The last months were pretty quiet around ScottGu but yesterday evening, for us Belgian people, there was a great and lengthy streamed event about Windows Azure. As I’m the competence center leader of the Azure Cloud Computing team at Ordina Belgium I took the opportunity to gather up with colleagues, ordered pizza and made a great evening.

I’m glad to see this kind of events happening. They provide excellent coverage about the topic, starting out in a way that newcomers can follow with ease but also introducing the latest and greatest tooling and progress the Windows Azure platform has made during the last months. There’s also a ton of great news on the fronts of having people with skills other than .NET being served as well. Node.js, Java, PHP and other technologies get attention. That’s just awesome!

The Windowsazure.com website also got a major update with that nice looking Metro style sauce over it.

In the past people sometimes feared testing the cloud for budget reasons. Even a colleague of mine once had to find out the hard way that when you shut down an instance but keep the deployment you also keep on getting charged. Microsoft now releases a new way to explore Azure for 3 months but with a spending limit. According to me that promises a safer way to spend researching Azure.

Grz, Kris.

It was a great event in Antwerp again and now the sessions can be viewed by everyone:

I was the “Ask the experts” booth leader and you can see on the next picture that we had a good time:

From left to right: Simone Chiaretta, Kris van der Mast, Gill Cleeren, Maarten Balliauw.

My personal favorite sessions were:

• Developer Keynote with Scott Hanselman - The Microsoft Web Stack : Putting the pieces together
• ASP.NET MVC 3 - Deep Dive
• NuGet In Depth: Empowering Open Source on the .NET Platform
• Identity & Access Control in the Cloud with Windows Azure
• Developing SaaS Solutions with the Windows Azure Platform

Grz, Kris.

The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes a whitepaper explaining all of the new Silverlight 4 RC features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. The business applications course includes 8 modules with extensive hands on labs as well as 25 accompanying videos that walk you through key aspects of building a business application with Silverlight. Key aspects in this course are working with numerous sandboxed and elevated out of browser features, the new RichTextBox control, implicit styling, webcam, drag and drop, multi touch, validation, authentication, MEF, WCF RIA Services, right mouse click, and much more!

You can find the material here: http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Silverlight4/.

Grz, Kris.

Going on vacation to Greece without pc or internet connection (but in very good company) is nice but you always find when coming home that new cool things have arrived. This time it turned out to be the long awaited Silverlight 3.

There’s an interesting video on Channel 9 with Scott Guthrie on the new things that shipped and also a new dedicated site. Be sure to check these out.

With the new version there’s also need of a tool to build compelling RIAs with. This is still in Release candidate but you can already check out Blend 3.

Grz, Kris.

Just read this on the blog of Somasegar:

Popfly is a tool and social network that provides a fun and easy way to build and share mash-ups, gadgets, Silverlight experiences, and Web pages using pre-built “Blocks” that connect to online services.

I asked for an invitation as they're not giving much away at the moment. Funny thing when I visited the site was to see someone I knew: Steven Wilssens, a Belgian developer and MVP that went working for Microsoft since last year.

Update: I just found out about this video on Channel9: PopFly

Grz, Kris.

One of my personal favorite channels, besides those on tv of course, is Channel 9: a dedicated media platform that developers that work with Microsoft technology just must have in their favorites.

This morning I noticed, probably because MIX is busy (where my buddy Gill Cleeren is currenlty following all those interesting sessions), that there's a lot of new material covering Silverlight:

• Scott Guthrie: Silverlight and the Cross-Platform CLR
• Silverlight Event Handling with JavaScript
• Using AJAX to Dynamically Update Silverlight Content
• Using Silverlight Brushes for Color, Gradient and Video
• Animating Raster Art for Silverlight with Expression Blend
• Adding Ink Support to a Silverlight-based Application
• Delivering Parameterized Silverlight Content with ASP.NET
• Publishing Media Content to Silverlight Streaming Services
• Using Expression Blend to Control Silverlight Media Playback
• ...

Grz, Kris.