Partner Otaku

Yesterday was a big day for Automattic and Microsoft folks. Matt Mullenweg demonstrated WordPress hosted on Azure during Ray Ozzie’s keynote. I was pleasantly surprised to see support for MySQL.  Very cool imho. This will give Wordpress users/hosters access to Azure. I think Matt stated that he saw “Pigs” out of his office windows .  Additionally, icanhazcheezburger (lolcats, failblog etc.), the largest WordPress site, announced that their new property “Oddly Specific” is now hosted on Azure.

Check out this cool pumpkin carving app.  This was created by Archetype a Microsoft Partner.  http://bit.ly/1glQa2

This was noted at ZendCon last week.  Here’s the official link for download.  

Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse

ARCHITECT COUNCIL | Pragmatic Patterns for Architects

“Cloud computing will supersede traditional IT”, “SOA will enable business agility”, “my way or the highway”, etc. We’ve all heard this type of proclamations before, as many look to the “next big things” in technology to exact sweeping changes and solve many issues; truth is, technologies and tools aren’t as instrumental in influencing progress, as the design and discipline in applying them to specific issues. When used appropriately, technologies and tools can be powerful enablers that bring about change.

One of the things we hear a lot working with the community is a desire for more guidance about how to use the technology instead of just talking about features and functions.  To address this, our team has put together a series of live webcasts on June 9^th – 11^th which will focus on guidance and patterns for some of today’s hottest topics. 

DAY 1 – June 9, 2009 at Noon PST

Patterns for Moving to the Cloud

Larry Clarkin & Wade Wegner

Everything that you read these days seems to suggest that you should be moving to the cloud. But where do you start? Which applications and services should be moving to the cloud? How do you build the bridge between on-premises and the cloud? And more importantly, what should you be looking out for along the way? In this session, learn architectural patterns and factors for moving to the cloud. Based on real-world projects, the session explores building block services, patterns for exposing applications, and challenges involving identity, data federation, and management. This session provides the tools and knowledge to determine whether cloud computing is right for you, and where to start.

DAY 2 – June 10, 2009 at Noon PST

Building Silverlight & WPF Applications with Prism

David Hill

Prism provides guidance, via design patterns, to help you build robust, flexible and modular Silverlight and WPF applications. These patterns support unit testing, separation of concerns, loose coupling and the ability to share application logic between Silverlight and WPF applications. Prism includes source code for the library itself, extensive documentation, and a sample application that shows how the patterns work together in a real-world application. It also includes a Visual Studio add-in to help you easily share code between WPF and Silverlight. This session provides an overview of Prism, and shows how you can use Prism to design and build composite Silverlight applications.

DAY 3 – June 11, 2009 at Noon PST

Patterns for Parallel Computing

David Chou

With recent advances in cloud computing, service-oriented architectures, distributed computing, server virtualization, multi-core processors; we are now seeing parallel computing techniques being implemented across the spectrum. It’s moving towards mainstream applications such as internet-scale web applications, massive data processing, graphics rendering, but the myriad of choices also present a number of questions on when and how to utilize parallel computing. This session explores the architectural patterns and trade-offs between different forms of parallel computing including: approaches for utilizing them to improve application performance, optimizing the use of existing infrastructure, and applying concurrency towards day-to-day enterprise information processing needs.

WEBCAST AGENDA

REGISTER

To register, please click on the link below for each day:

We will email you with the LIVEMEETING information and log-in detail a few days before the actual event. We will use the email address you provide in the registration. Thanks!

SPEAKER BIOS

Larry Clarkin – SR ARCHITECT EVANGELIST, Microsoft

Wade Wegner – SR ARCHITECT EVANGELIST, Microsoft

Architect in the Developer & Platform Evangelism division at Microsoft, tasked to collaborate with organizations in the advanced and emergent areas of enterprise architecture, SOA, Web 2.0, and cloud computing, as well as to support decision makers on defining technology adoption strategies. You can reach Wade at his blog http://www.architectingwith.net/ or through twitter at http://twitter.com/wadewegner.

David Hill – PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team

David Chou – ARCHITECT, Microsoft

Architect in the Developer & Platform Evangelism organization at Microsoft, focused on collaborating with enterprises and organizations in many areas such as cloud computing, SOA, Web, RIA, distributed systems, security, etc., and supporting decision makers on defining evolutionary strategies in architecture. Drawing on experiences from his previous jobs at Sun Microsystems and Accenture, David enjoys helping customers create value from using objective and pragmatic approaches to define IT strategies, roadmaps, and solution architectures.

Azure Services Training KitToday we released an updated version of the Azure Services Training Kit.   The first Azure Services Training Kit was released during the week of PDC and it contained all of the PDC hands-on labs.   Since then, the Azure Services Evangelism team has been creating new content covering new features in the platform.

The kit now includes the following content covering Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services:

• 11 hands-on labs – including new hands-on labs for PHP and Native Code on Windows Azure.
• 18 demo scripts – These demo scripts are designed to provide detailed walkthroughs of key features so that someone can easily give a demo of a service
• 9 presentations – the presentations used for our 3 day training workshops including speaker notes.
• 2 additional hands-on labs for Windows Azure PHP and Native Code support

Download the package here

Azure Services Management Tools

The Azure Services Management Tools include an MMC SnapIn and Windows PowerShell cmdlets that enable a user to configure and manage several Azure Services including .NET Access Control Services, and the .NET Workflow Service. These tools can be helpful when developing and testing applications that use Azure Services. For instance, using these tools you can view and change .NET Access Control Rules, and deploy and view workflows.The November release of the management tools was downloaded 2190 times.Download here

Being one of the few “techies” amongst my group of friends and family, I often get enquiries about technologies and products.  Over the weekend, my friend asked, “what is the cloud”.  I proceeded to explain with much hand waving and within a couple of minutes he had a vacuous look in his eyes. I had driven the car into the weeds.

I thought this document from David Chappell & Associates does a good job of providing an overview from an enterprise perspective. I should have forwarded this link to my friend and called it a day.