Talking Cloud – Tomorrow at Tulsa TechFest 2011

Friday, Oct 7th, aka tomorrow, is the sixth year of Tulsa TechFest. Tulsa TechFest is technical conference with many tracks covering lots of topics including architecture, web development, cloud computing, social media and even entrepreneurship. It has grown over the past 5 years, and this year there are 21 tracks and a keynote from Glenn Block on WCF Web API.

John Weston and I are presenting this year’s Cloud track and I’m excited to deliver two developer focused talks and John’s IT Pro talks look very interesting too. The following is the schedule for the Cloud track.

9:00AM – Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, what’s the Truth? – John Weston
10:30AM – Moving Web Apps to the Cloud – Eric D. Boyd
1:00PM – Hyper-V Virtualization to prepare for the Cloud – John Weston
2:30PM – Overview of the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket – Eric D. Boyd

If you are on the fence and haven’t yet registered for Tulsa TechFest, register and enjoy a great conference and a day of free training.

St. Louis Day of .NET Follow-Up and Slides

St. Louis Day of .NET was a blast! Thank you to everyone who made this event possible. This was truly one of the best events I had ever been to, both regionally and nationally. If you are in the St. Louis area, do not miss STLDODN next year!

I personally enjoyed meeting a ton of folks and presenting about OData, Windows Azure DataMarket, Massive Scalability and Making Money with Windows Phone. I also really enjoyed all of the side conversations about these topics and discussions of how they relate to the Cloud and Windows Azure.

If you attended my sessions and would like the slides, the following links are for you.
Consuming Data From Many Platforms: The Benefits of OData
Architecting for Massive Scalability
Overview of the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket
Making $$$ with Windows Phone 7

If you have questions or would like to know more, feel free to ping me and I’ll point you in the right direction.

St. Louis Day of .NET this Friday and Saturday

I’ll be packing tonight and heading out early in the morning to St. Louis. I’m originally from Missouri and I am aware of the miserably hot weather in Missouri this time of year. Let me say, it is less than ideal. This morning the actual temp was 87F while the heat index was 99F. If you are in St. Louis and want to escape the extreme heat this weekend, August 5th and 6th, check out St. Louis Day of .NET.

St. Louis Day of .NET is a big 2-day education and networking event for software developers that work with Microsoft technologies. Imagine taking 2 years of user group meetings and wrapping them up into one big 2-day event. That’s St. Louis Day of .NET. Sprinkle in a keynote from Jay Schmelzer, Group Program Manager on the Visual Studio team, food, music, social events and lots of prizes and you have an incredible weekend. I almost forgot to mention that this event is also at the beautiful Ameristar Casino Resort. After the sessions and social events, there’s tons to do without even leaving the building. You’ll get a keynote from Jay Schmelzer, nearly 100 technical sessions, a great Friday evening social event, personal time with industry experts, two days of breakfast and lunch, a nice polo shirt you can proudly wear at work, and great giveaways, all for only $200.

Registration is only open until 8PM today, August 3rd. If you are wanting to go and haven’t yet registered, I have one 50% off discount code. To enter to win this 50% off registration, simply tweet this post. I’ll draw a winner, announce it and Direct Message (DM) them the code at 6PM today. To receive the DM, you must also follow me on twitter.

I will be presenting three emerging technologies and practices that I’m very passionate about and are all in some way related to Cloud Computing, PaaS and Windows Azure.

Consuming Data From Many Platforms: The Benefits of OData
The amount of data stored today is growing at a rapid rate. However, data is only valuable if it is accessible and can be consumed by people and systems. OData is an open protocol for sharing data that is positioned to solve this problem. OData uses the standard HTTP protocol using REST principles to make data accessible and has huge industry momentum with rapid adoption growth. In this session, we will explore what OData is all about and how to expose relational and non-relational data as OData using WCF Data Services. We will then walkthrough developing apps to consume the OData feeds from multiple clients including mobile devices. Finally, we will take a look at how you can benefit from using Azure to publish your data with OData services.

Overview of the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket
Whether it is buying clothing, food, or software, consumers like the simplicity of the one-stop shopping experience. Product producers also benefit greatly by being a part of a community marketplace. These rules of commerce apply to data just as much as physical goods and mobile apps. The Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket is the marketplace for data set distribution in the cloud. In this session we will explore the benefits of the marketplace and the cloud for distributing data. Next, we will review the features and capabilities of Azure DataMarket. We will then walkthrough subscribing to, consuming and paying for data from Azure DataMarket. And finally, we will explore what this means for data publishers and how you can get data into the Azure DataMarket.

Architecting for Massive Scalability
The Cloud now makes seemingly infinite amounts of computing power accessible to everyone. However, to maximize this power, your applications need to scale. In this session, we will explore patterns that enable massive scalability. We will examine Brewer’s CAP Theorem and contrast it to the ACID principles that guide traditional LOB applications. And finally, we will explore how to apply these patterns when building applications for the Cloud using Windows Azure.

I’m excited to be back in Missouri and hang out with the St. Louis tech crowd. If you have questions, success stories or just want to chat about Cloud Computing, I’ll be around and would love to hang out, discuss and dig deep into “The Cloud”. If you want to chat about other things that Centare helps companies with and they’re in my range of expertise, like reducing time to market, increasing throughput, boosting flexibility and enabling mobile scenarios. Those are all ok too.

See you in St. Louis!

Vote for Sessions You Want to See at PASS Summit 2011

PASS Summit is the world’s largest conference for Microsoft SQL Server professionals. If you use Microsoft SQL Server or Business Intelligence technologies, you should attend PASS Summit. If you consider yourself a database administrator, application developer, BI or IT professional working with SQL Server, the sessions at PASS will be very informative and valuable for you.

PASS Summit 2011 is in Seattle, WA, Oct. 11-14 and the six session tracks are:

  • Application and Database Development
  • BI Architecture, Development and Administration Topics
  • BI Client Reporting and Delivery Topics
  • Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment
  • Professional Development
  • SQL Azure

If you are interested in PASS Summit 2011 and the sessions that will be offered, you can see a list of sessions and even vote on the sessions that you would like to see. All you need to do is:

  1. Visit http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2011/Speakers/SessionPreferencing.aspx
  2. Login or Create an Account
  3. Browse the sessions
  4. If you want a session at PASS, click the “Click here to Mark Session as Preferred” link

The following are my sessions that you can vote on for PASS Summit 2011. If you would like to quickly get to these sessions, you can select “Eric D. Boyd” from the Speaker dropdown.

BI in the Cloud with SQL Azure Reporting [200]
Session Track: SQL Azure
Why maintain infrastructure for operational reporting, when you can do it in the cloud with SQL Azure Reporting? SQL Azure Reporting provides a set of capabilities that are familiar for developers using SQL Server Reporting Services on-premise. We will begin this session by considering the benefits and scenarios for BI in the cloud. Next, we will walkthrough what you need to get started using SQL Azure Reporting. We will then develop and deploy some reports to SQL Azure Reporting. Unfortunately, SSRS and SQL Azure Reporting do not have complete feature parity. As a result, we will conclude by reviewing the challenges and limitations of using SQL Azure Reporting over SQL Server Reporting Services.

Consuming Cloud Data from Multiple Platforms: The Benefits of OData [300]
Session Track: Application and Database Development
The amount of data stored today is growing at a rapid rate. However, data is only valuable if it is accessible and can be consumed by people and systems. OData is an open protocol for sharing data that is positioned to solve this problem. OData uses the standard HTTP protocol using REST principles to make data accessible and has huge industry momentum with rapid adoption growth. In this session, we will explore what OData is all about and how to expose relational and non-relational data as OData using WCF Data Services. We will then walkthrough developing apps to consume the OData feeds from multiple clients including mobile devices. Finally, we will take a look at how you can benefit from using Azure to publish your data and OData services.

One-Stop Data Shop: Overview of Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket [200]
Session Track: SQL Azure
Whether it is buying clothing, food, or software, consumers like the simplicity of the one-stop shopping experience. Product producers also benefit greatly by being a part of a community marketplace. These rules of commerce apply to data just as much as physical goods and mobile apps. The Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket is the marketplace for data set distribution in the cloud. In this session we will explore the benefits of the marketplace and the cloud for distributing data. Next, we will review the features and capabilities of Azure DataMarket. We will then walkthrough subscribing to, consuming and paying for data from Azure DataMarket. Finally, we will explore what this means for data publishers and how you can get data into the Azure DataMarket.

Working with Data in Azure: SQL Azure, Azure Storage, Local Storage and AppFabric Caching [200]
Session Track: SQL Azure
The Windows Azure Platform provides a plethora of options for data storage and trying to make sense of it all can be overwhelming. In this session we will explore the many Azure data services including SQL Azure, Azure Storage, Local Storage and AppFabric Caching. We will walk through the scenarios that each storage service addresses. Next we will dig into how to use each storage service and how they can complement each other when used together. Finally, we will explore the pricing and economic drivers that encourage one storage service over another when multiple fit into your solution.

If you know me, then you know that I’m a Cloud Computing evangelist and I am excited to see the SQL Azure track at PASS Summit 2011. If you share the same Cloud Computing passion, please vote for the sessions in the SQL Azure track.