Just over three years ago, I was part of the team that launched Windows Workflow Foundation as part of .NET Framework 3.0 at PDC 2005.
Shortly after WF, I co-founded a team along with David Wortendyke, John Shewchuk (and briefly Mike Vernal) - we all strongly believed that a developer cloud platform was the obvious evolution in computing. Mike left the team early on (and ultimately left Microsoft to go to facebook) while David, John & I continued pursuing building a platform I often called “the .NET Framework in the cloud”.
Today, at PDC 2008, this one-time incubation was unveiled to the world as “.NET Services” - a key part of Microsoft’s Services Platform.
Several people have mentioned to me that to the degree that you’re able to do a ’startup at Microsoft’ we did it with this project. I’ve read that the founders of a company often play many different roles and in the company’s infancy, struggle to describe their exact role other than “to get it done”. Fortunately over the years, we’ve built a world-class engineering team - intelligent, dedicated and passionate about the platform we’re building. There are many aspects of this project I’m proud of - but this team is top of the list.
There are many stories I’ve collected over the last couple of years… here’s one I thought was particularly funny… when I moved into my new office to work on this project, I decided to come into the office on a Saturday and paint my office. I knew it was going to be blue… I went back and forth on the various shades and ultimately ended up with what I thought to be an appropriate choice… the color of the sky - Azure Blue. I couldn’t help but smile when nearly two years later, when I first heard the name of the brand.
You can hear that story and learn a bit more about what I’ve been working on in this Channel9 video that was posted today. I haven’t watched it yet so please let me know how and when I embarrass myself 