Event October 2009

Date: 27/10/2009, Nicosia
Members Present: 10
Location: Microsoft Cyprus Office
Presentation: Introducing Visual Studio 2010 Beta / An Introduction to the Windows Azure Platform

Many thanks to the hospitality and support of Microsoft Cyprus, for hosting our User Group's event!

This event was "celebratory" as it was the first offline event after summer holidays. Of course, during the summer, we had the opportunity to attend many online events on .NET and SQL Server technologies. Among other, in July 29, Artemakis Artemiou (Blog, Twitter), our User Group Lead and SQL Server MVP, delivered a talk on the new Programmability features in SQL Server 2008 and more specifically about the T-SQL Enhancements (Review). Additionally he participated to the 24 Hours of PASS, and MY-TG SQL Server Community Series as a speaker, delivering Live Webcasts on ADO .NET Data Services (Review) and Sync Framework respectively (Review).

Due to the nature of this event, we had two great sessions delivered by two great speakers! In the first session, Karl Davies-Barrett, Developer Platform Evangelist at Microsoft Malta & Cyprus and great friend of CDNUG, talked about Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and demonstrated many of its great new features. In the second session, Luka Debeljak, CEE DPE Regional Technical Lead at Microsoft Corporation, introduced to us the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform from a developer’s perspective.

Here is a photo of our two speakers and our User Group lead (from the left to the right: Karl Davies-Barrett, Luka Debeljak, Artemakis Artemiou)!

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 will provide the .NET developer with a huge variety of new enhancements in areas such as: Application Lifecycle Management, Developer Experience, Cloud Development, Web Development and last but not least, Parallel Programming.

In his session, Karl talked about all these features and with the use of some really interesting demos, showed us how the developer can take advantage of these features and thus, have a fantastic development experience!

Right after Karl's session, we moved on with the introduction to the Windows Azure Platform by Luka!

Windows Azure is a new, cloud services Microsoft Operating System that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. The Windows Azure platform offers an intuitive, reliable and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services. The Windows Azure platform is comprised of Windows Azure: an operating system as a service; SQL Azure: a fully relational database in the cloud; and .NET Services: consumable web-based services that provide both secure connectivity and federated access control for applications.

Luka talked about the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform and also provided information regarding all the services currently offered for hosting/management on the platform. To this end, we were presented many live demos of SQL Azure and .NET Services. Luka also demonstrated how we can develop .NET applications for hosting on the Windows Azure Platform using the Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio. The development environment for the demos was Microsoft Visual 2010 something which proved that it was a really great idea hosting these two sessions within a single event!

The User Group member were excited with the two sessions and some really long discussions took place!

Click here for more information on Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.
Click here for more information on Microsoft Windows Azure.

A BIG thank you to Karl Davies-Barrett and Luka Debeljak for delivering these two really interesting sessions to our User Group. Thanks for supporting CDNUG!