James Conard

Welcome to my new blog.  After being repeatedly asked “why don’t you blog”, I’ve finally decided to move off blogs.msdn.com and start a new blog after going silent for a few years. 

So who am I?  I’m a Senior Director at Microsoft in the corporate Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) group.  I lead a team of technical evangelist that focus on several key technologies including the Windows Azure Platform, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and the .NET Framework.  Basically my team is responsible for helping developers understand how to use new developer tools and technologies.  So if you’re going to PDC, downloading a training kit, or watching a Channel9 video for one of these technologies – chances our someone on my team is involved.  Over the last 2.5 years I’ve been focusing most of my time defining Microsoft’s technical strategy for the cloud, which has surfaced in keynotes at some of Microsoft’s major conferences such as PDC, TechEd, and Mix.  I plan to use this new blog to share more about the above technologies and to highlight some of the new resources coming from the evangelism team.  Stay tuned.