Last week I presented a Lightning Talk on Microsoft Azure at the Codestock developers conference in Knoxville, Tennessee.  The title of my talk was Microsoft Azure Quick.

For those of you who don’t know, a Lightning Talk is where you squeeze everything that you have to say into a 15-20 minute time slot.  My challenge was to fit Azure, an enormously rich and powerful set of Cloud services, into that time frame. In order to do that I decided to focus on how quickly you can create a Microsoft Azure Website using Visual Studio and the Microsoft Azure Management Portal. (Thus the title:  Microsoft Azure Quick)

We did give them a whole Azure 20,000 foot overview using a great build slide from Microsoft:

Then we showed them a few more slides about what we were about to demo and demoed it. (You can see the full slide deck here.)

We created a web site in the Management Portal, opened Visual Studio 2013  created a simple ASP.NET web site and tested it locally. Then we published it up to the Azure Website that we had previously created.  Along the way I demonstrated the Monitoring and Autoscaling capabilities of the Website using tabs in the the Management Portal.

We wrapped up the talk with a few references and information on the various ways that they could get an  Azure subscription in order to try this out for themselves. (See here. )

Hopefully my talk stimulated them to dig deeper into Microsoft Azure and many of the services and frameworks that we did not have time to cover. Again, the diagram that we started the presentation with was an excellent starting point for that activity.

Bill