Tomorrow (Friday 23/4/2010) I am delivering a session at the Cloud Grid Exchange in London at SkillsMatter (A top training company and superb supporter of development communities).

To be perfectly honest – I’m more interested in attending than presenting as the sessions and speaker line up look great. But in the middle of all that I will be doing the following (rather cheekily named) session:

Looking at the Clouds through dirty Windows

Many developers assume that the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform for Cloud Computing is only relevant if you develop solutions using Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. The reality is somewhat different. In the same way that developers can build great applications on Windows Server using a variety of programming languages, developers can do the same for Azure. Java, Tomcat, PHP, Ruby, Python, MySQL and more all work great on Azure. In this session we will take a lap around the services offered by the Azure PaaS and demonstrate just how easy it is to build and deploy applications built in .NET and other technologies.

The session will be a mix of slides and demos – currently I plan to demo .NET and Ruby on Rails running on Azure – but I may flex that depending on how the morning sessions go and who turns up.

Links:

• Getting started:
• Details on how to sign up for FREE to try out Windows Azure http://bit.ly/azure25 
• Getting started with Windows Azure UK Site http://bit.ly/startazure
• UK Azure Site http://bit.ly/landazure
• UK Community http://ukazure.ning.com
• Examples of Azure and none .NET technologies:
• http://ukinterop.cloudapp.net Restlet based, using Windows Azure Storage
• http://rubyukinterop.cloudapp.net Rails based clone using Windows Azure Storage (down at time of posting)
• http://rubysqlazure.cloudapp.net Simple rails using SQL Azure
• http://bookingbug.com Real world “Ruby on Rails on Azure” (Work in progress for conversion to Azure)
• Domino’s Pizza migration of Java/Tomcat on Solaris to Java/Tomcat on Windows Azure
• Main Azure Interop site http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsAzure/interop/:
• Eclipse Tooling http://windowsazure4e.org
• Java support http://www.windowsazure4j.org/
• Rails on Azure skeleton project for Visual Studio http://code.msdn.com/railsonazure
• Azure Runme utility for spawning processes http://azurerunme.codeplex.com
• Feedback www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com