July Boston Azure User Group – Recap

The July Boston Azure User Group meeting had a tough act to follow: the June meeting included a live, energy-packed Rock, Paper, Azure hacking contest hosted by Jim O’Neil! The winners were chosen completely objectively since the Rock, Paper, Azure server managed the who competition. First prize was taken by two teenagers (Kevin Wilder and T.J. Wilder) whose entry beat out around 10 others (including a number of professional programmers!).

This month’s July Boston Azure User Group meeting was up for the challenge.

• In the opening act, Bill Wilder (that’s me) introduced the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games (see also the Cloud Cover episode 52 which also talks about the toolkit). You can find Bill on Twitter @codingoutloud.
• Mark Eisenberg of Microsoft then shared some great insights about the cloud and the Windows Azure Platform – what they really are, why they matter, and how they fit into the real world. You can find Mark on Twitter @azurebizandtech.
• Marshall Rosenstein then talked about building social games for Facebook with an Azure back-end. Marshall’s slides are on his skydrive here (the slides are here, the code download is here). You can find Marshall on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/marshall.rosensteina) and on Twitter @mrosenstein.
• We wrapped up the meeting with a short live demonstration of the Windows Azure Portal doing its thing. Then a few of us retired to the Muddy.

Hope to see you at the Boston Azure meeting in August (Windows Phone 7 + Azure), two meetings in September (one in Waltham (first time EVER), and the “usual” one at NERD), and then kicking off a two-day Boston Azure Bootcamp!

Details on ALL upcoming Boston-area events of interest to Azure folks (that I know about) can be found in this blog post about Boston-events in August and September. Those hosted by Boston Azure are also at www.bostonazure.org and the upcoming events page.