Last week I attended a Windows Azure Services Platform Training Workshop, held by QA in London. Our trainer, the excellent Mr Adrian Jakeman, took myself and 12 other Microsoft Partners on a journey through the Azure Service Platform and its constituent parts:
I was fortunate enough to be sat next to Rob Blackwell, from AWS for the duration of the course. I met Rob a few years ago when AWS had just launched the amazing Mob Guardian system for the RNLI, (during the event Rob told me that AWS have recently been working on updating the system to run on Windows Azure) then in 2007, Conchango and AWS collaborated on the Contoso Bicycle Club Windows Live Quick App.
During the course Rob and I talked about running Open Source projects - I talked about StyleCop for ReSharper and he told me about his pet project - LSharp.NET - a LISP implementation for the CLR. I've always been intrigued by LISP, even thought I started studying Intelligent Systems (Computer Science, Cybernetics and Psychology) at university, the course never actually covered LISP. I was quite blown away when Rob told me that he implemented the language using LINQ Expression trees to take the LISP syntax and compile it into IL. I mentioned something about web based interactive Ruby consoles and about an hour later Rob had knocked up a Windows Azure solution equivalent for LSharp.
I asked Rob if he'd be interested in recording a video interview about LSharp and how he put it into the Cloud using Windows Azure. Below is the result (thanks for Adrian Jakeman for acting as Quiz Master):
See Rob's blog for more info on LSharp and hosting it in Azure.
If you would like to try out Rob's app - it's available at http://lsharp.cloudapp.net/