Reminder: US East Coast Windows Azure Dev Camps Start 12/5

I Last month, I posted here about the upcoming Windows Azure Dev Camps I will be hosting with my teammates Brian Hitney and Jim O’Neil.  Just a reminder that we’re kicking our 5 city tour off on Monday down in Raleigh, NC at North Carolina State University! 

If you’ve been wanting to learn about cloud computing and the Windows Azure platform, these events will be a great opportunity to do so!  I’ve posted the full agenda below.  All of the events, except New York City, will be from 2pm – 9pm.  (Due to facility availability, NYC is from 9am – 4pm.) 

For the first half of the event, we’ll be covering the who/what/where/why/and when of the Windows Azure platform.  For the second half, you will be “in the code”, competing in the Rock Paper Azure Challenge! 

You’ll get to code a C# or Visual Basic “bot” that plays the game of Rock Paper Scissors against other Dev Camps attendees.  As part of the RPA Challenge, you’ll walk through the process of creating an Azure account, deploying a basic compute hosted service, and exploring the Windows Azure Management Portal.

Before Thanksgiving, I posted that the Rock Paper Azure Challenge is back online with a chance to win a trip to Cancun, Mexico.  That contest is ongoing online through 12/16/2011.  At the Azure Dev Camp events, you will be participating in a “private” version of the RPA Challenge against the other attendees that day.  We’ll have some cool prizes on hand for the winners at each event.  However, once you’ve participated in the RPA Challenge at one of our Azure Dev Camps, you can easily enter the online challenge and have a chance at the trip to Cancun!

Be Sure To Catch Us In One Of These Cities

Location	Date	Time	Registration Link
Raleigh, NC	12-5-2011	2pm-9pm	REGISTER HERE
Farmington, CT	12-7-2011	2pm-9pm	REGISTER HERE
New York City, NY	12-8-2011	9am-5pm	REGISTER HERE
Malvern, Pa	12-12-2011	2pm-9pm	REGISTER HERE
Chevy Chase, MD	12-14-2011	2pm-9pm	REGISTER HERE

What am I going to learn at the Windows Azure Developer Camp?

At the Azure DevCamps, you’ll learn what services and capabilities constitute the Windows Azure platform and how to assemble those services to meet your application goals – whether they be storage focused, compute-intensive, or require broad reach across devices. Half of the day will be focused on instruction and demos of the key components of the platform, and then after dinner we’ll have a hack session/competition to play RockPaperAzure – providing a fun way to walk through the creation, deployment, and execution of an application on Windows Azure.

Agenda

1:30	Arrival and Registration
2:00	Welcome
2:15	The Case for the Cloud - Why the cloud? What can you do in the cloud that you can’t do now with your own in-house resources? To shed some light on these questions we’ll kick of the Camp with a number of concrete examples and scenarios and then transition into a discussion of the core building blocks of Windows Azure to set the foundation for the rest of the day.
3:00	Break
3:10	Storage in the Cloud - Storage is the primary entry point into the cloud – big storage, terabytes, petabytes, zettabytes! Windows Azure has a number of storage options, each catering to different needs and use cases. In this session we’ll cover Azure storage (tables, blobs, queues, and drives) as well as SQL Azure, the relational database service in the cloud.
4:20	Break
4:30	Code in the Cloud - Storage is only half of the story, so we’ll continue with how to deploy your applications to the cloud via Web Roles and Worker Roles. In our discussion, we’ll investigate some of the patterns for building scalable applications as well as mention some of the other Azure services and other non-Microsoft technologies that you can leverage in Windows Azure.
5:30	Dinner
	Hackathon!
6:15	Azure deployment walk through
6:45	RockPaperAzure (RPA) overview
7:15	Code your bots!!!
8:45	RPA Tourney ends / closing remarks