Windows Azure Training

Good Books

• Azure in Action by Brian Prince.
• Windows Azure Development Cookbook by Neil Mackenzie.

Webcasts

• Joel Forman, who works with me at Slalom Consulting, has a good blog post that lists an excellent half-day training plan.
• For a deeper dive there was a day-long Learn Windows Azure Event recently. It was recorded and posted on MSDN’s Channel 9.
• Peter Laudati worked with me at Microsoft. He is currently a Developer Evangelist who works with the user groups that meet here in New York Metro. He posted an excellent SQL Azure Roadmap for training located here.  By the way his blog is  an excellent one to follow if you want to keep abreast of user group happenings and other Windows Azure events in the New York Metro area.

Web Sites

• For General Information. start here for pretty much everything.
• MSDN Library documentation for Windows Azure can be found here.
• The Windows Azure Training Kit sometimes lags behind the tools releases by a month or two, but it is chock-full of useful samples, videos, tutorials and hands-on labs.
• Also see these other sites of interest:
  • Windows Azure Platform Management Portal For creating and managing all Windows Azure services.
  • Windows Azure Service Dashboard lists the health of every service in every region.

Blogs

The Windows Azure Team Blog is the best place to hear about new Windows Azure announcements as they occur.

Peter Laudati’s blog JrsyShr Dev Guy, as mentioned above, is a good one to follow for local Microsoft and user group events.

Try It

Download the Visual Studio tools and client libraries from Windows Azure .NET tools and client libraries.  These tools have a Cloud Emulator (Compute and Storage) so that you can develop and test locally without even having a Windows Azure account.

To upload and test in the cloud you will need an account. You can sign up for a free trial account here.  You will be asked for a credit card for fraud protection, but your account will be capped so that you will never be charged anything.

Nevertheless, to avoid using up all of your allotted resources heed the warning about how resources are charged in Azure. Essentially the meter is running all the time that an application is deployed and storage is in use, whether anyone is accessing them or not. For more details see the General Information reference above.

What Have I Missed?

What are your favorite Windows Azure learning resources?  What do you tell Windows Azure newbies that want to ramp up quickly on the platform? Let me know.

Thanks

Bill