use the offshore development team (Thank You Dmytro@  Soft Serve) for primary development.

The project that I worked on was Chris Stuckey’s FandomU, a social networking site focusing on conventions, fans, and vendors to extend the connections you make at the actual event.  Hopefully FandomU will be able to launch with the MomoCon Japanese Anime convention in March 2009.

Our front login page

The week was quite the experience. Microsoft brought in a handful of advisors and consultants to teach us about the Azure platform and (particularly for us) to use Asp.net technologies.  Jeremy Likness from Wintellect taught me the basic asp.net connections between the ASP and C#.

Here is the front page of our part of our prototype site, in the 4 days that we had to develop, we developed a few key features, registration, the beginnings to shopping, and the introduction to an idea of things like sharing images and videos on the cloud.

In addition to knowledge, Microsoft provided a great overall experience. We had nice co-working space with brand new “beta” style windows 7 computers at the MTC.  We had 3 meals provided 5 days of the week, and not just fast food pizza, but some pretty classy changes including Indian and Thai food.

Thursday, Microsoft spokesman Larry Gregory came and introduced us to all of the great features that Microsoft offers to entrepreneurs and startups. They have a lot of features that I’m sure will be great. We also did an interview regarding our progress that will be posted on Channel 9 – spoiler: I somewhat

Taking notes on one of the speakers teaching us about Azure products and the startup pitch process (Sanjay P)

embarrassingly spit Microsoft Marketing for the PHP community.

Speakers came in throughout the week, and on Friday, these speakers, and other startup voices in Atlanta sat as a judging panel for all of the startups. This was really valuable, as we all got a chance to practice our pitching abilities.

Because we sucked up more than a little to Larry Gregory by mentioning that we could expand from a conference like Momo Con to others like Dragon Con, or his interests like Farscape and Motorcyles, he presented us with our “incubation” week diploma.

Presented with an award

My group thought that the week would be more about coaching and less about technology, along with better planning for working with the offshore team as opposed  to us needing to be incredibly familiar with Microsoft products. It was slightly awkward to find that only 3 of 7 companies there had only just reached an idea and planning it out.

I’ll post later about some of the teams that I met.

Asp.net, Azure, C#, cloud, fandomU, Microsoft, momocon, Programming, SQL, Windows, Windows Azure, work

The Reason

So this last weekend, my brother was visiting from Washington State, and inconveniently enough his windows laptop started gettinga blue screen of death as it booted up. Apparently, windows update had automatically installed an update that did not work for his computer and he needed a Windows cd with a recovery console which he obviously didn’t have access to.

My brother is also a bit of a by the books person and demands that his computer be up to date with everything, windows update,. anti virus, a strong firewall, and anything else — which makes this even more satisfying — that when you try hard it can break things.

My Solution

So we are at my parents’ house and they don’t have a Windows XP disk either. I recommend that maybe Dan try booting from USB to Ubuntu — unfortunately, his Dell custom bios in a 2ghz P4 did not have an option to boot from bios! How!

Anyway, so he downloaded and burned the cd, which loaded amazingly fast on his 2gb of ram and to which he happily saw that everything worked, even his hardline ethernet that he had somehow turned off in overally strict firewall configuration, and his wireless cards which appear to be the driver that got updated.

He also thought that it was amazing to have a live cd, the wireless setup so easy, and everything to just work and be somewhat intuitive, especially with firefox in beta.

But Freedom Require Flexibility

Soon he was considering installing Ubuntu in another partition, but wanted to know if he could run his Norton system utilities in wine! This was very frustrating, and hard to explain, but he basically wanted to use only what he was used to, and basically said that he was going to switch back to Windows immediately only because he wanted to use the things that he was familiar with. Anyway, I came back to the city and grabbed a Windows CD to which he quickly cowered back to — to run his Norton checks, de-fragmentation, and service pack 3 updates.

Flexibility in Perspective

The world has only been using Windows XP since 2003, and 32bit Windows for 13 years. Despite the newer graphical user interfaces of Kde/Gnome/OSX that have shown themselves to be be more intuitive and easy for the unadapted people fixed in their ways are still afraid of change, despite the idea that that change might be better.

Dan, Flexibility, Linux, Ubuntu, Windows