Brian Lambert headlined an outstanding event, including an excellent crowd.

Rough meeting notes from Bill Wilder.

For the first 45 minutes, we had Boston Azure Theater, watching a Microsoft PDC video of Microsoft Director Manuvir Das' PDC talk: A Lap Around the Windows Azure Platform.

Mark Eisenberg of Microsoft opened the formal speaking with an overview of the big announcements from PDC, fielding many questions from an interested audience.

Michael Stiefel followed with a detailed dig into the Dallas announcement, showcasing the Dallas "Data as a Service" platform, working through sample apps, a custom mashup - with code, demonstrating the straight-forward programming model, and finishing by showing use directly in Excel and reviewing the business model.

Rough meeting notes are available.

Windows Azure Storage isn't a relational database but that doesn't mean that you can't use it in a real application. Sure, you're going to have to work with Azure Storage a little differently than SQL Azure but if you're worried about database size limits and cost, Azure Storage looks pretty good.

In this session, Ben will show you how to use Azure Storage from within a Domain Model pattern, n-tier application. Topics will include how to architect your Azure Storage application for unit testability, how to deal with configuration data, how to re-use data access logic using generics, how to save and load complex Domain Model types across multiple tables and blobs in Azure Storage, and how to implement lazy-loading in your Domain Model objects from within a medium-trust hosting environment.

Benjamin Day is a consultant and trainer specializing in software development best practices using Microsoft's development tools, Team Foundation Server, and Scrum. He is a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio Team System and a member of the Visual Studio Team System Customer Advisory Council at Microsoft. Recently, Ben became one of the first certified trainers for the new Scrum Developer class from Scrum.org. When not developing software, Ben likes to hang out with his wife and cats, play jazz piano, and geek out on all things food. He can be contacted via http://www.benday.com and http://blog.benday.com.

Rough meeting notes.

Another local user group Virtualization Group - Boston is hosting Community Virtualization Deep Dive Day on Fri Feb 12, 2010 in Waltham (Jones Road)

Of interest to Boston Azure members, part of this relates to the cloud, including Azure topics. Please see for details and to register (it costs a few bucks to attend).

Our featured speaker is Curt Devlin of Microsoft.

Abstract

The Azure platform presents new challenges for identity management. As developers and architects, we will still have to answer the same two perennial questions: 1) Who are you? 2) And what are you allowed to do? But the traditional on-premise approaches to authentication, authorization and identity lifecycle control are not adequate to meet these new challenges. The Geneva suite of technologies for claims-based identity management can be help because cloud computing can be thought of as a "special case" of federation, with many similar requirements. Together these two paradigms appear to be converging to create the perfect storm of paradigm shifts. However, even WIF, ADFS 2.0 and CardSpace 2.0, will only take us part way to a complete solution in the near term. This session will provide a simple recipe for claims-based identity management in Azure using Geneva, discuss some of the most important reasons why this is necessary, and finally some of the shortcomings we will still have to contend with on the road ahead. The aim is to educate, motivate, and caution.

About Curt Devlin

Curt Devlin is currently an architect in Microsoft DPE (Developer & Platform Evangelism) focusing on distributed solutions across many industries and customer segments. Curt is a Microsoft veteran of many technology wars, with more than 20 years of experience developing solutions on the Windows and .NET. platforms. He is also a dyed-in-the-wool New Englander with avid interests in sailing, skiing and nearly everything else.

Curt blogs as the philosophical architect, plus you can check out his MSDN articles Enterprise Authorization Strategy and SaaS Capacity Planning: Transaction Cost Analysis Revisited.

Azure Firestarter Event

Saturday May 8, 2010 at NERD (Cambridge, MA)

Save the date

Details to follow...