About the Authors

Chris Hay is a Microsoft MVP in Client App Dev, an international conference speaker, and cofounder of a .NET usergroup in Cambridge, UK (http://nxtgenug.net/). He has spent part of the past year working and living in India. Brian H. Prince is an Architect Evangelist for Microsoft, cofounder of the nonprofit organization CodeMash (www.codemash.org), and a speaker at various regional and national technology events. He lives in Westerville, Ohio. In their own words, here’s what they say about how they came to Azure.

Chris Hay

My day job involves building some of the largest m-commerce systems in the world. When Microsoft announced Windows Azure to the world at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in 2008, I immediately thought of how I could use the cloud as part of the systems I was actively building.

Of all of the key scenarios for using the cloud, dynamic scaling is one of the most well-known. I was hoping that the promise of massive numbers of servers and a simplified platform would be able to meet my enormous scale needs, while making it easier to build large-scale systems. Azure offered the promise of being able to deploy an application into the cloud and have an automated deployment and provisioning system, with a complete abstraction of the underlying physical infrastructure. This book is focused on exploring those promises, and seeing how they worked out.

Coupling this newfound passion with my long-held desire to someday write a book, I settled down to write the proposal that I would send to Manning, pitching my idea for a book titled Azure in Action. And a year later, here it is!

Brian H. Prince

While working for Microsoft in recent years, I found myself spending more and more of my time focusing on Windows Azure (or Red Dog, as it was called internally at Microsoft at the time) and cloud computing. I was already at work on another In Action book when I made a comment in one of my many meetings with Manning that I was surprised they weren’t planning a book for each piece of the upcoming Microsoft cloud platform. Thinking that writing my first book ever wasn’t enough work, I further commented that I would love to get involved and help with the Azure book.

This simple comment initiated a lot of work for the editors at Manning as they started looking for experienced authors who could write a series of books on Microsoft’s cloud platform. They approached me to see if I would pitch in and help write Azure in Action with Chris. I agreed, and after a few chats with Chris over Skype, we finalized the draft table of contents and submitted it to Manning. The rest is history and you are now holding that book in your hands.