Belated thanks to Perficient for sponsoring (and providing lunch, which was a nice unadvertised surprise) and to Avichal Jain and Brian Blanchard for presenting at the St. Louis Azure Boot Camp May 13-14.

There was a little more upfront discussion of “What is Cloud Computing and Why is it important?” than I thought necessary (I would think that people signing up for a two-day Azure event would already be convinced that it’s a worthwhile thing), but we put on our boots and fired up Visual Studio soon enough.

The good news for developers, as with most of Microsoft’s recent initiatives (e.g Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 development), is that you can leverage the skills you already have. If you’ve developed service-oriented applications, you’ve got a big head start.

If a free Azure Boot Camp event is coming to your area (here’s the schedule), be sure to check it out. If not, you can download the slides and labs from their web site and “throw your own”.