There's a lot of great work going on in the .NET and Windows Azure space, and the months ahead are going to be exciting ones for developers. A few people have sent me email recently about whether I had "left .NET for Azure." On the contrary - I'm still very involved in .NET, and the teams that build the server pieces of .NET (including ASP.NET, WCF, WF, and the corresponding Visual Studio teams) work for me. Making .NET applications in the cloud be amazing is a huge part of the Windows Azure promise, and one of the reasons I've recently also been working on Windows Azure. This past fall we began rolling out some major improvements (visit windowsazure.com to learn about them). You will see even more significant updates and features in Windows Azure in the months ahead.

You are also going to be able to soon take advantage of some great improvements that will ship with Visual Studio 11 and the .NET 4.5 versions of ASP.NET, WCF, WF - as well as with the new releases of ASP.NET MVC and the Entity Framework (which will support both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5). These releases are packed with great new features that will significantly improve productivity as well as enable some fantastic new scenarios - including mobile web, web sockets, web APIs, HTML5, database migrations, integrated async language support, and much, much more. These improvements are going to enable you to build really amazing applications. In addition to delivering great products, we are also increasing our commitment and support of open source and the community. In December, we announced that we were open sourcing the Windows Azure SDKs on GitHub. We are also releasing new features of ASP.NET including NuGet, SignalR and Web API under an open source license. You'll see us invest even more in open source in the months ahead. I'm really looking forward to 2012 - it is going to bring a bunch of improvements for developers, and enable you to build better applications than ever before. Scott Guthrie