Academic Roadshow On Windows 8

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Wow, what an amazing November month it was. Tons of great events, a lot of talks … and the opportunity to be part of the Academic Roadshow on Windows 8.

The idea behind an Academic Roadshow is to bring new technology to students and to stimulate them investing time in new stuff as well.

The first one I did was for Karel de Grote-Hogeschool in Antwerpen.
It felt like playing a home match, because it was where I studied myself and for students following exactly the same eduction as I did. All of them were in the last year of the eduction, and I got really great question as well. The interactivity was very high, some great ideas came out of the group as well.

The second one I did was yesterday morning, for Thomas More Hogeschool in Antwerpen. A group of a little over 100 first year students, all ready for me talking about Windows 8. You could clearly notice that they were very interested, they asked great questions and everybody even came back after the short break :-)

After that session I was already talking for 4 hours non stop, but after a short break of 20 minutes, where I didn’t shut up either ;-) , I was getting ready for the second group of the day.

The last one I did was yesterday afternoon, again for Thomas More Hogeschool, but now for third year students, around 60 in total. They already have a lot of skills, some of them already made up their mind on what they will be doing for work next year.

After more than 7 hours of talking yesterday, I was tired but also very happy. I think I drove home with a big smile on my face, and that’s why I do it!

If I look back at it, it was kinda crazy. 240 slides on Windows 8, all within 3 hours. Completely insane but I enjoyed it sooooo much that I’m looking forward to more of it.

The reaction of all students I heard were great, though not all of them have been convinced and will probably not switch their mac for a windows device ;-) .

There is clearly still some work todo :-) . I’ll be back!

Windows Azure Mobile Services, Connecting Cross Platform Devices

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Last week I had the opportunity to talk about an amazing Windows Azure feature during the Windows App Day. WAMS aka Windows Azure Mobile Services is a newer Windows Azure feature, released somewhere in September 2012.

It is a technology that allows you to quickly build mobile applications for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and even for iOS and also Android in the future.

Every application needs data, an API, authentication, authorization and custom server side logic. All of this is nicely integrated into WAMS, and can be highly reused on all these different platforms. One of the killer features of all these platforms, Push Notifications, to make your applications more alive and more interactive, is build in and easily available for you to use in any of your applications.

Preparing the session really took a lot of time this time. The subtleties of notifications were not easy to figure out and to fully implement without any issues. Now that I played with it a lot of times, it feels natural and it will be one of the components I’m looking forward to implement in my own apps.

Abstract:
People are getting more and more connected and moving away from computers to using more mobile devices than ever before. Tablets, phones, slates are becoming the new computers.

All these devices and applications also need data, synchronization, security and much more. The broad reach, the number of devices and apps and the big amount of different platforms existing today, are pushing the needs for scalable and high available solutions running on a solid cloud platform, like Windows Azure.

One of the killer features of Windows Azure is WAMS, the Windows Azure Mobile Services. A Solid platform to connect cross platform devices and to open up a big set of features needed to build mobile applications.

In this session we will give you an introduction to WAMS, show you its true power and demonstrate how it can be used on multiple platforms to have one common way of connectivity. Managing and opening up your data to mobile users, while keeping the flexibility of validation and queries. Securing your applications by enabling authentication and authorization and by allowing the user to do single sign on or to use his favorite identity provider like Live, Facebook or Twitter. Enabling standard communication means like email and SMS, directly from your own application. And last but not least, enriching applications using push notifications, to send information from server to client and to notify users about new content.

Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/KristofRennen/windows-azure-mobile-services-connecting-cross-platform-devices


Conclusion:
Again a great topic to talk about, and another amazing technology to demonstrate. I’m looking forward to talk about this subject more next year :-)

In less than one hour I was able to build a Windows 8 app from scratch, adding back-end data to it available through an API and stored on SQL Server in the cloud. Extended with server side validation and custom server logic. Secured by twitter authentication and data security by server side authorization. And ofcourse a final topping of push notifications.

Amazing no? It sure is :-)

Windows App Day Made Appi

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Last week, on Friday November 23rd, the Windows App Day took place. A full day on Windows 8 development, UX and Design, split up in 2 tracks.

The opening keynote was really fun and gave us an overview of a lot of the Belgian apps currently available, presented by the leads of those projects and the companies building them. It clearly showed that companies are investing heavily in Windows 8 and that even a lot of them started building apps without real previous experiences.

The first session I decided to follow was one by Bart Claeys, titled “From an iOS app to a Windows Store app”. Amazing session if you ask me, very relevant and clearly showing how easy it is to go from an iOS app to a Windows 8 app. Clearly something I will be looking back at in the future :-)

After lunch it was time for my own session. It was part of the developer track and roughly estimated got around 100 attendees. More about that in a separate post :-)

Another session I followed was the one “From Slider to Gauge: building WinRT custom controls” by Diederik Krols. It was a good session but showed me that all the skills you already have when building custom WPF / XAML controls, can be reused when building Windows 8 controls … great no?

The last session of the day was by Kevin Dockx, titled “What does it take to make Mine for Facebook: learn and apply to your next Windows Store app”. This was the session that learned me the most. Great tips, great insights and great overview of which problems and roadblocks you might encounter. A must see talk if you are serious about building a next killer app.

Conclusion of the day was that it was again an amazing free event. Great content, great speakers and a lot of fun. What do you need more?

Windows Azure Virtual Machines And Virtual Networks

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Today I had the opportunity to do a talk at the Windows Server 2012 Launch event in Antwerpen. Of course I talked about my favorite cloud platform, Windows Azure. This time my talk wasn’t developer oriented but more focused towards IT Pros.

I have to admit that the preparation didn’t go as smooth as expected and that it took me various Windows Azure accounts to get everything set up and to prepare the demos I wanted to show, more on that later in another post.

During the session I managed to demo a few nice features: how to get started with new virtual machines, how to create multiple machines under the same availability set and how to build a load balanced web farm using a Windows Server 2012 + IIS and a Windows Server 2008 R2 + IIS.

Abstract:
Join us for a tour of the features that make up the new Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks offerings. Using demonstrations throughout, we will explain the Virtual Machine storage architecture and show how to provision and customize virtual machines, configure network connectivity between virtual machines, and configure site-to-site networks that enable true applications that span from on-premises to Windows Azure.

We’ll focus specifically on features that enable you to create highly available Virtual Machine-based services and how to connect Virtual Machines with Cloud Services.

Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/KristofRennen/windows-azure-virtual-machines-and-virtual-networks

Conclusion:
I had the feeling that the audience was really happy with the information they got and I also got a few great comments about my session. This is why I do it and why community is great!

I had great fun, I hope you did too!

Windows Azure Support Is Amazing

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In August I gave a course on Windows Azure and I used my pay-as-you-go account to demo a lot of features like websites, virtual machines, sql azure and much more. Even though I only used a lot of these features for a short period of time, I noticed after a few weeks that my invoice was rather high. After detailed analysis I found out that the system thought I was using a reserved website, and thus a virtual machine, for more than a week. Not that bad but still a bill of around 30 euro.

Not knowing what was the problem (the management portal didn’t show any services at all), I contacted the Windows Azure support by using the official contact form on https://www.windowsazure.com/support/contact/. After exchanging a few mails with more details, exports of my billing and usage history, the team started investigating my issue and I received back the following answer which makes me a very happy customer

“Our records indicate that you utilized Windows Azure Web Sites in reserved instance mode and deleted all websites associated with your subscription.  Due to a system issue, your subscription continued to report compute hours associated with the reserved instance of Windows Azure Web Sites . This has since been corrected to automatically transfer your subscription to shared instance mode to avoid any future over billing.  Any compute charges that may have been billed associated with this issue will be credited on a subsequent invoice.”

We all know that these nice features are still in preview and I have to say that I’m very happy with this kind of support. They handled it properly, investigated it into as much detail as possible, refunded the charges and probably fixed something to avoid these kind of situations in the future.

A job nice done Microsoft!

Windows 8 App Development With Windows Azure

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Yesterday evening I got invited as a speaker to the Techs Teaching Techs event organized by 2IT. Of course I took the opportunity to talk about Windows 8 and Windows Azure.

I was surprised but also very happy to find out that a lot of the attendees already installed Windows 8 on their own computer and were using it as their active operating system. On the other side there was still much work to do, because none of them were using a windows phone and nobody had a look at app development for windows 8 already. Also Windows Azure wasn’t well known yet … time to change that :-)

The talk wasn’t focused a lot around demos but more about sharing basic concepts on windows 8 development, getting started, tips and guidance on UX, design and application certification.

I really enjoyed the session and I hope you did too. If you are interested you can download my slide deck from SlideShare.

Abstract:
With Windows 8 coming and Windows Azure being around as a solid cloud platform, there will be many new scenarios possible and big opportunities available to build new types of services and applications. We are facing a huge number of devices possibly upgrading to this new version of Windows and all of them will be connecting to well know services, fetching data and being online all the time. To enable this load, support flexible and scalable applications and to provide users with an amazing user experience, Windows 8 and Windows Azure will probably become best friends.

One of the key features of Windows 8 is the support for notifications, an easy and user friendly way to inform the user about events, available data, updates and much more. For the Windows Phone users this experience will feel familiar, as we are already using it for a while. For Windows 8, the experience will be similar but even more possibilities and scenarios are available.

In this session we will show you what Windows 8 has to offer for developers and how you can get started to build something of your own. You will learn what this new operating system offers to notify the user and what options developers have to implement those. To allow flexibility, scalability and transparency, we will use Windows Azure as a backend and initiator of the notifications to show you the close relationship between the two.

Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/KristofRennen/windows-8-app-development-with-windows-azure

Shared Windows Azure Websites Now With Custom Domains

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I never really made the shift from my personal, shared hosting to shared windows azure websites just because I was missing the custom domain feature available only on the reserved ones.
Currently I have a simple static html site for my band http://www.jessiesfive.be/ hosted on my http://www.telenet.be/ account, my blog hosted at http://www.vibit.eu/ and some redirection rules to get my mail up and running. Not all that expensive but all these different environments don’t always make it easy to keep everything up to date, to remember passwords and most importantly, to pay my bills in time :-) .

This weekend though, The Gu announced that shared websites can benefit from custom and naked domains as of now, so the story might change pretty quickly and I might move all my sites pretty soon :-) .

To support this new feature, there are now 3 modes your website can operate under: free, shared and reserved.

  • The free one is still the same one as before, allowing any user to have 10 free sites but very limited in traffic and only *.azurewebsites.net domain names. Bandwidth gets limited to “only” 165MB/day or 5GB/month.
  • The shared one is basically the same as the free one, but without an upper limit and with support for custom and naked domains (e.g. www.kristofrennen.be or blog.kristofrennen.be or kristofrennen.be). The first 165MB/day or 5GB/month bandwidth usage is free and everything above the 5GB/month will be rated as pay-as-you-go.
  • The reserved one was already available before and didn’t change. You get your own sized and isolated small, medium or large virtual machine. You can run any number of websites you’d like without restrictions on memory or cpu.

So when you are looking for some cheap hosting for your site, you can easily start with the free mode and whenever needed scale up to shared or reserved when needed.

Teaching My First Summer Class On Windows Azure

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A few weeks ago, the first 2 Saturdays of August, I have been pretty busy teaching my first summer class ever. I already give various presentations before, did already a lot of talks but this time it was a completely different experience.

The course itself was organized by CVO Antwerpen (http://www.cvoantwerpen.be/), specialized in education for adults and to support people in making a career change to the big bad world of IT. Normally there are no courses during summer time, but for those who are interested and for those that already want to prepare for their next year, a summer class like this is a nice opportunity.

The course I gave this year was of course about Windows Azure, trying to give as much information as possible but limited to only 2 full days

Day 1
The first day we started with a general overview of the Windows Azure Platform: websites, virtual machines, services and a small (video) tour in the data center itself. As expected, the attendees were pretty impressed by it (how could they not be :-) )

A nice feature to get started with the platform pretty easily are the websites, so we decided to first focus on those, also keeping in mind that people could play with them later on.

To take a practical approach, we decided to build a todo application, both in PHP and ASP.NET MVC 4. The application itself was pretty simple, allowing the display of a grid of todos coming from a MySql and MSSQL database respectively and enabling the user to add and manage these todos.

The tutorials for these applications are available on http://www.windowsazure.com/, both for php and asp.net:
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/tutorials/web-site-with-sql-database/
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/php/tutorials/website-w-mysql-and-webmatrix/

Building both of these solutions from scratch combined with a full overview of the platform seemed to be enough content for one day. The weather was very nice so we still tried to enjoy the sun and not only the cloud ;-)

Day 2
During the first day we finished our todo application both in php and asp.net but now it was time to host it somewhere on windows azure. The Windows Azure passes couldn’t be activated because of some maintenance activities and those passes don’t seem to support the newly released features anyway so we decided to share one account and to provide everybody with access to one free (and shared) website. Luckily we have 10 of those, which was enough for this group.

Deployment of both the applications was very easy (as expected) and the todo app was up and running in no time. Again this clearly showed the power of websites and the flexibility it offers users to get started with Windows Azure.

To make our application more scalable and secure, it was finally time to introduce queues and access control into the application.

The tutorial for the access control part available on the Windows Azure website was pretty easy to follow and allowed us to quickly secure our application using google accounts and windows live. http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/access-control/

As the last, and most interesting part in my opinion, we decided to implement queues into the todo application. The idea behind it was pretty simple but clearly showing the power of cloud and disconnected applications. The setup was pretty simple though.

I prepared a simple queue which could be used by everybody to put a message on every time a new todo was added in their own application. On my computer I wrote a small todo aggregator using java and IntelliJ which was listening on the queue. Every message entering the queue was picked up by this simple console application and published back to other queues, one for each attendee. Using a local worker, everybody could then listen to messages arriving at their own queue, convert the message into a todo and persist it into a database running on their own local machine.

So with these simple steps, I could clearly show the power of cloud and Windows Azure and queues. Even without any connection between the different machines in the room, it was pretty easy to communicate todos back and forth between all applications and to ensure all items were synced across all databases.

Conclusion
It was my first summer class on Windows Azure and I’m very happy that I used 2 sunny Saturdays to teach them. It was a great experience both for me and for all attendees, which I want to thank a lot for their interest in the material, their contributions and their enthusiasm.

I’m looking forward to teach more of this kind of classes, and I’m pretty sure it will happen in the very near future.

Windows 8 Summer App-a-thons

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Wow, it really promises to be an amazing summer this year with 2 Windows 8 App-a-thons ahead of us.

With the upcoming release of Windows 8 and the release of many amazing new stuff on Windows Azure, there are endless possibilities to show other people what you can do, to build sexy applications or to start learning and discovering these new platforms. I was there at the previous edition beginning of this year and I have to say I learned a lot but most importantly: I had a great time and big fun :-D .

Mark your calendar for 2 amazing days including sun, ice cream, water, ….
Team up with your best UX or developer friend to build a killer team, come alone, sign up with a group, whatever you want!

To reach as much people as possible, you can join as a Day Bird from 10AM till 4PM or as a Night Owl from 6PM til 12AM. If you really can’t resist, you can of course join both :-) .

And to support you during these 2 events, the community and MEET will be present, walking around to give a hand where needed, to share some ideas, to have some interesting discussions or to just have a drink.

Belgian Coast
When: Thursday July 12th
Where: Casino Blankenberge, Zeedijk 150
Register Here
Trello Board (containing app ideas, team formations and collaboration possibilities)

Zaventem
When: Wednesday August 8th
Where: Microsoft Office, Leonardo Da Vincilaan 3
Register Here
Trello Board (containing app ideas, team formations and collaboration possibilities)

Community Day 2012 Was Amazing

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Yesterday, June 21st, the biggest community event in Belgium took place in Utopolis Mechelen. The 6th edition of Community Day welcomed 17 user groups, giving a total of 40+ sessions divided in 6 tracks.

The event itself was amazing and with around 550 attendees really exceeded all expectations. Great content, great speakers, great people … and of course great communities.

I really had a great time and enjoyed a lot of good session, I even did a session myself which you can read more about here http://blog.kristofrennen.be/2012/06/windows-azure-applications-made-api/

Azug: Brewing Beer With Windows Azure (by Maarten Balliauw and Panagiotis Kefalidis)
Maarten and Panos did it again, a great session with great content and covered with a topping of humor. With a newly created service named BrewBuddy (http://www.brewbuddy.net) they are planning to conquer the world by offering you a platform to brew beer, follow up on brews and monitor the equipment using any sensor you’d like. If you are interested in learning more, you can find the slides here http://www.slideshare.net/maartenba/brewing-beer-with-windows-azure

Visug: A Lap Around Visual Studio 11 Beta ALM (by Pieter Gheysens)
I was really interested in this session to learn more about the new features and I think Pieter did a great job. It was clear that TFS is evolving a lot and becoming really the tool you want to have at hands when doing ALM within your company. Even connection problems couldn’t stop him of showing us around all the nice new features available. Also I believe Microsoft does a great job with this, if you see what they can do from the web based UI, it’s just amazing.

Kinect For Windows (by Dennis Miscoria)
Before joining this session, I never had a look at the Kinect SDK but Dennis convinced me to have a look at it when I find some time. His talk was almost completely demo based, and showed the great power and flexibility of the sensor and the SDK. The fun aspect of his talk really made is a pleasure to attend! I’m looking forward to see the first business solution using this technology.

InfoSupport: CQRS, only a buzzword or a suitable architecture for your problem domain? (by Tim Mahy)
For me this was one of the best sessions of the day. I already had a look at CQRS before but never got it explained so clear and step by step. Tim clearly showed the power of this type of architecture and also the reference case used with a real life project showed me that it is an architecture I want to look into more in depth and start applying myself when suitable.

UX in Windows 8: instead of “just another app”, build a great Windows 8 app! (by Leslie Cottenjé)
I already heard a lot of great things about Leslie before going to her session, certainly after people going to the Microsoft App Clinics and Microsoft Excellence Labs you can register for to validate your Windows 8 apps. She showed a great vision on UX during her talk and delivered a great talk. After the session it became clear to me that you really need to invest in good designers and good UX specialist if you want to build the next killer Windows 8 app. The platform clearly requires you to do more than just development, but also to focus on what users really expect from modern apps. Like she stated: “you have no reason anymore to build shitty apps” and “don’t make people feel like monkeys”!

Visug: Little productivity tools every professional developer should know about (by Dennis Doomen)
The best talk of the day. He already got my attention about it a few days before the event, just by tweeting about it. I have to admit that I’m not really a OneNote user but after seeing how Dennis uses it to streamline his work, his teams and the software development they do, he convinced me to start using it myself. He really showed some nice features and things I didn’t expect from an office product. If you want to learn more about how he deals with it or if you are interested in his talk, check out the slides here https://www.slideshare.net/dennisdoomen/little-productivity-tools-every-developer-should-use

Azug: Windows Azure Applications Made API (by … me :-) )
Well, it would have been strange if I wouldn’t have been in my own session. If you want to find out more about it, check out my previous post http://blog.kristofrennen.be/2012/06/windows-azure-applications-made-api/

One by one great sessions, great content and great speakers. Great job guys!

Pity that it is already finished, but I’m already looking forward to the 7th edition next year. If I heard it correctly, they might even try to go for 2 days instead of just one … which will make it even more amazing!

Thanks a lot Gill, Davy and Alexandre for organizing this amazing event. Keep up the good work and if you ever need help with anything, you know where to find me ;-)

Windows Azure Applications Made API

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Today, June 21st, the biggest community event in Belgium took place in Utopolis Mechelen. The 6th edition of Community Day welcomed 17 user groups, giving a total of 40+ sessions divided in 6 tracks.

The event itself was amazing and with around 550 attendees really exceeded all expectations. Great content, great speakers, great people … and of course great communities.

As crew member of Azug, I had the honor to deliver our last session of the day titled “Windows Azure Application Made API”, to be pronounced like the French ;-)

I really enjoyed the session and I hope you did too. If you are interested you can download my slide deck from SlideShare.

Abstract
The availability of cloud platforms like Windows Azure and the flexibility these offer makes it easier than ever to build highly scalable applications and services. It also gives developers access to an unseen level of scale and the ability to reach a bigger number of users. An important aspect to reach this scale is to embrace the “Bring Your Own Device” principle, where users will use your application from three screens: a phone, a tablet and a computer.

To allow users to connect to your applications and to enable new extension scenarios, a solid Application Programming Interface is a must. It opens up all or partial functionalities in a controlled and secure way, built upon the HTTP standards which are supported in virtually any environment.

In this session we will have a look at how you can start building your own API using ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Api, run it on Windows Azure and open up your services for multiple devices. We will see how easily you can re-use your MVC knowledge to build a solid API, how you can configure and extend the framework and how nicely it fits into the Windows Azure Platform. To secure our API, we will go through the OAuth protocol, which is an open and secure way to authorize API calls. To conclude we will talk about the various options you have when passing data back and forth, which formats you can use and what the impact on bandwidth could be, which is very important in scalable and cloud based scenarios.

Slides
https://www.slideshare.net/KristofRennen/windows-azure-applications-made-api/

Taking A Metro Ride On Windows 8 And Windows Azure

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Last week, on Tuesday June 5th, I did a session for the Belgian Windows Azure User Group Azug titled “Taking A Metro Ride On Windows 8 And Windows Azure” together with Panagiotis Kefalidis, one of my fellow Azug crew members.

Even though the traffic was hell (like we are used to in Belgium), a nice number of attendees showed up in the Capgemini offices in Diegem. We even welcomed 3 guys from Bruges, who took 2.5 hours to reach there, much respect and thanks a lot guys!

I really enjoyed the session and I hope you did too. If you are interested you can download my slide deck from SlideShare.

Abstract:
With the upcoming release of Windows 8 and new interesting technologies like WinRT and Metro, it is time to check out the possibilities these bring in combination with Windows Azure.

We will work through an application using Windows Azure as a backend for data and processing. Somewhere in the cloud, a worker will be reading and processing information and storing it on storage. Once new information is available and stored, the notification services will inform the clients about it.

Using a nicely designed Metro client, this data will be visualized in a touch enabled app running on a Windows 8 tablet.

Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/KristofRennen/taking-a-metro-ride-on-windows-8-and-windows-azure

Windows 8 Notifications From Windows Azure

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Last week, on Tuesday June 5th, I did my Microsoft Live Meeting titled “Windows 8 Notifications From Windows Azure”.

I really enjoyed the session and I hope you did too. The recording will be online soon on Channel 9 and if you are interested you can download the slide deck from SlideShare.

Abstract:
With Windows 8 coming and Windows Azure being around as a solid cloud platform, there will be many new scenarios possible and big opportunities available to build new types of services and applications. We are facing a huge number of devices possibly upgrading to this new version of Windows and all of them will be connecting to well know services, fetching data and being online all the time. To enable this load, support flexible and scalable applications and to provide users with an amazing user experience, Windows 8 and Windows Azure will probably become best friends.

One of the key features of Windows 8 is the support for notifications, an easy and user friendly way to inform the user about events, available data, updates and much more. For the Windows Phone users this experience will feel familiar, as we are already using it for a while. For Windows 8, the experience will be similar but even more possibilities and scenarios are available.

In this session we will show you what Windows 8 offers to notify the user and what options developers have to implement those. To allow flexibility, scalability and transparency, we will use Windows Azure as a backend and initiator of the notifications to show you the close relationship between the two.

Slides
http://www.slideshare.net/KristofRennen/windows-8-notifications-from-windows-azure