How many times have you hit Ctl+S in the Windows Azure Mobile Services Portal while editing scripts, because your used to doing it in VS right, and you get the save webpage dialog coming up.
It used to frustrate me immensely and now its fixed giggidy! You will be happy to know Ctl+S will now save your changes or CMD+S for those on Mac.
#thatisall, #drinkingbeercoding #betterthenvegemite #yay 
//BUILD 2012 was an awesome event! this post is a little late. Although late this content is still extremely relevant if you are building Connected Mobile Apps. Here are a couple of sessions you should watch:
Keynote Demo of Windows Azure Mobile Services
During //BUILD 2012 I was fortunate enough to be to be on point for delivering the day 2 Mobile Services keynote demo app Event Buddy. If you have not watched this keynote demo I would recommend you check it out – the Mobile Services Demo starts about 10mins 30 seconds in
Direct Video link on Channel9. Event Buddy is now also available as a Code Sample that you can download here.
Developing Mobile Solutions on Windows Azure – Part I
Watch Josh take a Windows Phone 8 + Windows Store application and light it up with cloud services to handle data, authentication and push notifications – right before your eyes with Windows Azure Mobile Services. Almost all demo and no slides, this session is designed to take you from zero to Mobile Services here in 60 minutes.
You can also watch this video directly on Channel 9 here.
Developing Mobile Solutions on Windows Azure – Part I
In addition to this I also presented with fellow baldy – Chris Risner. In this session we took the output of Part I from Josh and demonstrated how you could extend your existing applications to support common scenarios such as geo-location, media, and cloud to device messaging using services from Windows Azure. Here a summary of the content of this presentation that I humbly grabbed directly from a prior post by Chris
Here is the direct link to watch on Channel 9 and Chris has also made the code available here
Enjoy,
Nick Harris
Have you checked out the Imagine Cup Windows Azure Challenge? It’s not too late! You’ve got until February 15 for someone on your team to pass the Windows Azure Challenge quiz, which is available from your Dashboard once you’ve signed up for the challenge and created a team.
We’re spending this week sharing information about the challenge and about developing for Windows Azure. Here’s my Top Ten Reasons to Compete in the Windows Azure Challenge:
- Windows, Mac, Linux - .NET, node.js, java, php, python and others you can build applications using any operating system, language or tool. Use what works best for you!And the number one reason to compete in the Windows Azure Challenge is . . .
Nick Harris | Imagine Cup Windows Azure Challenge Captain | @cloudnick
Windows Azure is a suite of powerful cloud services that can help your app projects in a variety of ways. If your Imagine Cup team is thinking about exploring Windows Azure, the decision just got a lot easier thanks to the Windows Azure Boost!
At our worldwide finals next July in St. Petersburg, our first place winners who include Windows Azure in their project can earn an extra $1,000 or $3,000 for their team!
We actually have two Windows Azure Boosts. Our first boost is for those teams using Windows Azure Cloud Services, Websites, or Virtual Machines. Use any or all of those technologies and your team could win $1,000! Our second Boost is for using Windows Azure Mobile Services. Incorporate that into your project and your team could win $1,000 for it. And best of all, you can go for the double shot: if your team wins both Boosts you’ll get $3,000!
So if you’re submitting a project to the Windows Phone Challenge, for example, consider using Windows Azure Mobile Services in your project. If you’re our top winner in that challenge, your team will earn an extra thousand dollars thanks to the Windows Azure Boost. Add Windows Azure Cloud Services, Websites, or Virtual Machines and your winning team would get the double shot of $3,000!
(This is open to all competitions and challenges except the Windows Azure Challenge, since that would be redundant.)
We’re really looking forward to seeing your great projects in St. Petersburg. And if your project uses Windows Azure, your team could earn the thousand-buck boost or even the double shot for three thousand.
To get you started, here are some links to help you out:
Good luck and happy coding! Official rules for the Windows Azure Boost are here.
Nick Harris | Imagine Cup Windows Azure Challenge Captain | @cloudnick
Recently we announced the preview of Windows Azure Mobile Services. In this blog series I will detail how to build a Windows Azure Mobile Service to send push notifications of varying types to your Windows 8 applications.
This series will walk through creating a push notification scenario using WNS and Windows Azure Mobile Services.
As I post each part I will update the links below and tweet as the post is available. So lets get started with Part 1 - Azure Mobile Services and Push Notifications an Overview
Here is an info-graphic on the current Windows Azure Mobile Services stack I pulled together as part of a presentation I recently gave at TechEd. It’s important to note that this info-graphic captures Mobile Services today and over time you will see the feature set of Mobile Services grow exponentially with subsequent releases.
The goal of Windows Azure Mobile Services is to make it incredibly easy for developers to add a cloud backend to their client apps be it a Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS or Android application. To do this we provide a number of turn key features baked right into the Mobile Services experience. As the diagram depicts Mobile Services today provides:
Today we provide client libraries for Windows 8 to make consuming mobile services easy. For more details on what client libraries (Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS and Android) are supported at the time of reading please see: Mobile Services and Mobile Service Reference.
The Windows Push Notification Services (WNS) enables you to send toast, tile, badge and raw notifications from the cloud to your Windows Store applications even when your app is not running. Push notifications are ideal for scenarios when you need to target a specific user with personalized content.
The following diagram depicts the general Lifecycle of a push notifications via the Windows Azure Notification Service (WNS). We’ll walk through the steps shortly but before doing so I thought it would be important to call out that as a developer implementing a push notification scenario all you need to do is implement those interactions in grey and the applications/services in blue. Fortunately Mobile Services makes a great deal of this easy for you as you will see throughout the reset of this series. 
The process of sending a push notification boils down to three basic steps:
All in all Windows Azure Mobile Services makes all these concepts and steps and incredibly simple to implement though its structured storage and push notifications features. This series will walk through creating a push notification scenario using WNS and Windows Azure Mobile Services.
As I post each part I will update the links below and tweet as the post is available
Enjoy,
Nick
For those of you looking for localized content be it to help you get started with learning about Windows Azure Mobile Services or even if you want to go out and present about it in your local community we have made available a localized hands on labs, powerpoint decks and demo scripts
As a preview here is a screenshot of one of the Agenda slide from the Chinese zh-TW poser point deck
We have localized the content into the following languages thus far. You can click on the link to get access to the content directly
· Chinese zh-TW
· English en-US
· German de-DE
· French fr-FR
· Italian it-IT
· Japanese ja-JP
· Korean ko-KR
· Portuguese pt-BR
Coming soon:
· Spanish
· Russian
Enjoy,
Nick Harris
Come and Join us at TechEd North America in the Learn Windows Azure Track this Monday in the room N310 to learn about the latest from Windows Azure Engineering Leadership. For those of you who are attending in person click the links below to add to your TechEd Agenda. For those of you who are not attending TechEd we will be streaming it Live – register here
Note times below are shown in Eastern Time (for those on PDT we kick off 8am)
11:00 – 12:00 pm – Windows Azure Today & Tomorrow (Scott Guthrie)Windows Azure is a flexible and open cloud platform for a wide variety of applications ranging from web sites to enterprise and mobile applications. In this foundation session Scott Guthrie will demonstrate how to quickly build and deploy applications using the new Windows Azure features and services including Windows Azure Web Sites, Virtual Machines, and new developer tools and SDKs.
1:15 – 2:30 pm – Windows Azure Applications and Workloads (Mark Russinovich) Join Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich as he demonstrates new functionality in Windows Azure that allows for easy application migration, simple provisioning of new compute resources and advanced enterprise data center scenarios. Learn how you can use this new functionality to on-ramp applications as-is to the cloud or extend your data center to create true hybrid solutions.
3:00 – 4:15 pm – Web Sites on Windows Azure (Bill Staples) Join Windows Azure General Manager Bill Staples as he introduces the newest features and services for building web applications on Windows Azure. Learn how Windows Azure makes it easy for you to easily build and rapidly deploy everything from content management systems to high-scale ASP.NET web applications.
4:45 – 6:00 pm – Cloud-Ready Data Services (Quentin Clark) Windows Azure includes a complete set of enterprise-ready data services, including Windows Azure Storage and SQL Databases. In this demo-filled session developers will see how to can effectively use these services to develop and migrate data-centric applications to Windows Azure, while using familiar tools.
I look forward to seeing you there!
Nick
On Friday we released the an update to the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 Consumer Preview. This version of the toolkit adds a Service Bus sample, Raw Notification sample and Diagnostics to the WnsRecipe NuGet. You can download the self-extracting package on Codeplex from here.
If you are building Windows 8 Metro Style applications with Windows Azure and have not yet downloaded the toolkit I would encourage you to do so. Why?, as a quick demonstration the following video shows how you can use the toolkit to build a Windows 8 Metro Style application that uses Windows Azure and the Windows Push Notification Service (WNS) to send Toast, Tile and Badge notifications to your Windows 8 Consumer Preview apps in under 4 minutes.
You can view/download the hi-def version of the video on channel 9 here
If you would like to learn more about the Windows Push Notification Service and the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 check out the following videos.
You can view/download the hi-def version of the video on channel 9 here
You can view/download the hi-def version of the video on channel 9 here
You can view/download the hi-def version of the video on channel 9 here
You can view/download the hi-def version of the video on channel 9 here
For more details, please refer to the following posts:
Please ping me on twitter to let me know if you have any feedback or questions @cloudnick
Enjoy,
Nick
Today we released version 1.1.0 (CTP)of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8. This release includes the following changes to the Windows Azure toolkit for Windows 8:
As a brief preview to the CTP toolkit check out this 3 minute video to see how you can get a jump start using Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 to send Push Notifications with Windows Azure and the Windows Push Notification Service (WNS). This demonstration uses the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 that includes full end to end scenario for Tile and Badge notifications with Toast notifications only a drop down away
Note: This release is a ‘CTP’ release as it has not yet gone through our full QA process. We have released this as a CTP as it updates a number of key issues that users were facing with dependency checks and the file new project experience. We will be releasing a final version of the 1.1.x branch in the coming days once it has undergone the full QA tests and also has refreshed documentation. Until this updated drop is made the CTP is the recommended download for users to proceed with.
Enjoy,
Nick
Nick Harris is a Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft specializing in Windows Azure. Before Microsoft, he founded his own startup AdGAC a mobile advertising company developed utilizing Windows Azure, WP7 and ASP.NET MVC. In the 9 years prior, Nick worked as both a consultant and Senior Software Engineer delivering smart client applications, distributed enterprise applications and airborne software systems. While not working you can find him blogging or on Twitter about Windows Azure along with a diverse range of related technical content.
