domgreen

DDD Scotland has been a great weekend of lots of geek-ery, fun and fire. It was also my first experience of speaking at a large conference and gave me the opportunity to talk about some of the things I had learned whilst developing on the Windows Azure platform over the past year, working with the European Environmental Agency and RiskMetrics.

Bad news guys … I am unable to present at the upcoming NxtGen Oxford. I have just started a new and exciting project up in Leeds and therefore will be unable to get back down to Oxford in time for presentation. It does mean I will have even more content for my presentation when I eventually do get the opportunity to do it.

However, every cloud (pun intended) has a silver lining  and this one comes in the shape of Dave McMahon who will be stepping in for me to give a great presentation on SharePoint:

SharePoint Starting Point

SharePoint is one of Microsoft's biggest success stories. It's grown from a Document Management system into an Enterprise Platform capable of being scaled out to serve thousands of users, provide a platform for BI, CMS, EDM and a whole bunch of other stuff. But how exactly does it work?

I would like to say a big thank you to Dave for doing this at such short notice.

 

That’s not all we still have Ben Nunney presenting on “The Power of PowerShell” which promises to be a great talk, showing how developers can really get the most out of PowerShell.

Finally, if anyone is around Leeds and fancies a cheeky pint, let me know :)

The guys over at NxtGenUG Oxford have invited me along on the 5th of January 2010 to give a talk on Windows Azure and to share what I have learned over the past couple of months whilst developing on the platform.

Along with my talk, Ben Nunney will be giving a presentation on Powershell for developers. Showing how developers can make PowerShell work for them, whilst proving that the command line is still cool.

Here is a breakdown of the event with overviews of each talk:

Cloud Coffee – Dominic Green

Cloud Coffee is the latest in a wide range of coffee shops on the high-street. What makes Cloud Coffee different is that they use latest “cloud” principles, keeping costs low by using utility based staffing, maintaining a decoupled working environment and ensuring good scalability to meet customer demand. Cloud Coffee has very quickly risen to high street fame.
This analogy will help you understand how things work in the cloud, specifically Windows Azure. During this talk Dominic will elaborate and expand upon on the concept of ‘Cloud Coffee’, sharing some of the lessons he learned whilst developing one of the first production applications for the Windows Azure Platform.

The Power of PowerShell – Ben Nunney

It's a long time since DOS ruled the world, and the classic command shell was in serious need of an upgrade. Enter PowerShell - focusing on accuracy, extensibility, and congruent syntax, it is one of the most powerful and misunderstood things to come out of Microsoft in recent years. Who says a command shell can’t be interesting? By the time the session is over you’ll have seen what PowerShell can do for you as a developer, know exactly how to get there, and who knows - you may have even fallen in love with the command line all over again.

You can find out more information and register for the event here.

I mentioned in my last post that I presented on “What Is Windows Azure?” at the first Reading Geek Night. This presentation was aimed at people who are new to the world of Windows Azure and aimed to be a quick introduction to wet their appetites.

 

In good presentation style (or was that lack of time) my presentation contained minimal text and relied on my presentation skills and images to convey the message, so here is a quick run down of my presentation:

Cloud Platform – Windows Azure is a cloud based platform for built from commodity machines, that allows you to develop and deploy, scalable, available applications in Microsoft's  data centres across the world.

Utility Computing – Much like your gas and electricity you are only charged for what you consume, therefore giving a very small barrier to entry and making it ideal for small to mid-size businesses. When you need more compute power all you have to do is spin up more servers, no more buying servers based on your peak load, just scale and pay for what you use.

Web & Worker Roles - This is possibly my favourite slide, and where I think the whole concept of Windows Azure falls into place for everyone. Azure is build up on virtual machines consisting of worker and web roles I like to think of these much like the Barista and coffee makers in a coffee shop. Your order is taken by the Barista / web role and passed to the back end coffee makers / worker role for your order to be completed. If at any time either of these “fall over” there will be another role to step into its place and continue the order.

Azure Storage – There are three types of Azure storage Blobs, for binary data, Queues for queuing up messages to be processed by the worker roles, and tables which are flat file databases which will easily scale as needed.

Relational Database – although Windows Azure ships with table storage, you can also use a relational database structure using SQL Azure and SQL Management studio.

Developer Experience – Windows Azure offers a familiar developer experience for any .NET developer with plug-in’s for Visual Studio and a local developer fabric to develop on dev machines. Azure also offers SDKs for both Java and php.

Thanks for everyone who attended the talk and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. You can find more information about Windows Azure at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ along with the SDK and developer tools that you will need to get started.

It seems that the geeks of Reading are missing a trick when it comes to social, tech and networking  events the like of which are only to common in London. This is especially surprising with Reading being the UK home for many large corporations such such as Microsoft along with a host of start-ups including the notorious TweetMeme you would imagine that Reading is full of geeky tech events. You would also be sadly mistaken…

However, this looks set to change with the launch this past week of “Reading Geek Night” (#rdggeek) a monthly tech / geek event giving the techies of Reading an event to meet up, chat and give presentations.

Reading Geek Night was kicked off with a great presentation entitled “Who Do you think you are?” by Ben Nunney (@bennuk) looking into digital identity, the impact it can have on your life, career and how best to manage your digital brand.

Ben was followed by myself with a lightening fast introduction to a topic close to my heart, giving an insight into “What is Windows Azure?” and my now much loved Azure - Starbucks analogy, proving that geeks can’t keep away from coffee even when the Barista keels over whilst processing your order. (Slides from my talk will be up shortly).

Jim Anning (@jimanning) then showed that you are never too young to code with “Coding for Kids” with MIT’s sprite based Scratch programming environment. Scratch allows children to easily pick up programming and object oriented concepts in a fun easy to understand way, as well as the opportunity for the crowd to get in some good old heckling.

The night was then rounded off by Ruby Guru Chris Tingley (@fringley) showing how fast it is to set up and dive into dev using Ruby on Rails. Within the 15 minutes Chris had for his talk he had created a whole jukebox / song / artist MVC website with a backend database as well as giving an overview of some great Ruby features. Rails looks an exciting area, one I will definitely be sampling in the near future.

I hope that this even has really kick started the Reading tech community, with its tech agnostic and more social approach to community events, with each talk having “talk time” between them to allow for networking.

Looking forward to next months event, see you all there :)