I would like to thank everyone who braved the snow and the EARTHQUAKE to come out for yesterday’s MSDN Event on the Windows Azure Platform. Here are a number of the resources highlighted during the presentation as well as the slides:

Resources:

• Windows Azure Portal
• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.1 (February 2010)
• Windows Azure Training Kit
• Windows Azure Developer Center
• Azure on Channel9
• Azure Training Course on Channel9
• Lessons Learned Series on Channel9
• Windows Azure Platform Forums

Tools:

• SQL Azure Migration Wizard
• Azure Storage Explorer
• Cloud Storage Studio

PDC Sessions:

• Windows Azure Tables and Queues Deep Dive
• Windows Azure Blob Deep Dive
• Windows Azure Diagnostics, Logging and Monitoring in the Cloud
• REST Services Security Using the Access Control Service

White Papers:

• Windows Azure Table – Programming Table Storage
• Windows Azure Blob – Programming Blob Storage
• Windows Azure Queue – Programming Queue Storage

I will be presenting a session on Multi-Enterprise Business Applications in the Cloud as part of the July meeting of the Chicago Cloud Computing Users Group on July 30, 2009 at 6PM in Downers Grove, IL.

Join us for the July local meeting of the Cloud Computing User Group – this month in Downers Grove.

Our topic this month is Multi-Enterprise Business Applications (MEBAs), a new category of application for business collaboration that the cloud makes possible. We’ll review what the current thinking on MEBAs is from Microsoft and the cloud community followed by an in-depth demo and code exploration of an Azure business collaboration application.

Dave Bost, Developer Evangelist from the Developer Platform and Evangelism team at Microsoft will be the presenter. He will discuss how MEBAs facilitate business processes that span enterprises, how they are enacted by the exchange of messages, and how complex, cross-organizational challenges are managed through these applications (e.g. Security, Data, Management and Governance).

In this session, I will discuss the work that I was recently a part of in Redmond on “Project MEBA” in partnership with the Platform Architecture team. If the planets align, we will have the visionary and brainchild behind “Project MEBA”, Jack Greenfield join us by conference call.

You can find all the details and registration information at http://www.azureusergroup.com/events/event/show?id=2698780%3AEvent%3A13229&xgi=6zA1EHT.

Thanks to everyone who made it out early this morning at the Chicago Code Camp to catch my session on Azure – The Next Frontier. Here are the resources I promised you…

Here are the steps to get up and running with Azure:

1.) Request your development tokens (requires a Windows Live ID)

2.) Download the Cloud Computing Tools

3.) Download the Azure Services Training Kit

4.) Try the Cloud Computing Tools Walkthrough

Here are some additional resources to help you along your learning path:

• Steve Marx’s Blog
• Windows Azure Team Blog
• Clemens Vasters Blog (.NET Services)
• Azure Sessions from MIX’09
• Azure Services Platform Forums and Blogs

Update: I’ll be bringing these same discussions to Indianapolis on May 4th, Chicago on May 5th and Downers Grove, IL on May 20th. To register for these events or to see if MSDN Unleashed is coming to a city near you, visit http://msdnevents.com/unleashed.

For the Spring tour of the MSDN Unleashed events, we are focusing our discussion around Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7.

In the first session, we discussed the story around the new Internet Explorer 8 rendering engine and the choices that were made to make IE8 a standards-compliant browser. Web authors, developers and administrators need to be aware of these choices and how they may impact your website. Head on over to the Internet Explorer Compatibility site for more details. We continued our IE8 developer overview with a look into three features that are going to allow web applications to extend their impact beyond their own web address. These include Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search. We also took a look at a great enhancement for developers (and a much needed one), the Developer Tools.

Resources for Internet Explorer developers:

• Official IE team blog
• IE Developer Center
• IE Compatibility Center
• MIX09 Sessions (On Demand)
• Girogio Sardo’s blog (IE Technical Evangelist)

Our second session covered what developers need to know for Windows 7. Unfortunately, we didn’t have nearly enough time to dive into all of the details. Watch for future sessions on Windows 7 development where we will dive into the particulars.

The session started off by me stressing the point that Windows Vista is a viable option for Windows 7 development. Microsoft made a lot of architectural changes in Windows Vista. These changes were necessary to make Windows the most secure and trustworthy platform that also performs to user’s expectations. Windows 7 builds off of these changes and carries the platform forward.

Windows 7 brings Multi-touch computing to the forefront as a first-class citizen. Developers will have opportunities to extend their application user-interface paradigms into a whole new direction. The Windows 7 SDK provides the API’s to bring touch to your applications. Moving forward, the managed code developers will get touch API’s in WPF 4.

There are a number of new enhancements to the Windows 7 UI that developers can take advantage of. One of the biggest changes are the enhancements to the new Windows 7 Taskbar. The new Taskbar brings a clean and lightweight implementation that includes some great features such as Jump Lists, Thumbnails, and Icon overlays that provide information such as notifications and progress. You can find more resources on developing for the taskbar over on the Windows 7 Taskbar Developer Resource site.

We carried the discussion further in highlighting the point on how the Ribbon control born out of the Office 2007 products was to become a first-class control in Windows 7. As well as the new Explorer enhancements with items such as Federated Search and Libraries.

A few of the items we didn’t have time to touch on was how Windows 7 is going to include Web Service API’s directly in the OS to make communicating with Web Services a native part of the OS. Some other interesting new features include the new Sensors & Location platform. This provides the ability to build location-awareness into your applications. Think of the possibilities!

Resources for Windows 7 developers:

• Windows 7 Engineering Blog
• MSDN Windows Developer Center
• Channel 9
• Windows 7 taskbar: Developer Resources
• Windows Ribbon Framework: Developer Resources

The patterns & practices group recently released the Composite Application Guidance for WPF & Silverlight (Prism 2.0). I had the good fortune to present a session on Prism 2.0 at the VSLive conference in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the session timing wasn’t the best. Prism is not a topic taken lightly. It’s complicated, yet very powerful. Trying to squeeze all the technical goodness of Prism into a 75-minute talk, as the last session of the day on the last day of the conference is quite a challenge. :) Hopefully everyone who attended walked away with a little more knowledge about Prism. As a matter, I can guarantee they did as everyone walked away with a book thanks to the p&p team!

As promised to those brave and studious attendees, here is the deck a list of resources highlighted during the discussion…

• MSDN: Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight
• Codeplex Project Site
• Discussion Forum (Codeplex)
• pattern & practices Developer Center
• Team Member Blogs: Bob Brumfield, Blaine Wastell
• Channel9 videos on Prism