Come spend a day with us to explore Windows Azureâ„¢ – Microsoft’s platform for building and deploying cloud based applications – from a real world point of view! On Sept 22nd at the Microsoft office in Bloomington, MN, I will be hosting the MSDN portion of this Azure event.  During this event, we’ll review critical lessons Microsoft IT has learned migrating internal line-of-business applications to Windows Azureâ„¢. If you have ever asked yourself what is Windows Azureâ„¢? When should I use it? How does it apply to my job? Then this session is for you. Whether you’re an IT Professional, Developer or Architect, we’ll address your top of mind questions about cloud computing.

TechNet Presents – for the IT Professional from 8:30am to noon

In this session, we will discuss:

• Azure architecture from the IT professional’s point of view
• Why an IT operations team would want to pursue Azure as an extension to the data center
• Configuration, deployment and scaling Azure-based applications
• The Azure roles (web, web service and worker)
• Azure storage options
• Azure security and identity options
• How Azure-based applications can be integrated with on-premises applications
• How operations teams can manage and monitor Azure-based applications

MSDN Presents – for the Developer & Architect from 1:00pm to 5:00pm

In this session, we will discuss:

• Cloud computing architectures in general and the Azure architecture in particular
• Several aspects of Azure from the developer’s and architect’s perspective
• Azure roles (web, web service and worker)
• Azure storage options
• Azure security and identity options
• How Azure-based applications can be integrated with on-premise applications
• Configuration, deployment and scaling Azure-based applications
• How development teams can optimize their applications for better management and monitoring

One of the coolest new features to be part of VSTS 2010 is the Historical Debugger.  It hasn’t gotten a lot of buzz, so you may want to check out this 10-4 video. 

If you aren’t familiar at all with the Historical Debugger, I stole this blurb from the video web site…

The new Historical Debugger coming in Visual Studio Team System 2010 promises to revolutionize the way you debug managed applications. You can think of it as something of a VCR for your debugger; "rewind" the debugging trace to examine the state of your application at various points in time so you can all-but-eliminate the guesswork about where to place your breakpoints prior to pressing F5.

The Gestalt website says it better than I could…

“Gestalt.js is a library released by MIX Online Labs that allows you to write Ruby, Python & XAML code in your (X)HTML pages. It enables you to build richer and more powerful web applications by marrying the benefits of expressive languages, modern compilers, AJAX & RIAs with the write » save » refresh development model of the web.”

I haven’t had a chance to play with it at all, but the samples are pretty cool.

Check out this great blog post by Tomasz Janczuk on how to accomplish a pub/solution using WCF and Silverlight.  Full source and VS solution are available.  Cool stuff.

A new contest has just launched where you can show off your mad Windows 7 application development skills.  Check out https://www.code7contest.com for all the details.  The most important details… win up to $17,777 and a free trip to show your app off at PDC09.

Brad Abrams will be doing a virtual talk at the Linked .NET User’s Group on July 30th @ 10pm CST about Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services. Not the greatest time but I imagine there will be a recording at some point.  If you are not familiar with .NET RIA Services, check out Brad’s eight part series for all the details.  Cool stuff – and not just for Silverlight!

Well, all of a sudden, I can now move my XP virtualized apps to my second monitor.  Not sure what was goofy the first time, but I can now move the apps from monitor to monitor.

I have finally had an opportunity to play around with Windows XP Mode and XP Virtual Applications.  All in all, it is a pretty cool setup.  If you aren’t familiar, Windows 7 will have a built-in Windows XP virtual machine.  You can run it as a normal Virtual PC (complete XP desktop) or you can actually run an application that looks just like any other “installed” application but it is actually being run under the covers inside of the XP virtual machine.  It has come in quite handy with an application I had that was broken by the SQL Server Express 2008 install (issues with updated version of the C++ runtime).  I installed the app into the XP virtual machine (you do that from the full VM desktop experience) and I know have an icon that will launch the app directly from my Win7 desktop.  Works like a champ.

Of course, you probably knew all of that already. But there is a small fly in the ointment.  What is it?  Virtual app mode does not like multiple monitors.  The virtual app is restricted to your primary monitor. Grrr…….

After a long summer hiatus, I figured it was time to start blogging again.  I took a long break and am ready to get back at it.  I feel good!

I am already fast at work on my new screencast series for this year: Peer-to-Peer programming using .NET and the Windows platform. It is a pretty ambitious project since I have more in mind that just a simple series of tutorials.  I have a certain solution in mind and I will be interested to see if I can actually build the framework that I have floating around in my head.  The possibilities have actually made it hard for me to sleep!

Getting the Spaghetti Code podcast back from hiatus is the other big thing on my list.  Summer is a hard time to get folks in to do some interviews, but I have a speaker or two lined up and will be pressuring the usual suspects to come up with new topics. ;-)  If you have a topic or know someone that would be a good interviewee, let me know!  It doesn’t have to be .NET programming – any kind of programming is fair game.

I’ll have my usual random posting, musings, etc.  Conference-wise, I have the Twin Cities Code Camp lined up, along with Minnesota Developers Conference and Heartland Developers Conference.  If you are at any of these conferences (and if you aren’t you should be!), make sure you stop by and introduce yourself.