Today I filled in the registration form for the European WinPHP Challenge (there is also a Canadian version of that here). My application, of which I will post more details in a later blogpost, will be written specifically for the Windows Azure platform. It will be an interesting experience for sure.

It is no secret to people that know me a bit that, despite the fact that I work solely on OSX and Ubuntu, I have some friends in the Microsoft camp. So far though, I never really felt the need or will to start working with things Windows-related myself. 

When Microsoft announced they'd be running the WinPHP Challenge again this year, I quickly discarded the idea of entering because I don't use Windows anyway. However, after having seen two talks (one by Rob Allen and the other one by Josh Holmes) on Windows Azure I got at least a bit interested in how it would be to work with this technology. Having gone over the idea of it a bit more, I decided to take the plunge and make the step out of my comfort zone. And what better way to do that than to enter a challenge. After a bit of thinking, I was able to come up with a nice idea of an application I could create that would not just benefit myself but would be useful to others when open sourced. After some initial thinking on the name, I ended up with all the information needed to register in the challenge.

It will be an interesting experience: Having not worked with Windows for some years (4 or 5 I believe), let alone with other Microsoft technologies such as IIS, and not at all with cloud services let alone Windows Azure, I will be forced to really dig into all this to make it happen. I really want to take this step out of my comfort zone though, and see what I can do when I completely switch to a new platform and a new set of technologies. I'll be blogging about the experience here as well, so you'll be able to follow what I'm doing.

If you're interested as well: There is still a couple of days left to enter the challenge. Have a look at the website and take the plunge: There's some interesting prices attached as well, with the winner getting a trip to the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas!