Windows Azure Hands On Seminar

Two day Seminar that takes you "To The Cloud!" with an easy to set up learning environment. Let us know where you are and we can bring this unique learning opportunity to your area or enterprise.

$750 includes lunch and course VPC on USB Flash Drive. Learn to develop on this technology deploying to both on-premise and Cloud infrastructures.

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January 26-27

Learn Windows Azure Development in a two day Hands-On Seminar presented by Joe Homnick and other Microsoft Certified Trainers in Developer Technologies from Homnick Systems. We will supply you with a Virtual PC image and workbook. You can optionally, BYOL (bring your own laptop) to walk along with the instructor and/or take the materials with you for further lab work after the class.

What is a "Hands-On Seminar? This is a seminar format, pioneered by Homnick Systems in 2004, where the Instructor mostly uses demos to teach the attendee concepts originally presented in slide format. The attendee can approach this learning solution as a pure seminar without a laptop and then work on the courseware demos on their own time. Optionally, the attendee can "walk along" with the instructor on their own systems running a supplied VPC image. This "walk along" can be of varied involvement and should still be supplemented with lab work on their own time. Both approaches work very well in learning the concepts and the seminar attendees are usually evenly split on the approach they select.

Optional hands-on laptop system requirements to walk along with the instructor during demos and labs:

A laptop with a minimum of 2 gig of memory, USB 2.0 port and Windows XP, Vista or 7.0 installed.

Who Should Attend: Software Developers, Architects and Managers who want to learn about developing with Windows Azure Cloud.

Course Outline-Windows Azure Development

Introduction to Windows Azure Compute and Storage
In this session we explore the basic elements of a Windows Azure service by creating a simple GuestBook application that demonstrates many features of the Windows Azure platform, including web and worker roles, blob storage, table storage, and queues.

Introduction to SQL Azure
Investigate SQL Azure and learn how to manage logins, create database objects and query your cloud database. We also discuss how to move an existing on-premise database to SQL Azure including modifying the DDL and moving data via BCP and SQL Server Integration Services.

Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus V2
Azure AppFabric consists of Service Bus, Access Control Services and Caching that comprise a comprehensive building block services for developing, deploying, and managing applications. In this section we learn about the new Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus capabilities that are now available. You will use the management service to manage your connection points and the Anycast feature to load balance across different instances of a service.

Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service V2
We learn how to take advantage of the ACS for outsourcing authentication, managing multiple identity sources, performing some basic authorization tasks and take control of the authentication experience.

Building Windows Azure Applications with the Caching Service
Learn how to use the Caching service for both your ASP.NET session state and to cache data from your data-tier. You will see how the Caching service provides your application with a cache that provides low latency and high throughput without having to configure, deploy, or manage the service.

Deploying, Monitoring and Debugging Applications in Windows Azure
We explore multiple techniques for deploying, monitoring and debugging applicationsin Windows Azure. You will learn to deploy thorugh Visual Studio Studio and PowerShell scripts along with monitoring and debugging applications once deployed to Windows Azure.

Advanced Web, VM and Worker Roles
This section introduces these new capabilities that are unlocked in Windows Azure and allow more advanced application scenarios. Windows Azure Virtual Machine Roles allow you to run a customized instance of Windows Server 2008 R2 in Windows Azure, making it easier to move applications to the cloud. In this hands-on lab, you will explore Virtual Machine roles and you will learn how to create custom OS images that you deploy to Windows Azure.

Connecting Apps with Windows Azure Connect
Windows Azure Connect's primary scenario is enabling IP-level network connectivity between Azure services and external resources. The underlying connectivity model that supports this is quite flexible. For example, you can use Azure Connect to setup networking between arbitrary groups of machines that are distributed across the internet in a very controlled and secure manner. Once connected the Azure Roles can connect to an on-premise SQL Server and/or authenticate using an Active Directory login and appear as if the Azure Role is a local computer on the Enterprises netwrok.

SQL Azure Tips and Tricks
In general, working with a database in SQL Azure is the same as working against an on premise database. There are some additional considerations which are covered in this session.