Welcome to Area 91 – an open-source community-connection blog hosted by DPE (Developer and Platform Evangelism) team at Microsoft India. One of the primary parts of our role as evangelists, involves reaching out to the developer community from the entire IT eco-system. Through this blog we would want to to connect up with all of you and have a healthy and productive discussion on some of the biggest interoperability challenges you face in your development cycle.

One of the most common and consistent concerns / issues / feedback we received during our various interaction with the community, over the last few months, has primarily been “We don’t know where to get the info”; “How do I know what Microsoft is doing on interoperability”  etc.  So we got down to sorting that out. Amongst other initiatives, such as the Interop Newsletter, direct interactions with the community leads and members, we are now launching this website as a means of sharing all the work that has been going into our interoperability efforts. In addition, we also realize that there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding our platform and product offerings and we also aim to demystify some of those notions through this blog.  However, we do not intend to use this as a marketing platform to sell our products.  :) 
 
This site is in its first avatar…and is just the beginning …. this will certainly evolve over a period of time. And this is where we look forward to your participation in this journey. After all, this site has been built to address your needs and so please do share your feedback and ideas on how we can improve on the site to provide you with the right information.

The crack-team behind this blog is a great mix of Database guru’s, Code-crankers and Architect whizzies. Read more about them on the profile page. Our contacts are shared on the site and so please do feel to connect with us individually. We also have guest bloggers from the community who will be participating on the blog here. We are all very excited to be talking to you and let’s ensure that we keep the conversation going.

P.S: Any guesses on the brainwave behind the name?? Well ….this site was primarily conceptualized to address the audiences in the India Region. So “Area” for Region and 91 for India ( +91 - ISD code for India). :-)