Above The Cloud

Last Thursday evening (18th Feb 2010) I did a presentation to the Gold Coast .Net SIG about developing applications for the Windows Azure Platform. The talk went for almost 2 hours (for that I apologise!) and seemed well received.

I started with an overview of the platform, and then dived into Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .Net Services. I used a demo application that performed searches for images based on colour content, using Azure to do the grunt work of analysing images.

You can find the files from that presentation here:

• Slide Deck PPTX (1.9Mb)
• ImageSearch Demo Application (2.9Mb)

The night seemed to go well, except for the fact that my SQL Azure account expired on that very day, mere hours before my presentation. I received no warning email and was pleasantly surprised by the little ‘disabled’ flag against my SQL Azure account.

I will now spend the next few days trying to work out what I have done to anger the demo gods. In the meantime, stay tuned, as future blog posts will break down that demo application to talk about some of the techniques used to share code, use configuration settings, and utilise database access, all in a fashion that is agnostic to whether we are using the developer fabric, or the production Azure fabric.

If you attended on the night, I’m more than happy to hear any feedback about the presentation you may have. I am trying to continuously improve as a presenter and appreciate any constructive criticism you can provide.