Thank you to Scott Isaacs and the WI .NET User Group for inviting me to present last night. And another thank you to everyone who took time out of their busy summer schedule to participate in the local developer community. I had a blast presenting one of my passions, Cloud Computing, PaaS and Windows Azure. I really enjoyed our discussion and interaction last night and would love to continue the dialog if you have further questions or need assistance with moving “To the Cloud”.
I hope you left with a better understanding of the Cloud, PaaS and Windows Azure. Specifically, I hope that you now have a better idea of how to get started migrating an existing application to Windows Azure. We explored some of the items that can be extremely simple to move, like Application Data in SQL Azure, ASP.NET Membership and Diagnostics. We also discussed some of the items that can offer a challenge, both technically and architecturally, such as Claims-based security and Non-relational, NoSQL, data.
The guidance from Patterns & Practices is great when exploring these migration scenarios. You can read the P&P content online at MSDN. And if you prefer a paper book or an eBook, those are available for purchase too. Downloads for Hands-On Labs and source code for the a-Expense application are also available from P&P. The one caveat worth mentioning is that what’s currently published was developed with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, .NET 3.5 and Windows Azure SDK 1.1. It’s still a great resource to check out and there will soon be a Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4 and the Windows Azure SDK 1.4 update. Subscribe to my blog and I will let you know when that update gets released.
The following links are resources that will help you on your Windows Azure journey.
Patterns & Practices – Moving Applications to the Cloud – Online Content
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff728592.aspx
Patterns & Practices – Moving Applications to the Cloud – Code Samples
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=2798
Patterns & Practices – Books
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/hh124092
Windows Azure SDK and Tools
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sdk/
Windows Azure Pricing Calculator
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/
If you would like a copy of the slides from last night, you can download them from my SkyDrive.
Finally, please let me know what other cloud computing topics, either business or technically focused, you would like to learn more about. Your feedback will help guide future presentations and events. Thank you for attending and check back later next week for more details about a new community launching to provide practical, deep, hands-on experience developing with Windows Azure.