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.

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.

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.