This meetup is focused on hands-on coding for Cloud platforms. The goal is ultimately for members to share best practices and innovate. This meetup is about sharing code and building applications that run in the cloud. Although I work for Microsoft as a developer evangelist, I welcome all developers from all cloud platforms. Initially, the meetings will be focused on the Windows Azure Platform (Azure). Azure is new and initial meetings will be designed to get developers up and running and working on code, using C#, Visual Basic, PHP, and Java. The developer tooling will be Visual Studio or Eclipse.

IDC, a well regarded technology market analysis firm forecasted (in October 2008) that IT spending in cloud services will grow by a factor of almost three and reach $42 billion by 2012. Silicon Valley is the startup capital of the world. Being a successful software engineer means being able to code applications for the cloud. If writing code is what you love, then this is your meetup.