Thursday march 4th 2010 (starting 18:30), the first regular PHPBenelux meeting in The Netherlands will be organized in the Microsoft offices at Schiphol as we announced earlier. We are happy to announce that there will be two premier speakers at this meeting.

The first speaker is Jan-Willem Eshuis. Jan-Willem is Lead developer and architect in the New Media department of dutch public broadcaster NOS. In this role, he is responsible for the technical development of all new media applications of the NOS. Within these applications, the "in house" developed Service Oriented Architecture has an important role.

The second speaker is Josh Holmes. Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness. He is currently employed by Microsoft as a UX Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the dev partners with a UX or Rich Internet Application offering in Central Region. Prior to joining Microsoft in October 2006, Josh was a consultant working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development with an emphasis on mobility and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. You can contact Josh through his blog at http://www.joshholmes.com.

Jan-Willem will be speaking about their Service Oriented Architecture. The New Media department of the NOS uses a lot of Service API's in a Service Oriented Architecture in the development of their applications. During this presentation, Jan-Willem Eshuis will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of API's and will show some examples of the use of these.

Josh will talk about the possibilities of Azure for PHP developers, how to use the Azure eco-system efficiently using your application's architecture and will discuss topics how to best use Windows Azure OS with Microsoft SQL Azure to set up your PHP application.

Please note: For security reasons, pre-registration is required or you might not be able to enter the Microsoft building. Please pre-register here.