Sessions at Microsoft BUILD 2011 about Windows Azure on Thursday 15th September

Web app developers today are facing new challenges around how to expose data and services to multiple devices, browser apps and other cloud services. In this session we’ll explore how the Windows Communication Foundation Web API makes it easy for developers to expose their services and data to a broad set of clients and take advantage of rich emerging Web standards like WebSockets. We’ll show how simple it is to create new Web APIs, whether you are building Web apps or standalone services to expose existing functionality or data.

Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform for quickly building and running scalable apps. In this demo-focused session, you will learn how to get started building your first Windows Azure app. You will see how to build and deploy an app to the cloud and consume several Windows Azure Platform services.

In this session, you will learn how the new publish and subscribe messaging capabilities provided by the Windows Azure Service Bus can be used to interconnect services and apps. You will see examples of using pub/sub for decoupled communications inside Windows Azure using Queues and Topics, and you will also learn how to use Service Bus to bridge between services spread across cloud and local servers. Finally, you will see how Windows and Windows Phone apps can use the Service Bus to build continuous client experiences.

So, you’re building apps that span multiple devices apps and you’re curious about what the cloud can offer. Is it possible to deploy scalable Web apps and services on Windows Azure? How about storing data in the cloud? Is it possible to use the cloud for push notifications to the device? In this session, you'll learn how to build Windows 8, Windows Phone, Android and even iOS apps that are backed by scalable cloud services with the Windows Azure platform. This demo-focused session will cover the end-to-end experience and address how to tackle issues such as authentication, storage and notifications across a wide range of devices.

Notifications extend the reach of your app to the desktop but with a large user base timely delivery can be challenging without the right tools. In this session we’ll review the notification options available to modern apps, demonstrate how you can deliver notifications using Windows Azure, and discuss features provided by Windows Azure to scale your notification solution. By the end of this session you will understand how to use Windows Azure to rapidly develop a notification enabled service for Windows apps.

This talk discusses the role of the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) in managing identity and access control for apps running on the Windows platform . ACS offers developers the means to offload most of the complexity of handling authentication, regardless of where the app will be hosted or from where it will be consumed, to a cloud-hosted service. After a brief introduction to the approach behind ACS, the talk will highlight how developers can take advantage of Windows Identity Foundation to easily connect to ACS, and will demonstrate various scenarios ACS unlocks such as enabling Windows 8 apps to authenticate users from Facebook, Google, or Windows Live ID and reusing AD accounts with apps hosted in Windows Azure without requiring Windows Azure Connect.

Building a great social gaming experience for your users can be a challenging task. Your game has to be well designed, have a great user interface and perform under the most demanding conditions. This session will show how Windows 8 empowers you to build great user experiences with languages and tools you already know, and how Windows Azure can enable new scenarios in your games. We will discuss proven and effective patterns such as message queuing and background processing that you can use to build high -performance services on Windows Azure. We will demonstrate various technologies such as Windows Azure CDN and Traffic Manager that will allow you to scale your game to millions of users around the world. You will leave this session with concrete examples and code that you can use to build a great social games on Windows 8.