AzureFest Follow-Up Links & Videos

Cory Fowler stands beside the big screen in Microsoft Canada's MPR roomThis past Saturday December 11th, Microsoft and ObjectSharp hosted AzureFest, a community event to raise interest and learn a little bit about Microsoft’s cloud platform, Windows Azure.

My colleague Cory Fowler gave an introductory run down on the Azure platform and pricing, and then demonstrated for those in attendance how to go about Creating an Account and Deploying an Azure Application.

The best part, is that our good friends at Microsoft Canada offered $25 in User Group Funding for each person in attendance that followed along on their laptop to activate an azure account and deploy the sample application.

Now Held Over!

The even better part, is that MS Canada is extending the offer until December 31st online for anybody that goes through this process to activate and deploy a sample application online. We’ve got the instructions for you here and it will take you approximately 15 minutes to go through the videos and deploy the sample.

  1. Download the application package that you’ll need for the deployment here.
  2. Create an Azure Introductory Account (5 minutes). You’ll need
    • a Windows Live id. (if you don’t have one, click here for instructions)
    • a Valid Credit Card (don’t worry, in step 4 we’ll show you how to shut down your instance before you get charged).
    • navigate to www.Azure.com and follow along with these instructions
      Signing up for Windows Azure
  3. Deploy the Nerd Dinner Application (8 minutes)
    • follow along with these instructions
      Deploying the Nerd Dinner Package to Azure
    • email a screenshot of your deployed application showing the URL and the name of your user group to cdnazure@microsoft.com
    • Specify TVBug, Metro Toronto .NET UG, CTTDNUG, Architecture UG, East of Toronto .NET UG, Markham .NET UG, etc.
  4. Tear down to the application to avoid any further charges (2 minutes)
    • Tearing down a Windows Azure Service

Here are the slides from Azure Fest

Stay tuned here for the next part of our video blogs where we will review:

  • Deploying a SQL Database to Azure
  • Installing the Azure Tools for Visual Studio and SDK
  • Deploying ASP.NET Applications from within Visual Studio