The best part of my job as a Technical Evangelist is working with the community members. Hands down, this is the best way for any evangelist to learn about their product and how it is being used in the wild. The Windows Azure community is a great one, with huge technical depth and experience, and it is my honor to be working on a great community event that highlights what real developers are doing with Windows Azure. I’d like to introduce you to Windows AzureConf, the first all-community Windows Azure event executed by the community at Channel 9 Studios.

What is AzureConf?

On November 14, 2012, Microsoft will be hosting Windows AzureConf, a free event for the Windows Azure community. This event will feature a keynote presentation by Scott Guthrie, along with numerous sessions executed by Windows Azure community members. Streamed live for an online audience on Channel 9, the event will allow you to see how developers just like you are using Windows Azure to develop applications on the best cloud platform in the industry. Community members from all over the world will join Scott in the Channel 9 studios to present their own ideas, innovations inventions and experiences. These presentations will provide you the opportunity to see how your peers in the community are doing great things using Windows Azure offerings like Mobile Services, Web Sites, Service Bus, virtual machines, and more. Whether you’re just learning Windows Azure or you’ve already achieved success on the platform, you won’t want to miss this special event. For more information on Windows AzureConf or to register for the event, please visit http://www.windowsazureconf.net.

Some great community members will be participating in the event, and they’ve got some mind-blowing sessions lined up that demonstrate everything from attaching the Netduino microcontroller to Windows Azure, to writing your very own Windows 8 application that uses Windows Azure as a data-storage layer or middle tier. Here’s a run-down of the speakers who will be presenting and the topics you’ll get to see at this event.

Build Speedy Azure Applications with HTML 5 and Web Sockets Today
Rick Garibay

In the world of HTML5 development, interoperability is king. Unfortunately, sometimes interoperability can be at the expense of performance. With support for bi-directional, full-duplex messaging simply out of the reach of the HTTP protocol, messaging support in HTML5 can be severely limited. Fortunately, standards groups including the W3C and IETF are hard at work on a standard specification called WebSockets which aims to bring these much needed capabilities to the masses.

Come learn how Microsoft is leading the innovation behind this exciting capability with an interactive presentation covering Microsoft’s implementation of the HTML5 WebSockets API and how you can provide the performance and functionality required to deliver great user experiences with HTML5, ASP.NET, WCF, Node.js and Windows Azure today.

Building Cross-Platform Media Apps using Windows Azure Media Services
Eric Boyd

Applications with rich video and audio are increasing popular, but preparing and delivering this media to consumers has historically required lots of costly infrastructure and setup. Windows Azure Media Services enables you to outsource your media management to the cloud to let you focus on developing your applications instead of this costly infrastructure. In this session, Eric will walk through building a cross-platform HTML5 media application for the web, Windows 8 and other devices you may use day-to-day.

Building Elastic, Autoscalable Solutions with Windows Azure
Mihai Tataran

In this session you will learn how to implement true elasticity for your Windows Azure solutions. You will see how to automate the scaling of your Worker/Web Role instances depending on predictable usage patterns. Whether you expect high load during business hours and low load during the nights, or have different resource allocation needs, this session on using the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure's Autoscale Application Block will show you how your Windows Azure solutions can achieve higher levels of elasticity.

Continuous Delivery Zen with Windows Azure
Magnus Martensson

Ever felt that you spend more time packing deployments, configuring test environments and deploying the latest build in order to please the testers than you spend writing actual code? Had your flow interrupted by the boss wanting a demo environment set up for a customer demo? Fortunately built into the Windows Azure Platform there is great support for Continuous Delivery of the greatness that you just built. With little work, you can set up automated builds, test runs and deployments so that you may focus on what’s important - your next delivery. If you want full control of your whole process you can use third-party continuous integration options with Windows VMs. Through Power Shell there is support for any scenario. For those who are really brave you can even set up push from your development box via Git to live production environments with no downtime! In this word of high demand for delivery and agility everything that can be automated must be automated. Automate, automate, automate!

Elevating Windows Azure Deployments
Michael Collier

One of the core tenet for working with cloud services is automation. When it comes to deploying our new cloud solutions, we want to automate the process as much as possible. Though Visual Studio and the Windows Azure online management portal make deployments pretty easy, they don't automate the deployment process. This session will demonstrate techniques like PowerShell, TFS, and more, for handling the automated updating of cloud services. Coming away from this session you'll have a solid understanding, backed by practical real-world examples, of handling service deployments and updates.

How Mural.ly Achieves Great Performance for a Low Cost
Johnny Halife

Come on and see how we are serving 80K request per hour per server on only two small instances. We'll share our secrets on how Mural.ly uses a canonical operation model that converts into MongoDB statements that it uses to keep the murals updated while sorting out concurrency issues. Throughout the sessions we'll show the different patterns that we've applied to achieve this and we'll share all our secrets on how to optimize for performance on the client/server interaction. By the end of the session you will understand how we built mural.ly from Client/Server/DB I/O interaction, and which tools and metrics, you can use to understand what's going on.

JavaScript, Meet Cloud: Node.js on Windows Azure
Sasha Goldshtein

Node.js is an incredibly popular open-source framework for writing event-based server applications in JavaScript. With hundreds of modules and vibrant ecosystem, Node.js is quickly catching up to other server-based frameworks, and makes it extremely easy to deploy Web applications. The June 2012 refresh introduces Node.js support on Windows Azure. In this talk we'll build a Node.js application from scratch and deploy it to Windows Azure in a matter of seconds. We'll use Node, express, nstore, SQL Azure, MongoDB, and might even see a glimpse of integration with Windows Azure Mobile Services.

Solving Security and Compliance Challenges with Hybrid Clouds
Eric Boyd

When considering public clouds, many industries and companies have concerns about security, intellectual property and regulatory compliance challenges. The good news is a hybrid cloud can often solve these challenges. In this session, Eric D. Boyd will teach you how to use Windows Azure and still protect sensitive information and achieve regulatory and compliance mandates, like PCI compliance, by combining on-premise data centers and private clouds with the Windows Azure public cloud. There are a number of ways to achieve this using messaging and networking technologies and during this presentation Eric will walk through the options and provide you with guidance on when to choose each.

Windows Azure + Twilio == A Happy Tale to Tell
Panagiotis Kefalidis

Taking advantage of Twilio’s awesomeness and Windows Azure’s scalability, we decided to build a phone and SMS center in the cloud. It was finished with some salt from ASP.NET MVC Web API and bonded with SignalR and knockout.js. The end result was tasty and I’m here to share the tale and the recipe of creating a highly scalable phone and SMS Solution using only but cloud services.

Windows Azure and Embedded Devices
Andy Cross

This talk will demonstrate the Internet of Things with Windows Azure. Using embedded devices that interact with Windows Azure cloud technologies, the Internet of Things ideology is enabled with scalable and resilient cloud systems that imbue the resource constrained devices with elastic, on-demand additional computing power that allows any network connected device to achieve amazing computational feats. The talk features three main device/cloud interactions: persisting unbounded data from sensors, communicating through resilient channels and interacting directly with the Windows Azure cloud to provision and control cloud based infrastructure.

Windows Azure Mobile Services - Backend for Your Windows 8, iOS, and Android Apps
Sasha Goldshtein

Mobile app developers don't need to care about servers and clouds, push notification services and databases. Windows Azure Mobile Services is a cloud-based offering that provides a complete backend for mobile apps including data access and push notifications, enabling you to focus on the mobile app infrastructure and code and forget about the server management intricacies. In this talk we'll build a backend for a Windows 8 app, an iOS app, and an Android app -- all accessing the same data store and server-side triggers.

Windows Azure Services Throttling and Fault Handling
Mihai Tataran

In this session you will understand how Windows Azure components being exposed as services from a multi-tenant environment can throttle or generate transient faults because of heavy loads on the resources in Microsoft’s datacenters, or because of networking problems. Then you will find out how to deal with those situations using Transient Fault Handling Application Block, part of Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure.

Real Windows Azure Solutions, by Real Windows Azure Users

If you’re wondering how you can roll Windows Azure into your own enterprise, or if you’re a startup wondering how it can help you bootstrap your young business, Windows AzureConf is for you. You’ll see how other community members are making use of Windows Azure to be more successful than ever, and how they’re solving real-world problems by using cloud computing.