I've collected a set of Windows Azure links and resources so that I have one central place to point people to. I'll update this page as I find new links or as these links change

Core Resources

www.azure.com : Central site for everything Azure related. From there you'll find the links to sign up tog et on the Windows Azure waiting list

Windows Azure SDK : Lets you build, debug and package services locally. In particular, check out the development fabric and development storage which provide a replica of what you'll see in the cloud

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio: Don't you love short names? :-) This extends Visual Studio and integrates with the SDK so that you can create, build, debug and publish from within the comfy and familiar environment that is devenv.exe

Windows Azure on MSDN: We have a great page with links to the documentation, blogs, screencasts, etc. Highly recommended

Windows Azure Forum: Several members from my team hang out here and answer questions. If you have a question or comment, do post it here.

PDC talks

Lap around Windows Azure: If you have the time to watch only one talk (and for some reason, you decide that you don't want to watch mine), watch this talk. Manuvir's talk not only filled up the big 2K people room, it filled up three overflow rooms as well

Developing and deploying your first Windows Azure service: Probably the PDC talk with the most code written. Watch Steve go from hello world to showing off AtomPub on top of Windows Azure, all using Asp.Net

Windows Azure:Programming in the cloud: Daniel Wang and Stefan Schakow walk through the programming model and APIs, using both Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies and write a lot of code along the way

Architecting Services for Windows Azure: Yousef Khalidi, who runs the fabric team, talks about the principles and design of the fabric and the service model. If you want to 'grok' the fabric, watch this talk and Erick's talk below

Under the Hood:Inside the Windows Azure Hosting Environment: Erick Smith starts off and goes under the hood of the fabric and talks about how we deploy and manage the services. ChuckL (yes, the same ChuckL from the original NT team), takes over and talks about how our virtualization works. Lots of low-level details

Windows Azure: Essential Cloud Storage Services: *The* talk to watch if you want to understand Windows Azure storage. Brad Calder (or 'The Brad' as some of us call him) walks through blobs, tables and queues and dives deep into each of them. Brad is the chief architect of our storage systems so he knows everything that is worth knowing about our storage systems :-)

Windows Azure Tables: Programming Cloud Table Storage: Niranjan and Pablo dig into how to model data on top of our tables and show off the Ado.Net data services (Astoria) programming model.

Windows Azure: Cloud service development best practices: The best talk of the lot ;-). I dig into best practices for building cloud services and how they map onto Windows Azure. And I have pictures of goofy monsters and peanut butters among other things

Showcase: Windows Azure enables Live Meeting: How the next generation Live Meeting app was built on top of Windows Azure

Blogs

Windows Azure Blog: The 'official' blog. It's a bit light on content right now but we'll have more soon

Steve Marx:  My manager and official team fashion model. This blog actually runs on top of Windows Azure and if you watch his PDC talk, you'll see him create it on the fly

Jim Nakashima: Jim works on the VS extensions and has some great posts. In fact, I'm annoyed that he beat me to some of the posts I intended to write!

Cloud Computing Tools: This is Jim's team's blog. I'm jealous of their prime blogs.msdn.com URL.

Sriram Krishnan: Yours truly

Channel 9 videos

Manuvir Das:Introducing Windows Azure: The whiteboard intro to our stuff

Steve Marx: Windows Azure for developers: Steve talks about what Microsoft's operating system for the cloud means for developers. And I love the look on his face in that thumbnail (caption contest, anyone?)

Labels: windowsazure

# Wednesday, November 05, 2008 5:01 PM