Arkiv för April, 2012
WOW! Thank you big time to the organizers of this year’s TechDays Conference in Örebro Sweden. I really appreciated the great and very happy atmosphere you managed to instill in the attendees of this year’s event! Also the exhibitors did a fabulous job manning their stations and add their genuine and best efforts to keep the event from start to finish the time spent really well worth it. Super nice entertainment at the party too – especially the beauty and the Geeks situation!
I also want to direct thanks to the Azure DPEs Björn Eriksen and Kristoffer Liljeblad for having me in their “the Cloud” booth which was a big white container set up to give the feel of us being inside an actual Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud Container:
The Windows Azure Challenge and the potential of a really great tool for teaching Windows Azure skills through competition I also take home with me from the event.
Thank you Jessica Engström for giving me the opportunity to interview first Clemens Vasters on the Service Bus and then Nick Harris on the Windows Push Notification Service (WNS) and the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8.
Finally a thanks to the audience at my session “Predicting Cloudy Weather by Power Debugging Windows Azure” for asking so many good questions and showing a great interest in the platform. This was one of the more fun presentations I have ever given and it was the room that did it!
Lastly here are some pictures from the TechDays 2012 event.
Cheers,
Magnus
Written on the train back from Örebro to Malmö.
Summary OK so Day 1 at TechDays was a day with workshops. There were Web, mobile and of course Windows Azure workshops going on in parallel.
Our Windows Azure Workshop was headed by Björn Eriksen and Kristoffer Liljeblad with the newly created and very awesome Azure Challenge.
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The Azure Challenge is a service in the Cloud which contains a bunch of challenges for you to code, workshop style, against Windows Azure. When you have completed a challenge you give some information to the Challenge engine, like a url for instance, and the service will validate if you have completed the challenge. If you have then you get points. And you will continue to get points as long as you have the challenge up and running in the Cloud meaning you score higher for completing the tasks faster and also for being stable in the Cloud. Really cool!
In the evening we all went to a speakers hang out at the lovely Örebro Castle. Nice to hang out and get to know one another.
Today I’m helping out manning the Cloud booth. In this picture together with Microsoft Architect DevCeleb Clemens Vasters.
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People who come to the booth want to know all sorts of things from Pricing and versioning (typical Microsoft Questions to answer) or how does it work and what benefits are there from using a Platform as a Service like Windows Azure (those are my questions to answer)?
All in all the organization at Conventum from Microsoft and suppliers is as usual pretty immaculate. Coffe is great supplied by Soleo Mat & Vin. It’s all good.
I did my last tech prep today for my BIG session tomorrow. At 14:00 I’ll be presenting Power Debugging Windows Azure in room 10 in the Scandic hotel. I will be showing things like live tracing over the ServiceBus and what tooling and support is built into the Platform for debugging and monitoring your Windows Azure assets.
That’s all for now… there are people in the booth who want my attention!
Cheers,
Magnus
Happy Day! I found out today that the newly forming Windows Azure Insiders program is emerging and I am on the first batch of members.
As Windows Azure MVPs we are close and snug with the Windows Azure team. We get lots of great pre-information on upcoming Windows Azure features. Also, and very much equally important we are invited to contribute to the knowledge pool needed to shape future directions of our dear Platform – the Windows Azure Cloud!
With this new and now forming Windows Azure Insiders Program Microsoft wants to reach out to an even broader group of dedicated professionals, who are not necessarily MVPs on the Platform, but still are creating, innovating and pushing the boundaries for what you can do with the Cloud in general and the Windows Azure Platform in the Cloud in particular!
It is a great honor to be allowed to be a part of this very dynamic and experienced team! I’d like to thank Mark Brown (Senior Product Manager and Azure Community Manager at Microsoft) for his great work with putting this program together and I am looking forward to being able to contribute with all I have to his community group!
Cheers,
Magnus – Senior Consultant at Diversify in Sweden.
Here’s how to get a lot of Windows Azure extras as open source absolutely for free. It’s just a simple nuget comand away:
PM> Install-Package WindowsAzure.All.Contrib
Using the Nuget Package Manager has become a must have for modern development using Visual Studio. All of the “cool kids” who do OSS development build and publish their own Nugets. It’s just a thing to do basically. Consequently I also have a bunch of nuget packages in my nuget profile where I share code I write, mainly for Windows Azure. Although I’m fully aware of the “not invented here”-syndrome and I know that most readers would just shrug at a thing like this, it is still “out there” for you to grab if you like! Until now I have not had a simple way to “get it all” at once. But now I’ve published a new nuget package with which you can easily pull down 'all of it at once:
Windows Azure Contrib on the nuget site (currently version 1.6.0.8). It is very simple to get right from within Visual Studio with the command
PM> Install-Package WindowsAzure.All.Contrib
The code for the project, if you want to cut and paste from the source, is available here at CodePlex: AzureContrib. The code has a lot of UnitTests I have forced both StyleCop and CodeAnalysis rules on my project and with “XML Documentation File” and “Treat Warnings as Errors” the API is 100% documented. Hopefully it’s easy enough to digest if you look at it.
(If you want to come in and contribute to this project I’d love to put you up as a contributor with full credits. Contact me through the blog if you want to be a part of it!)
HTH!
Cheers,
Magnus
With TechDays in Örebro, Sweden coming up next week I am very exited to be part of the great Windows Azure content that Björn Eriksen has managed to pull together. Thank you Björn, here is a link back to your post convering the happenings, in Swedish. Let me republish a few of the highlights here for our English participants.
The official Facebook page for Windows Azure in Sweden is https://www.facebook.com/azuresweden. On “the Twitters” it’s #WindowsAzure and #TD2012.
Pre-Conference
There are three TechDays days this year. The first day is a Pre Conference featuring several topics where one is a full day of och Windows Auzre. There will be several shorter sessions during the day and the participants will be actively working on something called The Azure Challenge. (Authors note: I will be there as one of the tech experts and also give a session on Windows Azure Storage.)
The Cloud
There will be a space on the exhibition floor for Windows Azure where you can go for all questions about the Cloud to meet the experts presented here in under.
Sessions
| Wednesday 14.45 |
| Kristofer Liljeblad och Björn Eriksen - A peek into the Microsoft cloud |
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| Windows Azure is a broad platform to build Cloud based Applications on. This session is an overview of that platform. |
| Wednesday 16.15 |
| Robert Folkesson – Migrating to Windows Azure |
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| A good friend of mine showing his mad skilz with Windows Azure migration strategies. |
| Wednesday 16.15 |
| Nick Harris - Bring your Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 Apps to Life with Push Notifications using Windows Azure |
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| Nick Harris is “the Dude” when it comes to explaining all about the new services in the Windows Azure Cloud that supports such scenarios as push notifications to millions of mobile and Windows 8 devices and PCs. Certainly not a trivial problem to solve! |
| Wednesday 16.15 |
| Mikael Håkansson and Johan Hedberg - Microsoft Integration Strategy |
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| This session will cover the coming integration technologies in BizTalk and Azure Service Bus where a brand-new set of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) capabilities has been added. |
| Wednesday 17.45 |
| Clemens Vasters - Windows Azure Service Bus Introduction and Futures |
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| This session by Clemens Vasters, Architect on the Windows Azure Service Bus team in Redmond, will introduce scenarios and solutions with Windows Azure Service Bus. You will learn how to build hybrid cloud solutions and how to leverage Service Bus to bridge communication between different sites across the cloud. We will also talk about how Service Bus allows you to reach out to devices. The session will discuss Service Bus Relay and the Service Bus Messaging capabilities, and also how to leverage the Access Control Service to secure your endpoints. |
| Thursday 12.30 |
| Clemens Vasters - Windows Azure Service Bus Deep Dive |
| This session will illustrate advanced capabilities of the Service Bus Queues and Topics, including subscription filtering, session management, correlation, and you will learn about a range of architectural patterns that can be implemented using the messaging capabilities and help with scaling out your applications. You will also learn about ASP.NET’s SignalR framework and how to scale out SignalR using Service Bus on Windows Azure. |
| Thursday 12.30 |
| Peter Larsson - 0 or 1.000.000 users - the Facebook and Azure story |
| How do you build and host an application that allows for fast and exponential user growth, but still minimizes cost if the hype that you're hoping for never happens? Come listen to a case study of developing a hobby Facebook application in Azure! From an introduction, overview and live demo of the app, we'll dig down into the architecture and technical design, and zoom in on components like Azure Table Storage, Azure Queue Storage, SQL Azure and Azure Caching. We will also talk about how the application has been architected for scalability, performance and minimal cost, and lessons learned if you're planning to build your own Facebook application. |
| Thursday 14.00 |
| Magnus Mårtensson - Predicting Cloudy Weather by Power Debugging Windows Azure |
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| The main form of debugging applications in Windows Azure is by way of collecting, accessing and analyzing application trace messages. Handling thing process well without getting lost can be demanding. How do you collect a lot of trace from an application running live with thousands of users and make any sense of it? The risk of a heavy down pour of trace-rain from the Cloud is 100%. The Windows Azure Management Portal gives a lot of help for those who know how to take advantage of that functionality. Shared in this session, based on experiences from real Windows Azure endeavors by Cloud Accelerate Partners, are more ways to empower your Windows Azure debugging process. |
| Thursday kl 12.30 |
| John Craddock - Managing Identity in the Cloud with ADFS and Windows Azure |
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| We’ve all come to expect single-sign-on to our on-premise applications and services, but what happens when we move applications and services to the Cloud? How do we achieve single sign on for SaaS services such as Office 365, our own applications in the Cloud and services we consume from partner organisations? Federated Identity is the answer, come to this session and learn how federation allows the creation of an identity that can be consumed by services regardless of their location and ownership. You will discover how to build integrated identity solutions with Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) and Windows Azure Access Control Services. |
| Thursday 14.00 |
| John Craddock - Take the Spaghetti out of Windows Azure – an insight for IT Pro Techies |
| By now you will have heard of Microsoft Windows Azure and probably been lost in a plethora of terminology: app fabric, service control bus, worker roles, virtual machine roles, access control service, compute, REST APIs, SQL Azure… The list goes on and on - doesn’t it just make your head hurt? Come to this session and understand what Windows Azure is, what can be done with it and what role you can take as an ITPro Techie. You gain a thorough understanding of the components of Azure and how they are used to build Cloud services. |
| Thursday kl 15.30 |
| André Henriksson - Windows Azure – What does it cost? |
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| Session about costs and other important business matters on Windows Azure. |
| Thursday kl 15.30 |
| Håkan Winther - SQL server 2012 + SQL Azure = True |
| How do you make external SQL Azure databases work together with internal SQL server 2012 databases? |
There you have it folks! As you can see the speakers list at TechDays in Örebro about Windows Azure is very impressive! I can’t wait to be there and be part of all the fun!
And here is a list of my M33t (m33ters on Twitter) friends, what they do and their blogs:
See you soon at TechDays!
Cheers,
Magnus
