Vanity in the CloudS: Putting my head up in Microsoft's cloud

As we previous discussed, I decided to do a vanity page in the clouds, but what should it look like?

I believe that there are two types of programmers: Those that make the front look awesome and those that make the pluming work. I am one of that latter types.

So I thought, I'll creatively find something that my visual creativity wouldn't have come up with in a million years. I'll search through people I admire and find a site that has a couple of attributes:

1) Looks awesome
2) Has some complexity (or easily could add some)
3) is someone that I admire

The one that I found I like the best (and was able to secure permission to outright steal the look and feel) belongs to David Bressler, a technology evangelist of progress. When I worked for the state, Progress impressed me with their Actional product. In fact, I will be starting another blog soon about developing the Actional product to be used in creating an internal cloud.

Now, your probably thinking: "A vanity page?" What's the big deal that's just a bunch of html or xaml or flash. How can you show the background pluming, the enterprise service bus capabilities?

Great question. I plan on making this page more and more complex as it goes along. But to start out, I plan on creating a service that will use the Azure storage to hold copies of my posts that will be vetted through a workflow and fix the spelling of the word RESTfarian which I will deliberately misspell on all of my posts, but will be corrected on the vanity page.

As well, I will not use an RSS feed on the UI itself, but retrieve from storage.

Lastly, I will indicate my presence through Microsoft Live services.

Any other thoughts to make this an interesting, but doable challenge?

Does anyone else know of anyone who has their vanity page in the cloud?

Getting started

Situation:

Ingredients:
1 unemployed enterprise architect
1 unknown technology to supposedly change the world
1 non-microsoft computing device without
3 heaps of .Net knowledge and experience
4 knowledgeable on-lookers with a predisposition to know everything once it has been discovered.

Using the Unemployed EA, mix the unknown technology vigorously using the non-microsoft computing device. Use a heap of .Net knowledge but mix it with a little uncertainty spice.


This is how I feel about embarking out into Azure space. Grant it, I have years of .Net experience, I consider myself a pretty decent enterprise architect, and I have been evangelizing cloud computing way before it started to rain. I figured that I would be able to make this work, if anyone could. So, I though "Lets do it"

First off, we need a project. Something interesting, but not on the scale of world hunger. "A vanity page in the clouds"