Released: Windows Azure Training Kit – April 2013

April 17th, 2013 Posted in Development, Microsoft Azure, Training Kit
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Scott Guthrie announced the General Availability of Windows Azure IaaS features which includes both Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Windows Azure Virtual Network. This was paired nicely by a post by Bill Hilf highlighting some customer experiences using Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.

It is my pleasure to announce the April 2013 release of the Windows Azure Training Kit.

Windows Azure Training Kit Home

In this release

There have been a number of improvements in this release alongside the refresh to the Infrastructure Services content including:

  • New Presentation: Windows Azure Mobile Services and Android
  • New Lab: Windows Azure Mobile Services and Android
  • New Lab: Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows Phone
  • New Presentation: Introduction to Windows Azure HDInsight Service
  • New Lab: Introduction to Windows Azure HDInsight
  • Updated ITPro Content + Agenda
  • Updated Presentations for new feature support Windows Azure Overview, Windows Azure Web Sites, Windows Azure Virtual Machines & Windows Azure Mobile Services.

Release Notes

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Windows Azure Training Kit – December 2012

December 22nd, 2012 Posted in ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft Azure, Mobile Services, Training Kit
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Good News! The world didn’t end, which is good for two reasons, first we’re all alive, but also my team has been working hard to provide you another great Windows Azure Training Kit release.

What’s new in this release?

Back in October, you may have heard of a massive on campus Microsoft event known as Build. Build was a great event filled with an absolutely everything you need to know about Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Windows Azure Development. If you haven’t already done so, check out the day 2 keynote which highlights all of the news around Windows Azure.

In this release we’ve packaged up the day two Keynote demos for you to be able to look at the code or deliver a similar session using the very same demos.

Event Buddy Demo

eventbuddy-session-list

In this demo you will start with a disconnected application that manages events and sessions to later connect it utilizing Windows Azure Mobile Services to provide structured storage for events and sessions. In order to use authentication within the application, you will add Twitter (or Facebook) to your application and services. Following this you will upload session decks to SkyDrive and finish by sending Live Tiles using push notifications every time an attendee rates a session.

BUILD Clips Demo

upload-video

In this demo, we will show how to build and deploy an ASP.NET web site that enables users to browse, play, and upload their own personal videos. We will then extend the web site to include Web APIs that power a Windows 8 experience. Finally, the web site project will be deployed to Windows Azure Web Sites and scaled using multiple paid shared instances.

Windows Azure Mobile Services – Scheduler

We have updated the Windows Azure Mobile Services Presentations, Demos and Hands-on Labs to include the new scheduler functionality. If you want some more information about the new scheduling functionality in Windows Azure Mobile Services, check out Scott Guthrie’s post.

Updated Repositories

You can download the offline training kit (Windows only) or grab the files from GitHub.

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Windows Azure Training Kit – October 2012

October 12th, 2012 Posted in Microsoft Azure, Training Kit
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The moment that you’ve all been waiting for has come, the October 2012 drop of the Windows Azure Training Kit has been released! This release is rather significant and I’ll get into the details in a few minutes, but first I wanted to call out the Windows Azure Training Kit page on WindowsAzure.com.

Special Thanks to the WindowsAzure.com team for updating the Windows Azure Training Kit page.

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What’s new in this Release?

The October 2012 update of the Windows Azure Training Kit includes 47 hands-on labs, 24 demos and 38 presentations designed to help you learn how to build applications that use Windows Azure services. The October update includes updated hands-on labs to use the latest version of Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8, new demos and presentations.

Presentations

We received a lot of requests to add speaker notes in the slide presentations. I’m happy to announce that we have included speaker notes necessary to support the majority of sessions in the Agendas which are outlined on the Agendas section. The following presentations have speaker notes to aid you in delivering a session:

Foundation

DevCamps

Localized Content

We have scene how excited the community was about mobile services, so we have created new GitHub organizations to host localized versions of the Mobile Services Presentation.

Hands-on Labs

September marked the launch of Visual Studio 2012 RTM. How do we ring in this celebration? We’ve converted a number of Hands-on Labs to support Visual Studio 2012. In addition to this, we wanted to ensure that you were properly supported for running community events, so we have ensured that the Hands-on Labs will work with Visual Studio 2012 Express Editions just incase you or your audience do not have a license.

Labs available for use with Visual Studio 2012

New Labs page Layout

As the number of labs has increased, we wanted to provide a nice simple way of discovering the provided hands-on labs. The page is divided now into VS2012, VS2010, Open Source, Scenario, and All [which is the classic layout with the ability to Navigate by Service.]

Windows Azure Training Kit Hands-on Labs

Demos

You may not have noticed in the August 2012 REFRESH but we shipped a few demos. You might not have noticed this because we didn’t have a navigation page for you to browse them, they were just sitting around on your hard drive if you were adventurous enough to check.

We’ve added a landing page now which will help you navigate and discover the demos which we have packaged for use with the presentations.

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Available Demos

Contribute

GitHub - Codercat

One of the nicest things about the Windows Azure Training Kit is that it is open source and available on GitHub. This enables you in the community to Report Issues or Fork and either extend the solution or commit bug fixes back to the Training Kit.

You can find out more details about  the training kit from our GitHub Page including guidelines on how to commit back to the project.

Happy Clouding!

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Windows Azure Training Kit Update Released – August 2012

August 20th, 2012 Posted in Development, Microsoft Azure, Training Kit
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Today, My team has released a new drop of the Windows Azure Training Kit, it’s available for download now!

What is the Windows Azure Training Kit?

The Windows Azure Training Kit (WATK) is one of the best ways to learn, practice or teach how to leverage Windows Azure and it’s supporting services.

Official Description

Windows Azure Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content to help you learn how to use Windows Azure.

What’s new in the Windows Azure Training Kit?

This release [August 2012] of WATK includes 41 hands-on labs and 35 presentations.

Hands-on Labs

We have pulled in some changes from our GitHub Repository and addressed a number of bug fixes for our hands-on labs for this release. Feel free to Report Issues if you run across a problem in a hands-on lab or presentation.

Presentations

This release introduces a new agenda for Windows Azure DevCamps which contains 7 new presentations:

  • DevCamps Keynote
  • DevCamps Websites
  • DevCamps Cloud Services
  • DevCamps Virtual Machines
  • DevCamps Data
  • DevCamps Windows 8 + Windows Azure
  • DevCamps Windows Phone + Windows Azure

In addition to the new agenda, the following presentations were added to the foundation agenda:

  • Security & Identity
  • Building Scalable, Global and Highly Available  Web Apps
  • Windows Azure SQL Database
  • Windows Azure SQL Federations
  • Windows Azure Reporting
  • Windows Azure Data Sync

Have any feedback?

I’d love to hear any feedback that you have in regards to our training kit. Please leave a comment below.

Stay Cloudy my Friends…

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