Seeing PHP through a blue azure sky

I know it was a sponsored talk, but this was just a wast of time. 0 thumbs

Although I mostly went out of respect for them because they sponsored the event I found it nice to see Microsoft evolving and improving themselves. The people presenting the keynote were very friendly. Maarten presented his part very well in my opinion but I wasn't very impressed by the talks of Michelangelo and Katrien.
I just wasn't really interested in this subject.

@Jach, @Driesvints,

come and see me and Katrin at the conference and tell us how to make it more appealing. We like yor feedback on this

Would definitely like to know how we can improve things so feel free to speak up.

Microsoft's attitude "might" have changed, but that doesn't mean people haven't forgotten about the past.

Although I felt a bit like in a commercial session, they made their stuff well. Can't vote down the talk just b/c I don't like the topic or the company behind it. Nice to see MS starts to actually support non-MS products for their server/cloud environent.

i expected more of this :/

3 people doesn't work... Too short... To much info to give!

Although it didn't really come out extremely well, the idea about Azure is very intriguing.
For future talks, I'd like to advise to use one speaker with one clear story.
Personally I liked Maarten's best. It was informative and refreshing, although not very in depth.
Katrien seemed very apologetic and defensive. Don't be. You are Microsoft. You created something cool. Own that.
I'd like to advise to Michelangelo that we are not dumb code monkeys that can be bribed by beer. The joke is funny once, but it started to get insulting after the umpteenth time.
We (most of us) are not there to bash Microsoft. We want to learn new tools to create awesome stuff.

I understand that a sponsored keynote is more often than not a lose-lose situation. First of all, since it's more of a mandatory talk, most people who are there are not by free will, which is fine maybe, since MS has paid a quite large sum of money to let the phpbnl happen and in return we just listen for an hour about what they have to say. I get it, it's the way advertisement works and I completely agree with the system. But.. since you DON'T have a captive audience, and - let's face it - microsoft isn't really a "developers best-friend", you're gonna need to pull open ALL registers to create a really cool presentation to convince us moving to a platform as azure.

On the whole, even though great names like Dragonbe were behind it, the fact it was a 3-in-1 talk didn't really work for me. It looked too messy, with all three talks going into another direction, it's like reading the lord-of-the-rings but without the final book so you have no way on how all those story-lines come together. I would really consider making it a more fluent-> story the next time.

Maarten's talk was probably the most interesting since that was not so much about software, but more on the technology. My points go to his part of the talk.

Katrien was more appologying abouts microsoft's behaviour and after a while it was starting to get a bit annoying. We got it after the first few times :) Still, some great info about what microsoft is trying to do to better their life and I honestly believe that with all the development-guru's at redmond, something really great stuff for the php community can be created.

Mike's talk was a bit the odd-one-out. It wasn't clear (at all) what the whole purpose was of the deployment he did (and I don't consider myself a dumb guy). The fact that he deployed things on a normal and azure system, where the azure system took 10 times as much time (or even more, i forgot), is not really a great selling-point. Maybe you should focus more on the advantages of an azure cloud so in the end we can take the disadvantages for granted. For now, the only thing that sticked with me is that deployment sucks and is very slow. Which is probably not the story you would like to tell..


So all in all, much respect for all three speakers on daring to tackle such a sensitive subject in front of a big crowd, but still.. a lot of room for improvement.. but I assume there will be a service-pack released soon enough :)

I have to agree the presentation was a bit messy, but it explained the Azure services quite well.
I'm all new to the cloud 'stuff' but i was surprised that Azure has a local development environment. That looks really promising!
Will definitely experiment with this in the future!

Unlike the other commenters before me i'm not going to give my thought on the technology used but rather on the presentation itself. All three of the presenters have more than enough experience talking to a larger audience and that showed. Maarten's talk was the most fluent of the three but Katrien's and Mike's added some clear value through examples and background information.

Ofcouse we can't look past the fact that this was a sponsored talk, basically a sales pitch for Azure, which as a technology interests me but will most likely never be in my skillset since there is cheaper and better at the moment.

I had the impression that the azure/php stuff is not very mature yet. Also, I spent a lot of time to get rid of MS. So, I'm not too hasty to start using it again. But I do appreciate the effort and the Zend_Cloud backend ...

I really like that Microsoft knows it's place in web development and reaches out for that. I'm still a little awkward about it as well. But sponsoring a php conference, reaching out to the PHP community with examples like these and some more things which weren't presented at this session makes me feel that they deserve a chance!

Presentation should be done with 2 people. Nice to see Microsoft is trying to get involved in the open source world but it is still creepy.

A large part of the talk was really aimed at the wrong audience, I did see some cool stuff in Azure that I wouldnt have otherwise, and to have focused more on those would have been more interesting for me. Michelangelo lightened the mood, and got some chuckles from people, overall the quality was great, just a shame that the focus wasn't different.

Not a very well structured talk.
Always consider who your audience is when you prepare. Especially when you are Microsoft in front of a (almost) completely opensource crowd! You should adjust your slides and your words to your audience.
In this case it would have been better if it was less "commercial" and more "technical".

Never expect a technical audience to "just believe that it works easy". They are the ones that have to work with it, so just show how it works! They are not afraid for some technical information.