Posted by
Senior Manager, Worldwide Marketing & Operations
Brady Gaster (@bradygaster) is a Microsoft Azure Program Manager and the former host of Channel 9’s Web Camps TV, who focuses on building tools that make it easier for web developers to benefit from the cloud. His recent interests involve connecting devices like the Kinect, Netduino, and robotics platforms to Microsoft Azure, as well as finding creative ways to use SignalR, the groundbreaking open source persistent HTTP abstraction. Brady took a break from all things .NET, ASP.NET, Web API, SignalR, Kinect, microcontrollers, C#, and Java to chat with us on his work to ensure Microsoft’s cloud platform is open.
What’s your favorite technology innovation?
This is a great question, and the answer is part of the reason I’m at Microsoft.
SignalR, a library for ASP.NET developers, makes it incredibly simple to add real-time web functionality to your applications and is one of my favorite technologies created in the last five years. It has an interesting history, and I feel fortunate to have witnessed its creation and maturing.
Two guys at Microsoft were on separate teams, but both were excited about the possibility for real-time web functionality for applications. They started meeting in their free time discussing the potential and eventually created SignalR. In the beginning it was just a pet project, but over the course of a year, it became the most popular .NET project on GitHub. From its inception, SignalR was an open source project.
...(read more)
