LIDNUG Webinar Presentation Materials

Posted on July 24, 2012 by avidgator

Many thanks to the participants, organizers, and sponsors of today’s LIDNUG webinar – “Putting the Cloud in Your Pocket Pt1 – Using Windows Azure to Build Cloud-Enabled WP7 Apps.” I especially appreciate the patience of those who attended as we struggled to do the best we could to resolve the LiveMeeting technical issues that dogged us during the presentation. For what it is worth, prior to the presentation, the LIDNUG folks made sure we did a technical walkthrough to do everything possible to mitigate the possibility of running into these kinds of glitches…alas, despite our best efforts, the “demo gods” decided to frown upon us today.

As I mentioned during the talk, I have gone ahead and posted the code (along with the slide that were available for download during the talk) here. As is often the case with talks about this topic, the demo contains keys and other “private” information that is specific to my own Azure account. With that in mind, I have sanitized/removed the private content from the posted demo code, and included a document “ACS Update Instructions” alongside the code zip file that describes the steps necessary to get yourself up and running with your own Azure subscription.

As we mentioned during the talk, I will be working with the LIDNUG folks to make sure we are able to post a complete recording of the presentation. Stay tuned for updates. In the meantime, please be sure to check out additional upcoming Wintellect events as well as upcoming LIDNUG events, and please be sure to visit our webinar’s sponsor – Syncfusion.

Boston Azure Bootcamp Presentation Materials

Posted on June 24, 2012 by avidgator

I had a tremendous time this weekend presenting alongside Bill Wilder, Michael Collier, John Zablocki, and Jim O’Neil at the Boston Azure Bootcamp event in Cambridge, MA. The topic once again covered the concepts of using Windows Azure to enhance mobile Windows Phone application and general mobile development considerations, and went beyond my demos to include a hands on lab that most everyone seems to have enjoyed.

As promised, the slide and code content I referred to in my talk can be found here. I mentioned to a few who asked – there are some values in the lab that are specific to the ACS namespaces I have set up. I am including in the code file a word doc that indicates how to set up the ACS values for the demo code in question.

Again, many thanks! I’m looking forward to hearing about how folks are using Azure to add cloud “goodness” to their mobile applications.

CodeStock 2012 Presentation Content

Posted on June 17, 2012 by avidgator

I would like to thank the attendees of my “Putting the Cloud in Your Pocket – A Guide to Using Windows Azure to Build Cloud-Enabled Windows Phone Apps” talk at the recent Codestock event – especially considering the early hour following the previous night’s fun. The slide and code content I referred to in my talk can be found here. Also, many thanks go out to the event organizers – I had a great time traveling down to Tennessee for this event, and hope to maybe do so again in the future.

As can be expected, I removed my custom/personal ACS information from the sample code. This includes the acsnamespace and realm resources in the AccessControlResources.xaml file within the Phone project, and the SwtSigningKey, realm, and namespace values from the MVC project’s web.config file. These values can be obtained from a new or existing ACS namespace as follows:

ACS Configuration Values

These values are available in the following locations (Note – this is based on the current Silverlight-based management portal. Precise locations may shift slightly when this content moves to the newer HTML5-based portal.)

The namespace value is the namespace you indicated when creating the ACS instance.

The Realm is specific to the relying party application that has been configured, and can be found on the Relying Party Application page:

The symmetric key can be obtained from the Access Control Service management portal, selecting Certificates and Keys, selecting (and/or creating) a Symmetric Key specific to the namespace:

Async CTP

Also, please remember that the code made use of the Async CTP assembly. This was not strictly required, but was instead put in place to help improve the code flow instead of using Lambdas or complete methods for the various callback functions used when interacting with Azure Storage. Information about the Async CTP is available here.

Boston Phone Camp Presentation Materials

Posted on October 13, 2011 by avidgator

I had a great time talking about the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone at the Windows Phone Camp event in Cambridge, MA earlier today. I have posted the slide deck here for those who are interested in getting at the web links it contains.

If you missed the event and/or are interested in other Windows Phone Camp events, more information is available here.