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.

Alex Barnett, Group Manager for Developer Relations at Intuit and colleague Jarred Keneally, Developer Relations Engineer, will teach us about the Intuit Partner Platform and the major ways it intersects with Windows Azure.

As part of the recent joint announcement by Intuit and Microsoft, the Windows Azure SDK for Intuit Partner Platform is a set of tools, code samples and services designed to make it easy for developers of SaaS applications developed on Windows Azure to federate those SaaS apps on to IPP and sell them to millions of Intuit customers in the Intuit Workplace App Center.

In this talk, we’ll provide a high level overview IPP and provide details on how to use Windows Azure SDK for IPP.

Windows Azure SDK for IPP is currently available as an open beta, with a V1.0 release expected to be available soon.

The Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) is the fastest and easiest way to build SaaS applications capable of integrating with QuickBooks data and the easiest way to sell your SaaS applications to millions of Intuit customers in the Intuit Workplace App Center!

NOTE THIS MEETING IS ON April 29th - THE 5th Thursday of April - this is not typical (we usually meet on the 4th Thursday).

Main topic: Jason Haley leads a "hands on" session: Windows Azure SDK Walkthrough

This session is designed to be hands on - so bring your laptop. Prerequisites are listed below. If you want help getting configured, there will be help available from 6:00 -6:45 PM before the March and April meetings. But don’t plan to wait for the last minute if you can help it!

If you don’t have a laptop, come anyway and you can pair up with someone who does.

We will dig into the Windows Azure SDK samples and utilities - as well as the Azure Training Kit samples (time permitted). We be working locally (no internet connection requires) with the Development Fabric and Development Storage – which will give you a great feel for how you can get started developing your Azure applications.

• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 (Feb 2010) – this includes the Windows Azure SDK (and its samples)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or later
• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
• Windows Vista | Windows Server 2008 | Windows 7
  • Enabled IIS7 with ASP.Net
  • WCF HTTP Activation enabled
• Windows Azure Platform Training Kit (Dec 2009 update)

Jason is a local Independent consultant who specializes in Microsoft technologies and lately has been spending a lot of time getting to know Windows Azure. Jason blogs at jasonhaley.com/blog.

UPDATE: Summary of event, photos, resources see bostonazure.org/firestarter

ORIGINAL EVENT POSTING FOLLOWS

Boston Azure Firestarter

Registration now open!

SCHEDULE (DRAFT/SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

• 8:00-9:00 AM -- Registration (Breakfast being provided by Microsoft!)
• 8:00-9:00 AM -- last minute laptop fix-ups
• 8:55 -- Welcome / Overview
• 9:04 -- Keynote by David Aiken from the Azure team
• 10:30 Talk by Bill Wilder on Azure Tools, Roles, and Queues
• 11:15 Lab -- Build and Deploy app using Roles and Queue
• 12:15 Lunch (Lunch being provided by Microsoft!)
• 1:00 Talk by Ben Day on Azure Storage
• 1:45 Lab -- Using Azure Table Storage
• 2:30 Break
• 2:40 Talk by Andy Novick on SQL Azure
• 3:15 Lab -- Using SQL Azure
• 3:45 Break
• 4:00 Talk by TBD on Bringing it All Together
• 6:00 Closing
• 6:15 Done!

TOPICS WE'LL COVER (DRAFT/SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

• Overview: What's the big deal with Cloud Computing? What's Windows Azure?
• Programming Model: Roles, Queues, Storage options, Dev Fabric, App Fabric, Tools
• Storage options: Azure Tables, Blobs, SQL Azure, more
• Local Development Experience, Deployment to Cloud

ARE YOU SOCIAL?

Please help spread the word. Let us know if you blog about it. If you tweet about it, please use the #bafs hashtag.

[credit: Firestarter logo built based on http://shaedsofgrey.deviantart.com/art/fire-45734782?moodonly=1 under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.]