Sessions at Microsoft BUILD 2011 about Windows Azure on Friday 16th September

Windows Azure is an ideal environment for deploying compute-intensive apps that take advantage of the scale-on-demand capability of the cloud. The HPC Pack for Windows Azure provides a job scheduler, management tools, and a set of runtimes for developing and deploying parallel and scale-out apps. This talk will present app examples and best practices for using the HPC Pack in Windows Azure to rapidly create scalable compute and data-intensive services. Programming models include parallel apps using MPI, scale-out apps using WCF and data intensive apps using HPC to LINQ.

This session discusses both the fundamental concepts of Windows Azure and how it can be applied to provide connected experiences for Windows 8 users. After covering fundamentals, we will demonstrate how to use the development environment, consume Windows Azure compute and storage and ultimately the various app deployment methods. At the end of this session, you will be empowered to begin building and deploying your own Windows 8 and Windows Azure apps.

Modern apps don't just store data on local disks. Your users expect to have 24/7 access to their files and settings wherever they go. This session will show you how you can use Windows Azure Storage and SQL Azure to store your data to give your users the experience they expect. We will have an in depth look into how to handle scale so that your app gives your users the data they want when they want it. We will also look at the security solutions available on Windows Azure to ensure your user's data remains protected. You will leave this session with an understanding of when and how to use each of the various storage solutions in the Windows Azure platform to enhance your modern Windows app.

Learn proven patterns and practices to build your next scalable Web app. You will see how to harness the power of both the modern browser and the cloud to build a lightning fast Web app. We will go in depth into the architecture of a highly scalable Web app built on Windows Azure and learn how to effectively use various scaling techniques such as asynchronous Web services, cache aside and job queuing on Windows Azure. Additionally, we will demonstrate when and how to use the various data storage solutions in Windows Azure to maximize performance. You will leave this session with the code samples, tools, and knowledge you need to scale your next Web app.

Your app is in the cloud now, alleviating all of the problems traditional apps had such as performance issues, crashes and memory leaks, right? Join us as we dig deep into Windows Azure diagnostics with PowerShell and other techniques you can use from instrumentation to debugging to keep your app safe from problems that go bump in the night.

Building global and highly-available services requires more than just building a stateless Web app. A myriad of factors need to be considered including architecting for high availability, data replication and traffic management. In this session, you will learn how Windows Azure assists in building and running global and highly-available services.

We are currently undergoing a massive proliferation of connected devices ranging from phones to PCs, each with its own requirements and capabilities. This can lead to significant developer frustration as we try to create great end-user experiences across devices. The OData protocol (http://odata.org) was created to provide a simple, common way to interact with data on the Web from any platform or device. In this session, we’ll show you how the dynamic duo of OData and Windows Azure can be used to create rich, Web-friendly and scalable Web APIs that provide the capabilities you need to bring happiness to all your device programming experiences. Finally, we’ll mash up the data we’ve exposed with data provided by existing OData sources including Netflix, eBay, Facebook, SAP, and others.

Windows Workflow Foundation shipped with .NET 4 and is a great way to build extensible apps, model long-running processes and orchestrate services. In this session, we’ll look at the options available to leverage Workflow Foundation in Windows Azure, starting with the capabilities on offer today, before taking a peek into the future and looking at some new features that the team is working on for running and managing workflows in Azure.