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Thanks for reading.

Eric

Are you an ISV?

ISV = Independent Software Vendors – that is you write some kind of product that you sell to more than one customer. My new team is all about helping ISVs and we have a team blog and brand new twitter account which I will increasingly be found on. If you are an ISV, please fave the blog and follow the twitter account. And if you are an ISV please keep an eye on (and sign up to) http://bit.ly/ukmprhome, especially if you are interested in the Windows Azure Platform.

FREE access to the Windows Azure Platform

If you are looking for the cheapest way to explore Azure then check out the free Introductory Special – not many compute hours per month but you do get a SQL Azure database free for three months. (A while back I did a walkthrough for this offer and for the even better MSDN subscriber offer)

Slides

Links

• Download the free ebook (also includes details of how you can order the paper copy from lulu)
• http://azurescope.cloudapp.net/ Benchmarks and guidance
• For more resources and information http://bit.ly/startazure
• If you are an ISV intending to explore/adopt azure, sign up to http://bit.ly/ukmpr
• If you are an ISV in the UK, feel free to pop along for a chat about Azure
• If you are based in the UK, join http://ukazure.ning.com and check out all upcoming events
• UK ISV team blog and brand new twitter account
• And please follow me on http://twitter.com/ericnel

This two-day intensive instructor-led workshop provides delegates with an early opportunity to gain insight into the nature and benefits of the Windows Azure Platform. Delivered through workshop style presentations and hands-on lab exercises, the workshop will focus on three key services – Windows Azure, SQL Azure and AppFabric.

Details and registration links at:

London 30th September 2010

London 15th November 2010

London 8th February 2011

London 5th April 2011

Agenda

• Module 1: Windows Azure Platform overview
• Module 2: Introduction to Windows Azure
• Module 3: Introduction to SQL Azure
• Module 4: Introduction to AppFabric

Related Links

• UK based? Interested in the Windows Azure Platform? Join http://ukazure.ning.com
• Get started with the Windows Azure Platform http://bit.ly/startazure

We have been discussing how we can take that format forward and I am pleased to say we have our first “spin off”. Namely the  “Windows Azure Platform – Accelerated Virtual Training Workshop” which will take place in October. Yippeee.

The training will be delivered over a two week period and combines instructor led sessions (delivered virtually over Live Meeting) with independent distance learning, email support and access to hands-on practical exercises. The training provides delegates with an opportunity to gain insight into the nature and benefits of the Windows Azure Platform

Register NOW

AGENDA

NB: This is on UK time!

Day 1 – Live Meeting 3 hours Monday 11th October

9.30 am until 12.30 pm

• Overview of the “Accelerated Training Workshop” Virtual learning programme
• Windows Azure Platform overview
• Introduce the "Azure Application Resource Toolkit" and the Training Resources Application
• Introduction to Windows Azure
• Windows Azure demo
• Set participating students their Distance Learning Homework from the "Azure Application Resource Toolkit"

Day 2 to Day 4 – Self Learning

• Daily emails of Azure hints and tips to assist learners with Distance Learning Homework
• As a guide, Distance Learning Homework is expected to take students 1 hour per day to complete

Day 5 – Live Meeting 3 hours Friday 15th October

9.30 am until 12.30 pm

• Review of work done to date in the workshop
• Open Questions and Answers
• Introduction to SQL Azure
• SQL Azure demo
• Review of next steps
• Homework: Follow-up exercise to compley before Day 10

Day 6 to Day 9

• Daily emails of Azure hints and tips to assist learners with Distance Learning Homework
• As a guide, Distance Learning Homework is expected to take students 1 hour per day to complete

Day 10 – Live Meeting 2 hours Monday 25th October

9.30 am until 11.30 am

• Review of work done to date in the workshop
• Review of sample applications built by students
• Open Questions and Answers
• Programme Close

AUDIENCE

This course is aimed at software developers with at least 6 months practical experience using Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010.

Related Links

• UK based? Interested in the Windows Azure Platform? Join http://ukazure.ning.com
• Get started with the Windows Azure Platform http://bit.ly/startazure

It is a an exciting time to be a web developer. There are lots of new technologies from Microsoft coming out for the browser (IE9 changes everything), in the area of tooling (the brand new WebMatrix) and for the server – with ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 released today (27th July 2010).

Download and install side by side with MVC 2

If you have Visual Studio 2010 (The FREE Web Developer edition is fine) then you can safely download ASP.NET MVC Preview 1 (download + install takes a few minutes). ASP.NET MVC 3 is designed to be installed side-by-side with ASP.NET MVC 2 which means you can install today’s Preview 1 release on your machine without it impacting existing MVC 2 projects.  Once installed you will have a new set of ASP.NET MVC 3 project templates show up within Visual Studio 2010’s “New Project” dialog.

MVC 3 Preview 1 includes:

• View improvements: Select a view engine, new view engine “Razor”
• Controller Improvements: Global filters for “cross cutting” logic, new ways to pass data to views, new ActionResult types
• JavaScript and AJAX improvements: built-in JSON binding and more
• Model Validation improvements: .NET 4 DataAnnotations and more
• Dependency Injection improvements: Making it easier to do DI/IOC work to simplify testing of controllers

Once you have played, please give feedback

Preview 1 is about getting feedback. Post your feedback and any bugs/issues you find to the ASP.NET MVC forum at http://forums.asp.net. Thank you.

Related Links

• Scott Guthrie walkthrough of MVC 3
• Phil Haack announcing preview 1

P.S. Oddly, I only just received my copy of the excellent Pro ASP.NET MVC 2 by Steven Sanderson last week. It arrived before I had got round to finishing the first edition on ASP.NET MVC 1. MVC 3 Preview 1 arrived before I had read 20 pages of the second edition. I need to speed up

Project “Houston” provides a web-based database management tool for basic database management tasks like authoring and executing queries, designing and editing a database schema, and editing table data. All implemented in Silverlight.

Getting Started

For this initial CTP, you can access “Houston” from SQL Azure Labs. You also need to make sure that you check the “Allow Microsoft Services” checkbox in your firewall to allow “Houston” to communicate with your databases. Also check out the starter videos:

• Video – Tables – create and modify a table in an existing SQL Server database.
• Video – Queries – create, modify, execute, save, and open a Transact-SQL query.
• Video – Views – create, select, and modify views.
• Video – Stored procedures – create, select, and modify stored procedures.

Step1 – connect at https://manage.sqlazurelabs.com/

Step2 – browse

Step3 – Create

Enjoy!

Related Links

• SQL Azure team blog post on ‘Houston’
• http://ukazure.ning.com

It was  particularly interesting to me and my team as we are hoping/planning to do similar online conferences in UK time around technologies such as the Windows Azure Platform and Windows Phone 7 – and attending yesterday gave me the confidence that we are on the right track.

Highlights for me included:

Three tracks, great mix of sessions, no excuse to be bored!

Could join all three rooms at the same time

and follow the open space “Law of two feet” with ease

Every session could be rated on http://speakerrate.com

All sessions can be found at http://speakerrate.com/events/503-mvcconf. Alas only 78 ratings so far which is a shame. Rate them now!

The return of IRC

IRC is my fave “chat thing” and is too often overlooked.

Very professionally done

e.g. the slides explaining how it will all work

and the joining a room page

Sponsors a plenty

That were given plenty of air time at the start of sessions which is to be applauded. E.g. the wonderful JetBrains

And plenty of buzz afterwards

• UK based sharpcloud save $500,000 with Windows Azure
• Azure Portal gets Guest OS Auto Upgrade Mode

You can either manually select the operating system that you want to have deployed to your nodes via a drop down box or allow automatic mode to upgrade to the latest operating system as they are released.

• Steve Marx has written a Windows Azure application called  Swingify that allows you to upload any song to the internet and convert it into a swing  version. How about  Lady Gaga – Bad Romance for starters
• Not sure I mentioned it before, but Windows Azure Platform Training Kit got a June update.  The kit contains 15 Hands On Labs,  15 Presentations and Videos, 21 Demos, 3 Samples and Tools. Download the Training Kit here.
• Cloud Computing: A Guide for IT Leaders this is an online resource for business and technology leaders interested in the cloud, Windows Azure and BPOS.

A couple of weeks back I was at Web Directions manning a stand showing off Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2 (check out a post I did at the time including videos to watch on IE9 development).

The developers and designers present were in general impressed with the progress we were making with IE9. Way faster than IE8, far better standards support, focus on being great at HTML5 etc. IE9 is big news. Seriously big news. Its existence (once finally released) will significantly change how developers will build rich UX for the web, especially the web “outside the firewall”.  However Platform Preview 2 still was missing several key features which prevented a number of sites we tried out during the two days at the conference from rendering/working correctly – and just about everyone asked “will we implement canvas?”

The good news is yesterday we released Platform Preview 3 which adds a bunch of those features along with some great demos to show them off. You can install Preview 3 now alongside IE7/8 and check out the demos yourself. They are very impressive – my personal favourite being 250 gpu accelerated fish at near 60fps using <canvas>:

But others such as Amazon Book Shelf come a close second:

Related Links:

• More details on the team blog

This question has come up a lot in recent weeks as early adopters move from prototyping with the platform to actually needing to deliver real applications.

Whilst fundamentally you are using the same approaches and best practices for the Windows Azure Platform as you would use for a Web application or service (A good IIS7/ASP.NET based architecture is likely a good Windows Azure Platform architecture), there is still plenty of differences which impact on architecture.…

Note: Cross posted from IUpdateable from Eric Nelson.

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