Windows Azure

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #66)

Mark_BrownMS — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the newest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure.

Here is what we pulled together for the past week based on your feedback:

Articles, Videos and Blog Posts

Where Is .NET Headed? (posted May 15)
Windows Azure SDK 2.0 For .Net – Taking A Second Look At Windows Azure Diagnostics (posted May 12)
My Google Reader alternative using windows azure mobile services. Part 1 (posted May 12)
My Google Reader alternative using windows azure mobile services. Part 2 (posted May 14)
Active Directory in Azure – Step by Step (posted May 9)
Nifty #windowsazure tips and things you perhaps didn’t know (posted May 3)
Setup my first Azure Virtual Machine! (posted May 16)
Going to Microsoft TechEd to Speak About Cloud Integration (posted May 13)
Interesting Official #windowsazure posters at your disposal…and free ebooks (posted May 12)

Upcoming Events and User Group Meetings

North America

October - June, 2013: Windows Azure Developer Camp – Various (50+ cities)
May 17, 2013: Stir Trek: Darkness Edition - Columbus, OH
May 30, 2013: Matthew Grace has an Azure Framework – Cambridge, MA
June 1, 2013: Pittsburgh TechFest 2013 - Pittsburgh, PA

Europe

May 22, 2013 Law in the cloud and Azure—Stockholm, Sweden
May 27, 2013: WAZUGNL 14: Info Support in Veenendaal – Veenendaal, Netherlands
June 18, 2013: Scott Klein – All things Azure – Manchester
June 19, 2013: High Availability and Disaster Recovery in a SQL VM – London

Rest of World/Virtual

May 18, 2013 Developers Day In Saudi Aramco –Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
May 25, 2013: Welcome to SQLSaturday #224 - Sydney, Australia
June 5, 2013 Windows Azure? - Herzliyya, Israel

Code:

Interesting Recent Windows Azure Discussions on Stack Overflow

Possible to view azure performance diagnostics via Perfmon – 1 answer, 0 votes
Azure Media Services upload from HTML from – 1 answer, 1 vote
How to control NServiceBus queue name when hosted on Azure? – 1 answer, 0 votes
Windows Azure REST API MediaLink – 1 answer, 1 vote
azure download subscription file link – 1 answer, 0 votes
Why does it take so long to get through first level retries? – 3 answers, 0 votes
How to migrate from Azure SQL to SQL Server? [duplicate] – 2 answers, 2 votes

Mark

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #65)

Mark_BrownMS — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:24:00 GMT

Welcome to the newest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure.

Here is what we pulled together for the past week based on your feedback:

Articles, Videos and Blog Posts

Windows Azure Cloud Services, Extensions and Service Management API – Fun with Remote Desktop (posted May 6)
Windows Azure SDK 2.0 and Tools (posted May 5)
Windows Azure Basics–Compute Emulator (posted May 8)
How to Tell Your Windows Azure SQL Database Moved (posted May 7)
The Identity and Access tool was updated (posted May 7)
Building the Next YouTube: Windows Azure Media Services (posted May 7)
Virtual Machines Are The New Processes (posted May 9)
Sample databases for SQL Azure that support Entity Framework (posted May 6)

Upcoming Events and User Group Meetings

North America

October - June, 2013: Windows Azure Developer Camp – Various (50+ cities)
May 15, 2013: Chicago Azure User Group Meetup - Downers Grove, IL
May 16, 2013: Scott Guthrie, AZGroups day of Azure - Scottsdale, AZ
May 17, 2013: Stir Trek: Darkness Edition - Columbus, OH
June 1, 2013: Pittsburgh TechFest 2013 - Pittsburgh, PA

Europe

May 2-4, 2013: SQLBits XI – Nottingham, United Kingdom
May 3, 2013: Windows Azure Security and Compliance Workshop – London
May 6, 2013: Alan Smith talks twice: migrating to the cloud & web site authentication – Belgium
May 14, 2013: Node.js and Windows Azure – Manchester
May 14, 2013: Building Zudio: Websites, Storage, Typescript and Traffic Manager – London
May 27, 2013: WAZUGNL 14: Info Support in Veenendaal – Veenendaal, Netherlands
June 18, 2013: Scott Klein – All things Azure – Manchester
June 19, 2013: High Availability and Disaster Recovery in a SQL VM – London

Rest of World/Virtual

April 27, 2013: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp - Various Locations
April 27, 2013: SQL Saturday Brisbane - Brisbane, Australia
April 28, 2013: SharePoint 2013 Developer Boot Camp - Khobar, Saudi Arabia
May 5, 2013: SharePoint 2013 Developer Boot Camp - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
May 5-9, 2013: SELA Developer Practice - Israel
May 15, 2013 Why you'll love Windows Azure SDK 2.0 – Brisbane, Australia
May 25, 2013: Welcome to SQLSaturday #224 - Sydney, Australia

Code:

https://github.com/bitcrazed/PowerRazzle

Interesting Recent Windows Azure Discussions on Stack Overflow

How does Windows Azure Mobile Services differ from Azure Cloud Services?- 2 answers, 2 votes
Federated authentication (single-sign-on) for a WCF REST/HTML-service on Azure- 1 answer, 1 vote
How to setup Azure Connect?- 1 answer, 1 vote
How to deploy application in windows azure with text file? - 1 answer, 0 votes
Deploying a sql server based webservice on azure virtual machine – 2 answers, 0 votes
azure mobileservice proxy authentication required – 1 answer, 0 votes
View Results of Simple Query – 2 answers, 0 votes
Creating a Cloud Service in Windows Azure gives the error The Specified URL is already in use – 1 answer, 0 votes
Maximum concurrent connections Azure Django – 1 answer, 0 votes

Decks:

Migrating to SQL Azure

Mark

Designing Great Cloud Applications

Mark_Souza — Tue, 07 May 2013 18:45:00 GMT

I get strange looks when I talk to developers about the difference between developing an application to a product versus developing an application to a service. The application you write on premise is written to a piece of software purchased, installed and configured on a piece of computer hardware that you privately own. The application you write in the cloud is written to a set of services that are available to you as well as the public to exploit. So let’s explore how they are different.

When you write your application for your on-premises server there are expectations that you have from this set of hardware and software. You can expect that you will connect successfully every time you logon. You control what applications run on this server so you expect the same level of performance every time. You know and control the security context of your data. You configured the software and hardware so you expect that if something goes wrong all you have to do is look at a logged event and you can most likely figure out what happened. For the most part you have a pretty good pulse on the behavior of your application for your privately owned, managed and maintained server. On the other hand, you also know that if you run out of compute on this server you now have to move to a different, more capable configured system. And if it turns out that your server has more compute capacity than your application needs, you have wasted compute and now need to migrate other workloads onto the same server to better utilize the compute you have. Lastly once it is all up and running you need to maintain the hardware and software. It is some of these reasons why you may be looking at the cloud in the first place where the hope is to lower your overall cost of computing.

Now you decide to either move your application or build your application in the cloud. In the cloud you have the same capabilities that you have on premise: authentication services, application services (Cache, messaging, etc.), database services, and availability services, to name a few. But you also have significant new opportunities such as ability to scale on demand and the cost benefits of pay-as-you-go on commodity hardware. If you desire you can develop your application to these services similarly to how you wrote your on-premise application and for the most part it will work.

However building a great cloud application requires a little more.

Maximizing the performance, scalability and manageability of cloud applications written for Windows Azure requires architecting and coding to exploit the unique features of the cloud platform. Examples include:

Capturing application telemetry throughout your code so you can proactively react to the applications behavior in real-time.
Exploiting scale-out of compute and storage nodes for great scale or utilizing multiple data centers for greater availability. Designing your application to grow through deploying new “scale units” (groupings of compute, storage, and database) allows provisioning for both planned and unplanned growth.
Tolerating any single component failing while ensuring the app continues to run. The best cloud applications in the world support this but it does require you to write your application expecting a potential component failure and responding to that outage in real-time without notable impact to the end user.
Leveraging cache for data retrieval whenever possible, and spreading database requests across a number of separate databases (shards) to support scalability and maximize performance.

To help jump start the learning process of writing a great cloud application this blog points to seven reusable cloud components with sample code and documentation that you can leverage for almost any PaaS application that you are developing on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform.

What we created: The AzureCAT (Microsoft’s Customer Advisory Team in engineering) has been part of the design, build and deployment of hundreds of Azure PaaS applications. We learned a lot from this and decided to write and share these seven reusable components below to help others see what we mean by writing to a service. We wrote them as a single end to end application to ensure the components work seamlessly. The application itself is a rather simple application that registers users, logs in and adds comments. It was built and tested at scale requiring telemetry and sharding code to be added to ensure great performance.

The sample code and documentation for the seven reusable components will benefit anyone who is writing a PaaS application. The components are:

Configuration – configuration files are key to helping make management of your application seamless
Logging – the logging of application, event and performance telemetry
Data Access – this is actually two components: a) retry logic for database commands and connections and b) sharding using a custom hashing algorithm
Caching – writing and reading user data into/from cache
Scheduling - background worker role to collect telemetry data every minute and move it into a custom ops database in SQL Azure
Reporting –reporting on the telemetry collected into the SQL Azure ops database
Application Request Routing (ARR) – technology in IIS for routing users to multiple hosted services (application workload load balancing)

Below is a link to the material – The application code is posted on MSDN’s CodeGallery:

Cloud Service Fundamentals in Windows Azure:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Cloud-Fundamentals-in-1a3ab1bd

Summary: This introductory blog will be followed by several others drilling into each of the components in much more detail. If you read this blog and take
away that great cloud applications require you to write code to exploit the cloud services to their fullest, then it has met its purpose. The code samples are real and they work (i.e.
they function together). They are derived from real-world implementations and have been tested at scale.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #64)

Craig_Kitterman — Fri, 03 May 2013 22:30:00 GMT

Welcome to the newest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure.

Here is what we pulled together for the past week based on your feedback:

Articles, Videos and Blog Posts

Global Render Lab at the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp (posted Apr. 28)
What is new in Service Bus 2.0? (posted May 1)
Manually configure Point-To-Site VPN (posted May 1)
Understanding Windows Azure Fabric Controller error handling model (posted May 2)
Introducing Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .Net (posted Apr. 30)
Clash of the Clouds Followup (posted May 1)
Zudio is now in “Free Trial” phase (posted Apr. 27)
Building a simple custom STS using VS2012 & ASP.NET MVC (posted Apr. 9)

Global Windows Azure Boot Camp Recaps: (In local languages, use a modern browser to translate)

Windows Azure Service Bus 2.0

The Service Bus Explorer is a tool developed available on MSDN Code Gallery that allows developers and system administrators to manage, test, debug and monitor queues, topics, subscriptions and relay services running in a Windows Azure Service Bus namespace. The new version of the tool gets advantage of the new features introduced by Windows Azure Service Bus 2.0:

Shared Access Signatures at the connection and entity level
Authorization Rules
Metrics and monitoring support
Message browsing from queues, subscriptions and dead letter queues
Repairing and resubmitting messages
AutoDeleteOnIdle support for brokered messaging entities

See the notes on the MSDN Code Gallery page for more information on the new features.

Upcoming Events and User Group Meetings

North America

May 15, 2013: Chicago Azure User Group Meetup - Downers Grove, IL
May 16, 2013: Scott Guthrie, AZGroups day of Azure - Scottsdale, AZ
May 17, 2013: Stir Trek: Darkness Edition - Columbus, OH
June 1, 2013: Pittsburgh TechFest 2013 - Pittsburgh, PA
August 16-18: Code on the Beach 2013 - Atlantic Beach, FL

Europe

May 6, 2013: Alan Smith talks twice: migrating to the cloud & web site authentication – Belgium
May 27, 2013: Dutch Windows Azure user group meeting (#14)—Veenendaal, Netherlands

Rest of World/Virtual

May 5, 2013: SharePoint 2013 Developer Boot Camp - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
May 5-9, 2013: SELA Developer Practice - Israel
May 25, 2013: SQL Saturday Sydney - Sydney, Australia
June 5, 2013: Windows Azure Community in Israel June Meeting: Windows Azure Service Bus – Israel

Interesting Recent Windows Azure Discussions on Stack Overflow

Locking Azure SQL record only when accessed by a specific call – 1 answer, 0 votes
How to set up Web Role to A Record DNS - 1 answer, 0 votes
Can't authenticate with token - 1 answer, 0 votes
WAAD Tools for ASP.NET - Exception - 1 answer, 0 votes
Does service bus have Task bases API - 2 answers, 0 votes
Scale out senarios with Azure Sql (geolocation) - 1 answer, 0 votes

Announcing WebMatrix 3

Craig_Kitterman — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Editor's Note: This post comes from Justin Beckwith, Program Manager.

Today we are excited to announce the release of WebMatrix 3. WebMatrix is a free and lightweight web development tool we introduced in 2010, focusing on simplifying the web development experience for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js. Since that time, we've received a lot of feedback, and added many new features. To get started you can download the release, or watch the introduction video:

The highlights of this release include simple Windows Azure Web Sites integration, Remote Editing in the cloud, and source control tooling for Git and TFS.

Integration with Windows Azure Web Sites

WebMatrix 2 was a great match for easily creating web sites, and deploying them to Windows Azure. We've taken that a step further in WebMatrix 3. The first time you start WebMatrix 3, there's an option to sign into Windows Azure. You can sign in using the same credentials you use on the management portal:

After signing in, you have the option to create up to 10 free sites on Windows Azure Web Sites. WebMatrix will automatically create these sites, and set up the publishing information when you create a new site from the pre-built templates or from the Application Gallery:

The hope is that we’re creating a simple, effective way to manage your sites locally and in Windows Azure.

Great Video: Watch Eric build a site with WebMatrix 3 and deploy it to Windows Azure.

Remote Editing in the Cloud

In WebMatrix 2, we added the ability to open your Web Site directly from the Windows Azure portal. With WebMatrix 3, we’ve rounded out that experience by providing an amazing developer experience for remote editing of your sites. The new visual site gallery allows you to open existing sites on your local machine, or to remotely edit sites that are hosted in Windows Azure:

While working with the remote site, IntelliSense and the other tools work as though the site was local. If you want to work with the site locally, you can click the ‘download’ button to install and configure any runtime dependencies, and work with the site on your machine:

Great Video: Watch Thao show you how to edit your live site on Windows Azure using WebMatrix 3.

Source Control with Git and TFS

One of the most requested features in WebMatrix 2 was support for version control software. Following the TFS and Visual Studio announcements to support Git version control, WebMatrix 3 supports both Git and TFS. The source control experience is extensible, and we’ve worked with a few partners to include rich support for CodePlex and GitHub:

The Git tooling will work with your current repositories, configuration, and existing tools. The experience includes support for commits, branching, multiple remotes, and works great for publishing web sites to Windows Azure:

The TFS experience is focused on making common source control tasks easy. It matches up well with Team Foundation Service, our hosted TFS solution that provides free private Git and TFS repositories. You can even use the new source control features to deploy your site to Windows Azure.

Great Videos: Watch Justin give a tour of the Git and TFS integration in WebMatrix 3.

Microsoft Invites You to Join the Cloud Conversation!

Craig_Kitterman — Wed, 01 May 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Editor's Note: This post comes from Mark Miller.

The 3^rd Annual Future of Cloud Computing Survey has just been launched by North Bridge and GigaOM Research.

We are participating in this survey because your feedback on cloud computing is important to us and the industry. We want to hear about your plans for cloud implementation, where the cloud is making an impact across your software eco-system, what critical issues you might be facing around IT and business, drivers and inhibitors to cloud adoption, etc.

We invite you to be among the first to TAKE THE SURVEY and share it with your network. By doing so you will help shape the industry view of cloud computing and identify emerging trends.

Results of the survey will be announced at the GigaOM Structure in June and we will be back at that time to discuss the findings.

Learn more about the Cloud OS – Microsoft’s vision for the new era, a consistent, modern platform for the world’s apps.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #63)

Craig_Kitterman — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:58:00 GMT

Welcome to the newest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure.

Here is what we pulled together for the past week based on your feedback:

Articles, Videos and Blog Posts

Lessons Learned: Taking the best out of Windows Azure Virtual Machines (posted Apr. 22)
Using Active Directory Federation Services to Authenticate / Authorize Node.js Apps in Windows Azure (posted Apr. 22)
WAAD – Integrate with Web App (posted Apr. 23)
Use Mobile Services to easily schedule tasks in Windows Azure (posted Apr. 25)
Windows AzureConf – Spring 2013 (posted Apr. 23)
Power of Windows Azure PaaS: State Share and Persistence in the cloud (posted Apr. 22)

Upcoming Events and User Group Meetings

North America

October - June, 2013: Windows Azure Developer Camp – Various (50+ cities)
Aril 27, 2013: Twin Cities Code Camp - Minneapolis, MN
May 4, 2013: Carolina Code Camp 2013 - Matthews, NC
May 15, 2013: Chicago Azure User Group Meetup - Downers Grove, IL
May 16, 2013: Scott Guthrie, AZGroups day of Azure - Scottsdale, AZ
May 17, 2013: Stir Trek: Darkness Edition - Columbus, OH
June 1, 2013: Pittsburgh TechFest 2013 - Pittsburgh, PA

Europe

May 2-4, 2013: SQLBits XI – Nottingham, United Kingdom
May 3, 2013: Windows Azure Security and Compliance Workshop – London, England
May 6, 2013: Alan Smith talks twice: migrating to the cloud & web site authentication - Belgium

Rest of World/Virtual

April 27, 2013: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp - Various Locations
April 27, 2013: SQL Saturday Brisbane - Brisbane, Australia
April 28, 2013: SharePoint 2013 Developer Boot Camp - Khobar, Saudi Arabia
May 5, 2013: SharePoint 2013 Developer Boot Camp - Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
May 5-9, 2013: SELA Developer Practice - Israel
May 25, 2013: SQL Saturday Sydney - Sydney, Australia

Interesting Recent Windows Azure Discussions on Stack Overflow

How do I define a read-only access connection string for a container in Azure? - 2 answers, 1 vote
Is there a way to retrieve Activity Logs from Azure ACS? - 1 answer, 0 votes
Windows Azure - HDD Size - 1 answer, 4 votes
Change ServiceConfiguration.csfg from an other role - 1 answer, 2 votes

Mark

Virtual Network adds new capabilities for cross-premises connectivity

Venkat_Gattamneni — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:30:00 GMT

Last week we announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services and Virtual Network. Virtual Network is a service that allows you to create a private, isolated network in Windows Azure and treat it as an extension of your datacenter. You can assign private IP addresses to virtual machines inside a virtual network, specify DNS, and connect it to your on-premises infrastructure using a Cisco or Juniper hardware VPN device in a ‘site-to-site’ manner.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re expanding the capabilities of Virtual Network and stepping beyond cross-premises connectivity using hardware VPN devices.

First, we’re enhancing the existing ‘Site-to-Site VPN’ connectivity so you can use Windows Server 2012 RRAS (Routing and Remote Access) as an on-premises VPN server. This gives you the flexibility of using a software based VPN solution to connect your on-premises network to Windows Azure. Of course, if you prefer the more traditional route, you can still connect a virtual network to your hardware based VPN and we will continue to expand the list of supported VPN devices.

Second, we’ve added a new capability called Point-to-Site VPN which allows you to setup VPN connections between individual computers and a virtual network in Azure. We built this capability based on customer requests and learnings from a preview feature called Windows Azure Connect. Point-to-Site VPN greatly simplifies setting up secure connections between Azure and client machines, whether from your office environment or from remote locations.

Here is an illustration:

Using Point-to-Site VPN enables some new and exciting ways to connect to Windows Azure that are not possible from other cloud providers. Here are a few examples:

You can securely connect to your Windows Azure environment from any location. You can connect your laptop to a Windows Azure test and development environment and continue to code away while sipping coffee at an airport café!
Small businesses or departments within an enterprise who don’t have existing VPN devices and/or network expertise to manage VPN devices can rely on the Point-to-Site VPN feature to securely connect to workloads running in Windows Azure virtual machines.
You can quickly set up secure connections to Windows Azure even if your computers are behind a corporate proxy or firewall.
Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) wanting to provide secure access to their cloud apps can leverage the Point-to-Site VPN feature to offer a seamless application experience.

Windows Azure Virtual Network continues to deliver the power of ‘AND’ by providing you the ability to integrate your on-premises environment with Windows Azure. If you want to learn more about Windows Azure Virtual Network, its capabilities and scenarios, you can find more information here. Also, check out Scott Guthrie's blog for a deeper dive on the new features.

Check out our Free Trial and try it for yourself.

SQL Server in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services – Updated Documentation and Best Practices for GA, Upcoming Blogs

Craig_Kitterman — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:00:00 GMT

It’s been just over a week since Windows Azure announced the GA of Infrastructure Services, marking the beginning of a fully supported Infrastructure as a Service in Windows Azure, with SQL Server as a major component.

Pre-installed SQL Server VMs are available for pay-per-hour usage in the Windows Azure gallery. Currently Enterprise, Standard and Web edition VMs running on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 are available, with more SQL Server editions coming soon. SQL Server editions running on Windows Server 2012 images are also on the way. For more details on the scenarios and benefits of running SQL Server workloads on Windows Azure Virtual Machines, please visit the SQL Server blog post here.

We are very happy to announce that the updated technical documentation for deploying and running SQL Server in Windows Azure Infrastructures Services is now available online. When deploying SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines, we recommend that you follow the detailed guidance given in the new SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines documentation in the library. This documentation includes a series of articles and tutorials that provide detailed guidance on:

Over the next few weeks we are planning a series of blog posts to provide more detailed information on specific SQL Server topics. Subjects in the pipeline include: high availability, disaster recovery, performance, application migration and security. Let us know what topics you would like to see covered in this series by adding comments to this post.

SQL Server Team

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #62)

Mark_BrownMS — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:30:00 GMT

Welcome to the newest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure.

Here is what we pulled together for the past week based on your feedback:

Articles, Videos and Blog Posts

Windows Azure Endpoint monitoring (posted Apr. 17)
Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD) (posted Apr. 16)
Using GridFS in MongoDb from C# (posted Apr. 16)
Authentication vs Authorization (posted Apr. 16)
How to use an Academic Pass to open a Windows Azure Account (posted Apr. 16)
Publishing a Node.js Website to Azure from the Raspberry Pi in 3 mins (posted Apr. 15)
Protecting your online and on premises assets IaaS style!: Introducing #windowsazure Online Backup … #meetbe (posted Apr. 12)
Streaming a Node.js Azure Website log (posted Apr. 12)

Upcoming Events and User Group Meetings

North America

October - June, 2013: Windows Azure Developer Camp – Various (50+ cities)
Aril 27, 2013: Twin Cities Code Camp - Minneapolis, MN
May 4, 2013: Carolina Code Camp 2013 - Matthews, NC
May 15, 2013: Chicago Azure User Group Meetup Downers Grove, IL

Europe

April 24-25, 2013: Windows Azure Camp - Brussels, Belgium
May 2-4, 2013: SQLBits XI – Nottingham, United Kingdom
May 3, 2013: Windows Azure Security and Compliance Workshop – London, England
May 6, 2013: Alan Smith talks twice: migrating to the cloud & web site authentication - Belgium

Rest of World/Virtual

April 23, 2013: Windows AzureConf - On-demand
April 27, 2013: Global Windows Azure Bootcamp - Various Locations
April 28, 2013: SharePoint 2013 Developer Boot Camp - Khobar Saudi Arabia
May 5, 2013: SharePoint 2013 Developer Boot Camp - Riyadh Saudi Arabia
May 5-9, 2013: SELA Developer Practice - Israel

Interesting Recent Windows Azure Discussions on Stack Overflow

Can an Azure Website have multiple bindings? – 1 answer, 3 votes
Is Azure Service Bus supposed to replace your SOA – 1 answer, 0 votes
Possible bug with New-AzureDeployment – 1 answer, 1 vote
Azure ACS with WAAD as IdP gives WS-Federation protocol error if already signed in to another Microsoft account – 1 answer, 1 vote
Azure Blob Storage - listblobs in $logs container – 1 answer, 2 votes
How to delete or rename an Azure Active Directory? [closed] – 1 answer, 1 vote
Does Azure TableQuery handle continuation tokens internally? – 1 answer, 1 vote

Mark