Building My First Windows Azure Application
On Saturday, May 16th, I presented at my first developer conference – Indy Code Camp. My presentation was entitled “Building My First Windows Azure Application.”
I was pretty excited, and nervous, about doing this presentation. Like I said, this was my first time giving a talk at a developer conference. It was also the first time in a long time that I’ve had to speak in front of a group of any decent size. There were probably about 20-30 people in my session. I have to admit, it was pretty exciting! Hopefully those that attended liked the session too. I’m looking forward to doing more presentations in the near future.
Overall, I think the session went pretty well. Windows Azure is a pretty large topic to try to cover in a 75 minute talk. The talk was supposed to show mostly code, and in my opinion, that really doesn’t lend itself to covering Azure’s features all that well. I had a few slides at the beginning on what Windows Azure was and what some of it’s basic features were – and I whipped through those in about 7 minutes. Hopefully I didn’t lose people. I wanted to make sure there was plenty of time to show the code.
I was pretty happy with the PowerPoint deck, and the code samples went off without a hitch – pretty much. The only time the demo gods showed their vengeance was right at the end when I needed internet connectivity. For some reason my virtual machine (VMWare Workstation 6.5) wouldn’t connect to the internet – but my host OS (Windows Vista) was able to connect. It was really odd for me. I’m still not sure what went wrong there, but I’m thinking it had something to do with some public vs. private network settings in Windows Vista that I don’t totally understand yet.
If you would like a copy of the PowerPoint slides or the code for the demo Windows Azure application, please leave a comment and I’ll be happy to send them to you.
You can also find the sample application I built during the session at https://azurejokes.cloudapp.net/. Note – I’ve temporarily disabled the ability to publish the jokes to Twitter.
Finally, I must give a big thanks to the organizers of Indy Code Camp. This event continues to get better and better. There were some pretty good speakers there, and I was very honored to be invited to be one. I’m looking forward to coming back next year – as either a speaker or attendee!
