I had the opportunity to be a part of Microsoft Community TechDays at Hyderabad and Bangalore. What is special about CTD? This is run completely by the community and the User Groups with a very little support from Microsoft.
The Hyderabad CTD was held on 20th September at Microsoft campus. I had the privilege to deliver the keynote on Azure Services Platform.
Azure Code Camp at MS Community TechDays
Today I delivered the Windows Azure Code Camp session at the Bangalore CTD. Code Camp is a session where I use no slides. In fact, I start the session deleting the Powerpnt.exe from the Office12 folder. The scenario I chose covers the key aspects of Windows Azure – Web Role, Worker Role, Compute, Storage and Configuration. It is hard to cover all this in a matter of one hour. But I make sure that I set the right context as I go along. In my scenario, I build a Web App that mimics the functionality of Twitter. The nick name and the status are stored in the Azure Table Storage. The scenario also exposes a WCF Service along with the Web App, that pulls and pushes the status messages. The Worker Role has code that constantly polls the given Twitter account and writes selected messages to the same Table in Azure Storage. Excluding the Worker Role, I covered everything in 55 min.
I am glad that the session was well received and most of the attendees told me that they want to go back and write their first app on Azure.
I am planning to record and screencast the demo along with a step-by-step guide. I will have to find time to do that soon.
