IIS Technical Evangelist
Hello, my name is Drew Robbins. I just started as the IIS Technical Evangelist focused on developers who build web applications that use and extend our platform.
On this blog, I'll be covering topics like the following:
- Taking Advantage of IIS7 as an ASP.NET Developer
- Using technologies like PHP, ColdFusion, Rails, Python with IIS7 and Windows 2008
- Creating Managed Extensions to IIS7
- Hosting Web Services in IIS7
- Programming Windows Media Services
- Highlighting People/Companies Creating Great Apps for IIS7
To give you a little background, I've been developing web applications since sometime in college. I started out writing applications in PERL before I was introduced to some of the popular frameworks at the time. I had a lot of fun coding in various environments such as Cold Fusion, PHP and ASP. I've spent the last 5-6 years focused primarily on ASP.NET, while still keeping an active interest in other frameworks.
I value using the best tool for the job, while not reinventing the wheel every time new technology arrives. That's how I arrived at this role. IIS is an exciting technology, because it is not only a great web server, but it enables you to combine the technologies that make sense for your organization or project. With IIS7, I can use both .NET and PHP together. I can even pull in tools like BlueDragon and integrate CFML.
I'm not a big proponent of mixing a lot technologies into a single project, but I do get excited when you can download a great PHP blog application like Wordpress and integrate it into your existing ASP.NET site using the built-in membership providers (Mike recently did just that). That saves a lot of time so you can concentrate on creating new functionality.
Feel free to contact me via this blog or email. My alias is drobbins at Microsoft.