[I originally posted this as an editorial for the MSDN Flash]

Happy New Year!

As some of you may have spotted, I'm a certified cricket tragic. In fact, I'm writing this from the top deck of the M A Noble stand, waiting for play to start on day 2 of the Sydney test. I've had plenty of time to kill since I started queuing at 4am both today and yesterday and apart from the good-natured and very knowledgeable banter with my fellow tragics, I've been whiling away the hours watching recordings from the Learn Windows Azure event that was held in Redmond and online on December 13 last year.

The event features some of the top technical brains at Microsoft including Scott Guthrie, David Campbell and Mark Russinovich.

We made some interesting announcements at the event including:

• Support for Node.js, as well as a number of other Openness initiatives for Azure;
• A new 90-day trial subscription model that guarantees you won't get charged for the trial
• A tripling of the maximum database size in SQL Azure to 150GB, along with built-in support for federation of SQL Azure databases

There are some great presentations that were recorded at the event itself, as well as a bunch of supporting interviews and webcasts that area available from the event landing page. My favourites so far are:

• Scott Guthrie's Getting Started with Windows Azure (including an awesome demo of Node.js on Windows Azure);
• Dave Campbell's Cloud Data and Storage (check out the Hadoop on Azure piece!); and
• Jay Schmelzer's Developing Windows Azure Applications with Visual Studio (although he had more than his fair share of issues associated with doing live demos to a world-wide online audience)

I've not yet watched, but am very much looking forward to:

• Steve Marx and Wade Wegner's Channel 9 Cloud Cover Show Live; and
• the Expert Panel Q&A featuring Scott Guthrie, Dave Campbell, and Mark Russinovich

Of course, these sessions are all available to watch streamed, but I suggest you do yourself a favour and download them so you can watch them in half the time.

Richard Banks is presenting a Readify Dev Day in Sydney early next month on a topic that I suspect most of us could do with a bit of brushing up on. From their event site:

At the conclusion of this Dev Day, attendees should not only understand the theory of estimating and prioritising a product backlog but would have also experienced the practices themselves so that they can feel ready to directly apply these techniques to their own projects the very next day.

More information and registration details