Any DevEvening members looking for a new position

New DevEvening member Rusty has contacted me to see if anyone is looking for a new position.

You would be working at Rusty's startup company Incuvis (www.incuvis.com)

Rusty says:
"We're currently looking to work with a lead developer for our venture, it's a typical risk-reward model and we can share equity.

We're developing radically new business risk intelligence software. Core skills will be ASP.net (we think ...) and charting tools and moving
towards MS Silverlight. An understand of analytics and data would also be a bonus."

If this sounds like you please email sarim at incuvis.com.

Azure first look

One of the most exciting upcoming technologies is Windows Azure.  

Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform and made up of a number of components and services.

Azure can be split into a number of technologies (not all of which are currently available)

• .Net Services (Message broker, security and Workflow hosting)
• SQL Services (an online database accessed using REST)
• Live Services (a number of different services from interfacing with messanger to sending alerts)
• Sharepoint Services
• Microsoft CRM

Currently .net and to some degree SQL services are available.

To play around with Azure you need to register so sign up at: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/register.mspx.

Microsoft will then send you a key (mine took about a week to arrive) allowing you to access the online facilities.

Until you get this key you can still play around to an extentby downloading the SDK: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=BB893FB0-AD04-4FE8-BB04-0C5E4278D3E9&displaylang=en.

I suggest you also download the tools for visual studio from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=63D0D248-1B08-4F7D-ABDE-62EB75CB1E69&displaylang=en. As this is beta software you probably want to be running it in virtual pc (although I didnt and everything seems fine still).

The first thing you should do is watch Steve Marx's presentation on developing an application in Azure at: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES01/
Steve is an excellent preseter, great to watch and will take you through the basics of Windows Azure.

After installing the Visual Studio tools you can create Web Cloud service ASP.net projects. Cloud projects are very similar to standard ASP.net projects but contain another project that has some additional files that describe where the service is hosted and configuration settings (.csdef and .cscfg). 

If you look at the project name in Visual Studio you will see it is called something like CloudService1_webRole. Role is a term within Azure that seems to describe the type of service you are running. If you right click on the service project you can deploy it to the cloud (which they havent given me access to yet).

As it would be inconvenient to deploy your app every time you wanted to test it Microsoft provide an application called the development fabric which simulates how it will function in the cloud (below). If you open the cscfg in studio you will see its an XML file that contains the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudService3" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration">
<Role name="WebRole">
<Instances count="1"/>
<ConfigurationSettings>
</ConfigurationSettings>
</Role>
</ServiceConfiguration>

If you alter the instances count element and run the app you will see more instances created in development fabric. This simulates adding capacity to your Azure application e.g. if you are expecting many visitors to hit the site.

 


Once you have your key and have activated it you can log into the Azure services platform. This will take you to an interface like the screen shot below. At present its a bit rough around the edges but you can see the direction they are going.



Currently within .net services you have access to 3 components:

• Service Bus (acts as a broker/intermediatry for messages)
• Workflow (hosts workflow)
• Access control service (authentication and authorization)

The examples provided in the SDK take you through the basics of how these work. There is an example of a chat application that sends messages via the service broker. What is impressive is the speed of it, no noticable delay at all. There is also another example application to demonstrate the security features )(a calculator app). This threw an security exception when I tried to run it about token being valid 10 seconds after it was requested?!

Security is defined by an input claim e.g. a specific username which is then matched to Output claims (e.g. in the included example give the ability to multiply).

 




Some of the examples are a bit cryptic at present and I would suggest brush up on your WCF and Workflow as these concepts will certainly be used. 

It all looks really promising so far and I cant wait to learn more about it.

Must watch PDC sessions

I have been watching a number of the PDC sessions online (much to the annoyance of my wife who failed to get excited about parallel programming). The Silverlight player works very well making them the sessions easy to watch.

I would recommend the following as highlights (for me anyway)

Day 2 Keynote
http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/pdc08/WMV-HQ/KYN02.wmv
Okay you should probably watch day 1 for all the Azure stuff but I found day 2 more interesting. Very slick Tesco's WPF application.

Future of C#
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL16/
Anders is an excellent speaker and a very interesting session.

Parallel Programming
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL26/
Daniel Moth presents an excellent session demonstrating some of the parallel enhancements.

Introduction to F#
http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/pdc08/WMV-HQ/TL11.wmv
Excellent talk on the basics of F# and demonstration of some of the advantages

A lap around Oslo
http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/pdc08/WMV-HQ/TL23.wmv
Take a first look at "M" 

Developing and deploying your first Windows Azure service
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES01/
Good demo of Azure with MVC application

DevEvening update

I have made a couple of textual changes to the site and made the forms a bit easier to use. At some point I need to sort out the layout for logged in users as it has just been all plonked on one page due to time constraints.  

There is now a feedback page at:
http://www.devevening.co.uk/suggest.aspx

This allows users to send feedback about DevEvening and suggest possible future sessions.

I am currently talking to Jon Skeet, MVP and author of the book C# in depth (http://csharpindepth.com/). With any luck Jon will be coming to DevEvening at some point next year to give a talk on C#. Jon is very active in the community and frequently answers questions my current fav site StackOverflow. A number of people have recommended Jon's book to me which I have ordered and look forward to reading when Amazon deliver it.