I’ve been busy.  For the past 5 months or so I’ve been working on something completely different.  I moved out of the Dynamics world and into the Azure world .

In July I was asked to help out with the PDC planning.  David Aiken’s team were doing a great job with technical evangelism so I was mainly responsible for supporting the Microsoft field evangelists by engaging with key projects, helping to recruit target customers/partners, engaging customers and partners with feedback on business models and managing the all-up engagement pipeline across the TAPs, Metro and Bizspark.  As you can imagine with a mandate that wide I did a lot of cross-group work.  One of the key tasks was helping with partners in the PDC day 1 keynote (see my video of backstage PDC).  Another was helping with the partner-specific sessions (i.e. the Lunch sessions).

PDC was a blast.  I spent so much time with partners that in the end I only had time to get to 2 sessions (and that includes the one where I was speaker).  The time I spent meeting with partners was fantastic.  I shot almost 17GB of video for a Channel 9 series I’m putting together (more on that soon). 

Here’s a video I shot of a discussion I had with a couple of partners (Rob Fraser of Risk Metrics Group and Richard Prodger of Active Web Solutions) about what they found interesting about PDC this year.

Catching Up and PDC’09: So many sessions; so little time

Since I didn’t get a chance to get to many of the sessions I’ll be watching them online.  All the sessions include full streaming or downloadable video and slide decks.  Here’s the complete list of Windows Azure Platform sessions:

Getting Started

• Lap Around the Windows Azure Platform
• Windows Azure Present and Future
• Introduction to Building Applications with Windows Azure
• The Business of Windows Azure: What you should know about Windows Azure Platform pricing and SLAs

Windows Azure

• Patterns for Building Scalable and Reliable Applications with Windows Azure
• Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure
• Windows Azure Monitoring, Logging, and Management APIs
• Automating the Application Lifecycle with Windows Azure
• Building Hybrid Cloud Applications with Windows Azure and the Service Bus
• Enabling Single Sign-On to Windows Azure Applications
• Bridging the Gap from On-Premises to the Cloud
• Tips and Tricks for Using Visual Studio 2010 to Build Applications that Run on Windows Azure
• Storing and Manipulating Blobs and Files with Windows Azure Storage
• Windows Azure Tables and Queues Deep Dive
• Developing PHP and MySQL Applications with Windows Azure
• Building Java Applications with Windows Azure

Codename “Dallas”

• Enrich your Applications with Data from Microsoft Project Code Name “Dallas”

SQL Azure

• SQL Azure Database: Present and Future
• Using the Microsoft Sync Framework to Connect Apps to the Cloud
• The Future of Database Development with SQL Azure
• Microsoft SQL Azure Database: Under the Hood
• Scaling out Web Applications with Microsoft SQL Azure Databases
• Petabytes for Peanuts! Making Sense out of “Ambient” Data
• Development Best Practices and Patterns for Using Microsoft SQL Azure Databases

Identity

• Windows Identity Foundation Overview
• Software + Services Identity Roadmap Update
• Enabling Single Sign-On to Windows Azure Applications
• REST Services Security Using the Access Control Service

Customer & Partner Showcases

• Lessons Learned: Building Scalable Applications with the Windows Azure Platform
• Lessons Learned: Building On-Premises and Cloud Applications with the Service Bus and Windows Azure
• Lessons Learned: Building Multi-Tenant Applications with the Windows Azure Platform (I highly recommend this one ;)  )
• Lessons Learned: Migrating Applications to the Windows Azure Platform

As always comments are welcome below or directly via the contact form.