AzureFest, the get-together where developers and aspiring developers learn how to use and deploy applications and databases to Azure, took place at Microsoft Canada headquarters in Mississauga on Saturday.

The event was held by our partners ObjectSharp and led by Cory Fowler, an Azure MVP. There was a morning sessions and an afternoon session, and my rough estimation of both events put the attendance at around 130 in total.

Each three-hour session consisted of a quick overview of the Azure platform, the distribution of all the necessary developer tools, signing up for an Azure account and using the prototyping-and-wallet-friendly Introductory Special and deploying that old ASP.NET MVC standby app NerdDinner and its associated database to the cloud. The three-hour format covered more practical ground than the typical one-hour conference session and gave Cory and the ObjectSharpies a chance to make themselves available for one-on-one assistance.

In Case You Missed AzureFest…

If you couldn’t make it down to Mississauga to participate in AzureFest, you can still benefit from the AzureFest session. The ObjectSharpies are recording a version of Cory’s Azure deployment walkthrough and making it available online. Watch this blog for more details.

Try Azure and Get Some Money for Your User Group!

If you’re the member of a Canadian Microsoft User Group, you can help them make a quick $25 which they can use to fund their activities. All you have to do is:

• Open an Azure account: either the introductory special offer or using the Azure benefit that comes with your MSDN subscription
• Deploy an application – any application, including pre-written ones like NerdDinner – to Azure
• Send an email to cdnazure@microsoft.com with the following:
  • A screenshot of your application running on Azure
  • The name of the user group to which you’d like to get $25
  • Feedback about your experience with Azure

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

For today only (September 26, 2010): Manning is selling the ebook version of Azure in Action for a mere US$15, which converts to CAD$15.36 as of this writing. The ebook is a MEAP book – that’s Manning Early Access Program – which means that it’s an in-progress book. Purchasers of MEAP books get updates and the final version as part of the deal.

To get the deal on Azure in Action, use the discount code dotd0926 in the Promotional Code box when checking out.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

For today only (that’s Sunday, August 15th), Manning is offering the pair of their books, C# in Depth, Second Edition and Azure in Action for the price of one! Just use the discount code dotd0815 in the Promotional Code box when you check out. You can order the final book in either dead-tree or PDF format.

Both these books are MEAP books – that’s short for Manning Early Access Program, a chance for you to get in-progress and final editions of books currently being written.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Are you a developer looking to launch your new web application? Or perhaps you’re an IT Pro or IT Architect trying to understand what all the fuss about “The Cloud” is. Or maybe you need for some compute time to run calculations. No matter who you are, or why you’re thinking about the cloud, Microsoft is making it easy for you try out our cloud offerings: Windows Azure (which runs your apps the in the cloud), SQL Azure (your database in the cloud) and AppFabric (which ties your on-premises and cloud systems together).

Check out the Azure Pricing Page and take a look at the introductory special, which lets you take Azure for a spin for a limited time – free of charge. Here’s what you get:

Included each month at no charge:

• Windows Azure
  • 25 hours of a small compute instance
  • 500 MB of storage
  • 10,000 storage transactions
• SQL Azure
  • 1 Web Edition database (available for first 3 months only)
• AppFabric
  • 100,000 Access Control transactions
  • 2 Service Bus connections
• Data Transfers (per region)
  • 500 MB in
  • 500 MB out

Any monthly usage in excess of the above amounts will be charged at the standard rates. This introductory special will end on October 31, 2010 and all usage will then be charged at the standard rates.

This special offer is available right now through October 31, 2010 and is limited to one per customer.  (You’ll probably want to look at the “full details and disclosure” page.)

If you’re in Canada and have questions about Windows Azure, my team and I are here to help and can answer your questions.  We’d also love to hear what sorts of projects you’re using Azure for. To reach us, drop us an email at cdnazure@microsoft.com.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My coworker Christian Beauclair, Senior Developer Evangelist, did an interview with IT in Canada about Azure, its parts and some development patterns for Azure that fit many business scenarios.

For those of you not familiar with Azure, it’s Microsoft’s cloud computing platform made up of three parts:

• Windows Azure, the operating system in the cloud where your applications run
• SQL Azure, the database engine in the cloud where your data lives, and
• AppFabric, which connects cloud, hosted and on-premises services together.

As for the Azure development patterns that fit common business scenarios, they are:

• Transparence: Simply moving applications and data from servers to the cloud. The benefits are cost savings, not having to manage servers, cost-effective scaling and opportunities to prototype without having to invest in additional hardware and software.
• Scale-in multi-tenancy: On-the-fly scaling by creating new Azure instances when demand increases. It’s hard to predict what demand for an online service will be; this “just in time” approach does an end run around having to make such forecasts and purchases based on them.
• Burst compute: This is scaling based on known peak periods, such as the Christmas rush for retailers or the Superbowl for pizza delivery. A cloud-based system like Azure lets you acquire more server capacity during those known peak periods and release them once the peak period is over.
• Elastic storage: This is data scaling – you can use Azure to extend your storage instead of purchasing more on-premises disk arrays.
• Inter-organization communication: Using Azure to host an API to connect to your company’s services or data (which may live in Azure, on some hosted system or on-premises). It’s a good way to provide services to the outside world while keeping your infrastructure manageable.

There’s more in the article, and even more in the interview, which you can either:

• Listen to, either on the podcast page or download the MP3
• Read, in the transcript (in PDF form)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
MP4, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune format.

Here’s the episode 3 of Cloud Cover, the Channel 9 show where hosts Ryan Dunn and Steve Marx show you what’s in the Windows Azure cloud computing platform and how to get the most out of it.

In this episode:

• How to host other web servers in Worker Roles
• New tools for working with SQL Azure
• Find out how to calculate the size of your database and objects in SQL Azure

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
MP4, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune format.

Here’s the second episode of Cloud Cover, the Channel 9 show where hosts Ryan Dunn and Steve Marx show you what’s in the Windows Azure cloud computing platform and how to get the most out of it.

Steve’s off being a jet-set celebrity – what kind of excuse is “I’m off to Japan to shoot a commercial”, anyway? – so David Aiken, who also knows quite a bit about Azure, is filling in for him in this episode. Here’s what David and Steve cover:

• They do a walkthrough of the RoleEntryPoint class and show you the hooks that you can use to build web and worker services,
• Explain Azure’s billing model, and
• Show you how to troubleshoot the Initializing-Busy-Stopping loop.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in MP4, WMA, WMV and Zune formats.

Cloud Cover is a new show on Microsoft’s Channel 9 that covers the Windows Azure platform. In this first episode, hosts Ryan Dunn and Steve Marx show you:

• Azure’s Service Management API and how to use PowerShell cmdlets to manage your cloud services, and
• How to get started quickly with Windows Azure.

They also talk about updates to SQL Azure, Windows Azure drives, new Windows Azure storage management tools and Azure Reader architecture.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you had to give a name to the sort of programming I’m going to be concentrating on in 2010, I’d suggest Cloudy with a Chance of Mobile. I’m using this phrase as a catch-all that comprises the following:

• Windows Azure as a platform for web applications
• ASP.NET MVC as my web framework
• Silverlight as my rich internet application platform
• jQuery as my JavaScript framework
• A number of programming languages: C#, JavaScript, PHP, IronRuby, IronPython, F#
• Mobile computing, which means means phones, tablets and other ways to access processing power while on the go
• And while it’s yet another thing to put on my plate, I can’t resist XNA, the game development platform for Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune.

Remember: these are just the technologies I’ll that I will be using my in own software development and will be writing about. My job remains helping Canadian developers be the best that they can be, primarily with any Microsoft tools and technologies. If you’ve got questions about tools and tech that aren’t listed above, I (along with my fellow Developer Evangelists, Christian Beauclair and John Bristowe) am still your resource within Microsoft!

I sometimes like to refer to this selection of technologies as “The Undesktop”. The desktop, its operating system and applications have been Microsoft’s bread and butter since the company was a handful of scruffy nerds in New Mexico building a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 (the “old man” of the 8-bit machines). While the desktop has been very good to the company – I’d go so far as to call it Microsoft’s first love – it’s not the only place where the software magic happens.

Sometimes I worry that the company is a little too in love with the desktop:

(Bill Gates, DOS and a game called DONKEY.BAS actually played a surprisingly influential role in my first kiss, but that’s another story. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you in person.)

Since the company already lavishes plenty of attention, documentation, demo code and love on the desktop, I thought that I’d do well to take a different tack and help developers build on platforms other than the desktop (and its svelte fraternal twin, the notebook).

What is Windows Azure?

In this article, I’m going to give you a quick overview of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Windows Azure. I figured that a good place to start would be by answering the question “What is Windows Azure?”, and doing so with a video whose title is, oddly enough, What is Windows Azure?

Steve Marx of the Azure team made this video, and it’s a quick one, running at a mere 4 minutes, 16 seconds and explains what Azure is and how and why you might want to use it:

Steve also made a video on The CIA Pickup, which features an app that says he built to impress people (okay, he wants to impress potential dates) by convincing them he’s a CIA agent. It runs on Azure and makes use of a couple of services too: Twilio for telephony, Live ID for authentication and Live Mail for… well, mail. It’s easier to show you than tell you what it is and how it works:

Azure is Live!

As of this Monday, Windows Azure has gone live. That means it’s out of beta, commercially available and ready to host websites, web apps and data. Azure will remain free-as-in-beer for you to evaluate through January 2010, after which you’ll start getting charged for Azure compute time. Take it out for a spin!

Getting Started with Azure

I’ll cover Azure in greater detail in future posts. In the meantime, here are some links to resources to help you get started developing for the cloud:

An overview of Azure

Check out this quick introduction to Azure and its pillars:

• Windows Azure, where your apps, data storage live and where you can manage them.
• SQL Azure, the cloud-based relational database, with lots of SQL Server goodness.
• AppFabric, which makes it easier to connect cloud apps with “on-premises” (that is, non-cloud) apps through features like identity management, firewall-friendly messaging and more.

Building Azure Apps

Before you can put an app in the cloud, you need to build it on your local machine:

• Get your paws on the Windows Azure Training Kit
• Get your machine set up for Azure development:
  • The Azure Tools and SDK
  • Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 (or if you must, Windows Vista SP1)
  • IIS 7.0 with:
    • ASP.NET (and optionally ASP.NET MVC)
    • WCF HTTP Activation
    • CGI (optional)
  • One of these Visual Studio IDEs:
    • Visual Studio 2008 SP1
    • Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition with SP1 (which is free-as-in-beer)
    • Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (free-as-in-beer during the beta)
    • Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition Beta 2 (also free-as-in-beer)
  • SQL Server 2005 Express Edition or SQL Server 2008 Express Edition or higher (The Express Editions are free-as-in-beer)
  • These hotfixes, which you may or may not need, depending on your setup:
    • Native debugging improvements (not needed for the 2010 IDEs)
    • Improve Visual Studio Stability (not needed for Windows 7 RC or later)
    • Support for FastCGI on the Development Fabric (not needed for Windows 7 RC or later, or Windows Server 2008 R2 or later)

Deploying Azure Apps

Once you’ve got a web app running on your local machine, it’s time to deploy it to the cloud. Here’s how you do it:

1. Purchase the Windows Azure platform package that works for you. And yes, there’s a free-as-in-beer one. Remember that if you have an MSDN subscription, you already have a monhtly allotment of Azure compute hours – check your subscription!
2. Package your application for deployment.
3. If your app needs a storage project, create one.
4. Create a hosted service for your app, then deploy the your package to that service.

If this seems a bit vague and hand-wavy for you, that’s because it is. I’m working on a step-by-step, from-the-ground-up tutorial that will cover the process in greater detail. I hope to post it in the next couple of weeks.

If have an Azure account set up, I strongly recommend checking out Colin Melia’s article, titled Deploy this Silverlight Application on Windows Azure in 10 Minutes – No Tools Required! We had 150 people at TechDays Ottawa and TechDays Winnipeg follow the steps in this article successfully.

Azure in a Little More Detail

Azure@PDC

There were a number of Azure presentations at the Professional Developer Conference (PDC), which took place in November. If you want an introduction to Azure that goes into a little more detail, watch these:

• Windows Azure Present and Future by Manuvir Das: An overview of Azure’s new features and a peek at what’s coming in future versions.  If you watch only one Windows Azure talk from PDC 2009, watch this one!
• Introduction to Building Applications with Windows Azure by David Lemphers: Azure from a developer’s pertspective. This presentation covers the high-level concepts behind Azure and features Azure development demos.
• Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure by Steve Marx: Steve Mark – yes, the guy who made the two videos above –  covers advanced Azure development techniques using the new features announced at PDC. This is of those build-up-an-app-throughout-the-session talks and worth a look.

Canadian Developers Blogging About Azure

Be sure to check out Colin Melia’s and Cory Fowler’s blogs – they write about Azure quite often! (And if you’re a Canadian developer blogging about Azure, let me know.)

Books on Azure

I’m currently working my way through these books:

• Introducing Windows Azure by Henry Li, Apress
• Windows Azure Platform by Tejaswi Redkar, Apress
• Azure in Action (which is still a work in progress) by Chris Hay and Brian Prince, Manning

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Book

I do believe I’ll be ordering an ebook edition of Apress’ Windows Azure Platform. Here’s Apress’ description of the book:

Master Microsoft’s brand-new cloud-computing technology with Windows Azure Platform by Tejaswi Redkar. You’ll learn how to utilize Azure’s four core components— Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services—both separately and together to build flawless cloud computing services.

What you’ll learn in Windows Azure Platform:

• Everything you need to know about the Azure Services components—from Access Control to SQL Services, from the Service Bus to Workflow Services.
• Understand both the architectural thinking behind Azure and the nuts-and-bolts code that binds your service together.
• Design, build, and deploy an Azure service with the assistance of a fully worked template for end-to-end application design that mimics a real-world scenario and gives you a rock-solid example of the design and development processes that you need to work through.

The Discounts

If you bought the ebook version of their previous Azure book, Introducing Windows Azure, you’ll get an automatic 50% discount off the the price of the ebook of Windows Azure Platform.

If you didn’t buy the ebook version of Introducing Windows Azure, you can still get a discount. If you place an order for Windows Azure Platform before the end of December 31st, use the discount code APRESSHOLIDAYML, which will apply a 25% discount to your entire purchase (so you can save on other Apress books, too!)

These discounts won’t last very long, so place an order today!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Archetype have put together a cute little Hallowe’en pumpkin-carving application built with Silverlight and hosted on Azure. It lets you “carve” a pumpkin, complete with backlit glow from the candle, and send the resulting image to a friend. Give it a try!

• To get started with Silverlight, visit the Silverlight site’ “Get Started” page.
• To get started with Azure, visit Windows Azure’s “Get Started” page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s been announced on Canadian Developer Connection, but I thought I’d mention it here: we folks at Microsoft Canada are gearing up for the 2009 edition of EnergizeIT, a cross-country tour where we’ll show off our upcoming tools, technology and platforms.

For starters, we’ll be showing off Windows 7. I’ve been running it on both my “developer” and “TPS report-writing” laptops for weeks now, and it’s been nothing but rock-solid: all my XP and Vista-based software, from development apps to games and even my synth software (I run Ableton Live and FL Studio, a.k.a. “FruityLoops”) work like a charm on it. We’ll show off the improved UI, additional capabilities that you can take advantage of as a developer, and even give you a chance to install the beta on your own machine.

EnergizeIT is also an opportunity to check out what we’ve got in the way of server tech, such as the revamped Windows Server 2008 R2 with its Hyper-V virtualization and Windows Azure, our cloud computing platform that scales to meet your needs and saves you maintenance headaches.

We’ll have five different kinds of events at our EnergizeIT stops:

• The Future of the Windows Platform: We’ll talk about Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, all with this question in mind: “How is this going to make my life easier?”
• Energize IT: From the Client to the Cloud: Find out about our “Software + Services” vision, where you can access computing power anywhere, any time and on any device.
• Student Connection: Get Energized About the Future! Get a head start on your journey from academia to “the real world” as we show you some upcoming tech and talk about the opportunities that exist, even in current economic mess.
• Faculty Connection: Supporting Faculty to Support the Future: Find out about our programs to support people who teach technology and let us know what you need.
• Enthusiast Connection: Windows 7 Installfest: Take Windows 7 for a spin and ask us about our experiences with our up-and-coming desktop operating system.

In the past, we’ve only held EnergizeIT in Toronto, but this time, we’re borrowing a page from Aerosmith’s book and coming to your hometown. Starting in mid-March and running through until the end of April, we’ll be hitting these cities:

• Victoria
• Vancouver
• Edmonton
• Calgary
• Regina
• Saskatoon
• Winnipeg
• London
• Kitchener-Waterloo
• Mississauga
• Toronto
• Ottawa
• Montreal
• Halifax
• Moncton
• Fredericton
• St. John’s

As for how much it’ll cost for you to attend our EnergizeIT events: nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Honkis de Konkis, as we say in some circles. Simply put, it’s free of charge.

Want to find out more about EnergizeIT or register? Go hit the EnergizeIT site.