Where are the UK #Microsoft evangelists?

Now is a great time to give you a round up of where our crack team of highly-visible ninjas will be concentrating their efforts on your behalf for the next year (you may or may not know that Microsoft ends its internal years in June).

Each of the team actually draws up a series of plans and ideas for the “new year” (I know – you’d never have guessed) but instead of me trying to read and understand them I thought it easiest to have them explain it in their own words. By way of value-add I’ve invented some nicknames for the team which you can feel free to use... I’m all about giving.

First up, Mike “Hoity” Taulty at http://www.mtaulty.com. He says, “I’ll be focusing on our RIA technologies letting that RIA term span all the way from browser based Silverlight (and HTML5) applications and stretch to include clients that are built with deeper platform integration points using .NET 4.0 on Windows today and tomorrow. A lot of developers build the RIA client as part of building a distributed application so I’ll also be thinking about the modern service-side stack for putting these applications together and connectivity options to it.”

Then Eric “Half” Nelson at http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable. He says, “After having far too much fun with my ‘head in the cloud’ during the first six months of 2010, I am now branching out from a focus purely on the (IMHO awesome) Windows Azure Platform, to cover pretty much all things web dev related. Over the remainder of 2010 I will be helping UK developers make sense of everything from jQuery to HTML5, MVC to SEO, OData to ORM. I will also be doing my small bit to cross-pollinate ideas and approaches between the .NET crowd and other web development communities.”

We’ll be bringing in someone else to talk about web too as there’s a lot to talk about.

Rounding up our developer evangelists is Mike “Donny” Ormond at http://blogs.msdn.com/mikeormond. He says, “They say a change is as good as a rest. Having spent the last few years extolling the virtues of our web stack and tools I admit I’m looking forward to a bit of a rest in the form of Windows Phone 7. I’ll be spending my time helping people get to grips with the platform, how to build great applications with WP7, and of course showcasing some examples of the great work people have done. I think Beyonce nicely summed up my year when she said, ‘You’ll do anything to do with anything with a ring on it.’ Something like that anyway.”

Spanning the vast and ethereal world of architecture is Matt “Blue” Deacon at http://blogs.msdn.com/matt_deacon. He says, “For me in the architect space the topic of conversation is still doing more with less (nothing new there I guess); but now we have a growing innovation agenda to deal with too. How to ‘deliver innovation with less’! As such enterprises are re-evaluating what they care about and for me this comes together under a theme I’m calling the “New Model Enterprise”, where enterprise sourcing strategies are moving from monolithic to multi-sourced and hybrid models of operation. In a nutshell the year’s going to be all about living with (and profiting from) clouds!”

Slipping gently into the world of the IT Pro, we quickly find newbie, Simon “O” May at http://simon-may.com. He says, “I’ve just joined the evangelism team helping Andrew look after IT Pros in the UK. I’ll be focusing on our client technology including deployment, management and use – obviously that can’t be done without exploring our server platforms too. Helping keep UK IT Pros in touch with what’s going on in the cloud, how it helps them and their business and how they can adopt a more cloudy outlook is an exciting challenge too. My other main focus is working out how Microsoft works being the newbie.”

Sticking with IT Pro, and variations on cloud jokes, is Andrew “Deepfat” Fryer at http://blogs.technet.com/andrew. He says, “I am the old kid on the block on Marc’s team and my main area of interest is the Data Center. Consolidation and the Cloud are the hot topics here and I’ll be focusing on taking the fear and uncertainty many IT Professionals feel about this brave new world. So I’ll be concentrating explaining what this future looks like and why there is a very bright silver lining for those willing to embrace these new approaches to service delivery. When I’m not doing that, I’ll fall back to my first love of data management with a few cartoons and graphics for the rest of the team.”

Scratching around the underbelly of the team, we find Sara “H” Allison and Andrew “Soup” Spooner who look after http://ubelly.com.

Sara says, “Hi! I’m Sara and I’m the editor of Underbelly, a website about web technology across open and closed source software, including ‘how to’s, stories on the latest technologies and trends in the industry. Kicking off with a shake up in the site design, this year Underbelly will focus on themes like social media tools, new developer tools and languages and the latest open source software. We’ll also be out and about in the community at web camps, conferences and exhibitions to capture the buzz and talk to speakers and attendees about what’s front of mind for them. Finally, we’ll be producing some interesting and (hopefully!) fun videos to inform and entertain.”

Our other newbie, Andrew, says, “Hi, my name is Andrew, I work as a Creative Technologist. This year, I’ll be discovering how Microsoft’s products and services are making a difference to developers, from large corporations to students in their bedrooms and I’ll be sharing those stories with communities online and at events around the UK”.

They – at least – know what they’re up to. If you spot them in the wild, let me know, as there’s a cage for them somewhere. As always, if we’re hitting the mark, or we’re a bit wide of it then let us know and we’ll do our best for you.

Me? I’ll be here – I’m the 7-Zark-7 of the outfit. We’ll all be “Watching, warning against surprise attacks by aliens galaxies beyond space”. Flying whirlwind pyramid thing is ‘to be confirmed’ but it does give me an idea for a video.