Back in the Fall, my team and I held several training events around Windows Phone 7. It was an opportunity to bring developers together to learn the facets of creating great Windows Phone 7 applications. We’ve done these sort of events in the past. However, with the sure volume of upcoming technologies coming out of Redmond, these events tended to focus on a plethora of topics and give you a taste of each one. With our Windows Phone 7 Boot Camp events, we tried something different. Focus on one topical area and give developers an opportunity to kick the tires in a semi-structured environment. We’ve taken some of the feedback with these events and have brought more of these free learning opportunities to you:

I’m happy to announce the upcoming Boot Camp series of free developer training events including: Web Camp, Windows Dev Boot Camp and Azure Boot Camp.

Web Camp

Microsoft’s Web Camps are events designed to teach you all about building websites using ASP.NET MVC, WebMatrix, OData and more. There are 1-day and 2-day events being offered with interactive sessions on:

• Introduce ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages and WebMatrix; discuss possible uses of these
• Explore new features of ASP.NET MVC 3
• Take a dive deep into jQuery
• Facilitate an in-depth discussion on when to migrate ASP.NET WebPages applications to ASP.NET MVC
• Discuss configuration and deployment of web applications.

Clark Sell has more details on the Web Camps taking place in the Central US.

Windows Dev Boot Camp

The Windows Development Boot Camp is a one-day deep dive class on client development. The event covers developing for Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9, and Silverlight 4 out of browser. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience presenting content, as well as a series of labs so you can write some code and practice what you just learned.

Interactive sessions will include topics from throughout the Windows development platform. We will look at application compatibility and transitioning your applications to Windows 7, integrating with the Windows taskbar, developing for IE9, utilizing the cool functionality in the Sensors and Location Platform so that your application better responds to its current environment, leveraging the multi-touch capabilities (especially in kiosk scenarios), and creating Silverlight 4 out of browser applications.

Azure Boot Camp

Windows Azure Boot Camp is a two day deep dive class to get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned. The agenda will cover:

• Introduction to Cloud Computing and Windows Azure
• Web Roles and Worker Roles
• Queues, Tables and Blobs
• Convincing the Business to use Windows Azure
• Diagnostic and Management API’s
• SQL Azure
• App Fabric
• Cloud Scenarios

For details and locations for each of these events, visit the respective website for each boot camp.

I had the opportunity to present a talk at one of the local PHP meetup groups in Chicago. The title of this particular talk is – Make Web Not War. This is a slogan that the Microsoft Web Platform team has adopted as a kind of statement to show how we feel about the so-called technology religous wars (“my software/language/technology is better than yours”). It’s not about the language, the framework or the tools. It’s about the Platform and what that platform can provide to solve your needs.

There have been several teams at Microsoft who have done great things to get “other” technologies to run better on top of the Microsoft Platform. Unfortunately, not many people, especially those outside of the Microsoft community, are aware of the changes taking place to get these technologies to interoperate with Microsoft Platform.

That’s where part of my job, as a Developer Evangelist, is to participate in these technology communities to share the progress of the work we’re making to give developers more opportunities to expand their skill sets and take advantage of a platform that may have not had an opportunity (or reason) in the past. All the while hopefully educating, sharing direction, guidance and a showing off a cool thing or two.

In this particular instance, I had the opportunity to join the Suburban Chicago PHP meetup and discuss some of the work various teams at Microsoft have been contributing to make PHP run better on Windows. Some of the talking points included…

• Increasing PHP performance on Windows by doing simple things like re-compiling the PHP core engine with a modern compiler
• Offering bytecode caching in IIS7 through the Windows Cache Extension for PHP
• Creating an installer with the frameworks, the tools, the server configs and the applications to get up and running quickly
• Having a native SQL Server Driver for PHP
• Developing toolkits, SDKs and sample code to easily take advantage of components in the Microsoft Web Platform including Windows Azure
• Providing guidance on Running PHP applications on IIS
• Including the all-important URL Rewrite Module to give developers control over their URL paths that lead to an SEO happy site
• And providing tools to help you optimize your SEO practices in the SEO Toolkit

It’s great to see the amount of work that has been done in such a short amount of time to make the Microsoft Web Platform the best platform to run your PHP applications on.

As an added bonus (and a promise to the meetup group) here are the slides from my presentation on Make Web Not War…

Coming this summer comes a man on a mission. With his sidekicks Higgins (played by Some Guy) and Rick (played by Some Other Guy), Tom Cannon is your Web platform solution solver. Keep an eye out for future episodes.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=9e1142a3-c13e-4156-9bc4-1096f6145434" onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://video.msn.com']);" target="_new" title="Cannon P.I. - Title Sequence">Video: Cannon P.I. &#8211; Title Sequence</a>