After a bunch of iPhone programming I thought I'd jump over to the other side for a little bit and check out the Windows Azure platform: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

It looks like a great way to develop for dumb terminals using a cloud, which is exactly what a lot of companies will be heading towards in the future.

From my point of view as a sysadmin/IT support I think it's a great direction for companies to head and will reduce IT maintenance costs considerably while giving support staff more time to focus on other projects.

Desktop support wastes so much time/money that a solution which works towards eradicating or even reducing it can only be good.

I am applying for the Microsoft Bizspark program (http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark) to hopefully get access to Visual Studio to try Azure out and work on something (I'll post here when I've made progress). I've only ever used Xcode so I'm not sure how the transition will go.

My first project will be to develop a bug tracking system (like bugzilla, confluence) which will run in the cloud locally for a company. Lets hope my application is approved!