TechZulu's Geoffrey Emery interviews Microsoft Architecture Evangelist David Chow at the PDC Underground. What is a Architect Evangelist? ITs a person who specializes in a  Microsoft Technology and helps other Architects in the business world find the right answers and the right people for the job at hand. David’s current Technology Platform is Microsoft Cloud Computing project known as Azure.  David describes to us how the cloud will help us extend out our current architecture from the internal data center out onto the cloud giving the enterprise environment more flexibility and a robust disaster recover model. He also explains that by taking our datacenters to the cloud we are given the ability to scale horizontally instantaneously with only minor costs increases. David firmly believes that this form of computing will democratize the way the internet works allowing everyone to host and scale as if they were a Amazon or EBay size webiste. It is truly a exciting time for the internet community as cloud computing is bringing in a age of cheaper hosting and easing designing for a architecture of scale. Look for this and more in this very exciting interview.

Topic Links

Microsoft Azure – http://azure.com

Microsoft Silver light – http://silverlight.com

Microsoft Public Devoloper Confrence – http://microsoftpdc.com

Davids blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/dachou/

PDC Undergound - http://underground.socalcodecamp.com/

This is a guest post written by Josh Highland, Founder of Not Popular

Josh Highland catches up with James Johnson at the Inland Empire .NET User's Group MVM Awards. The MVM (Most
Valuable Member) Awards spotlight outstanding members of the .NET community in the Inland Empire. James
Johnson, who founded the Inland Empire .NET User's Group 5 years ago, talks to TechZulu about the growing pains
the user group has experienced, and how the MVM program has helped boost the .NET community in the Inland
Empire. James Johnson blogs at www.duringlunch.com. The Inland Empire .NET User's Group's home is
www.iedotnetug.org

Microsoft and INETA joined forces for the PDC Underground event on October 29, 2008.  They brought together a great bunch of guest speakers.  TechZulu brings you each of their talks in there entirety after the jump.  Here is a shot bio on each:

Scott Guthrie is corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division, where he runs the development teams responsible for delivering Microsoft Visual Studio developer tools and Microsoft .NET Framework technologies for building client and Web applications.

A founding member of the .NET project, Guthrie has played a key role in the design and development of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework since 1999. Guthrie is also responsible for Microsoft's Web server platform and development tools teams. He has also more recently driven the development of Silverlight – a cross browser, cross platform plug-in for delivering next generation media experiences and rich internet applications for the Web.

Today, Guthrie directly manages the development teams that build the Common Language Runtime (CLR), ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), IIS, Commerce Server and the Visual Studio Tools for Web, Client and Silverlight development.

Guthrie graduated with a degree in computer science from Duke University.

Don Box is an architect at Microsoft working on declarative languages and tools to simplify developing applications and services. In that role, Don is involved in creating languages, frameworks, and end-to-end experiences to help people translate their intentions and desires for software into a machine readable and executable form.

Don joined Microsoft in 2002 as an architect of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), where he worked on software to enable programs to safely and securely interoperate with one another. Don’s responsibilities included both the design and architecture of the runtime stack, as well as interoperability protocols with IBM and other partners.

Don is a respected writer on software development topics, serving as a series editor at Addison Wesley and as a contributing editor to C++ Report, Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ), and MSDN Magazine. Don’s first book, Essential COM, remains a part of the C++ developer’s canon. Don was the first blogger to publish RSS from a Microsoft web property (http://www.gotdotnet.com/ ) and now (sporadically) maintains a blog at http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/ Don has a Master’s degree in Information and Computer Science from U.C. Irvine and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from C.S.U. Long Beach.

Chris Anderson has spent the last ten years at Microsoft as an advocate for the working developer. Chris joined Microsoft in 1997 as a developer on Visual Basic, where he worked on integrating Visual Basic with the Web.

Chris was a part of Microsoft’s Java effort, working as a developer on Visual J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes for Java. Chris’s primary responsibility was to ensure that Java developers had a world-class visual design experience for building Windows applications.

Chris was a founding member of the .NET Framework team where he worked as a developer/development manager on Windows Forms, ASP.NET and the Base Class Library (BCL). In this role, Chris was a key contributor to the design and implementation of every presentation technology used by .NET developers today.

Chris then played a key role in the next generation of this work, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Chris was an architect on WPF, where he focused on the unification of Windows and Web presentation models into a coherent framework. Chris also drove the design and adoption of the eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML) that is used to separate the declarative specification of presentation from application logic.

Since delivering the first version of WPF, Chris has turned his attention to building languages, frameworks and tools to simplify the task of writing applications and services. Chris now works on the “Oslo” project where he brings to bear his passion for user experience and empathy for the working developer.

Scott Hanselman works out of his home office for Microsoft as a Principal Program Manager, aiming to spread good information about developing software, usually on the Microsoft stack. Before this he was the Chief Architect at Corillian Corporation, now a part of Checkfree, for 6+ years. He was also involved in a few Microsoft Developer things for many years like the MVP and RD programs and He'll speak about computers (and other passions) whenever someone will listen.

Hit the Jump to view speakers

What happens when you get a dev and turn him into a developer evangelist you get Jason Mauer. While at PDC Underground TechZulu’s Geoffrey Emery Interviews Jason Mauer about what it takes to be a developer evangelist and what he was interested in at PDC which includes Windows 7 , Workflow 4, Visual Studio 10 and developing XNA. The XNA Framework is a set of managed libraries for Windows, the Xbox 360, and Zune. These libraries enable you to be more productive by using a set of unified class libraries to develop C# games. If you are new to game programming, or just want to review the basic steps toward getting a simple game up and running in XNA Game Studio, see the how-to articles in Game Programming Basics. Once you develop the game using this technology you can launch on the Zune or Xbox live via their online store a very cool technology. All this and more in a great interview from Jason Mauer.

Jason’s Blog - http://www.jasonmauer.com/

creator Club  - http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

XNA - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb198548.aspx

workflow - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms735967.aspx

Visual studio 2010 - http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2010/overview.mspx