My Run 2.0 samples

Last week Run 2.0 took place in Montevideo and I had the privilege of working with Guadalupe Casuso (from Microsoft) and Luis Pandolfi (from Infocorp) on part of the Keynote, we talked about Windows Azure and if you ask me it was too short.

After the keynote I talked to some people who told me the session was great, but most of them already knew about Azure, so I guess I never know how good/clear was for someone new to the Windows Azure Platform (if you’re in this category please send me a line). One thing Guadalupe told us, and I guess she was right, is that there’s no point of showing something you can’t use yet… it’s like showing a kid a candy. I don’t know, but one thing I do know is that we could have use the entire conference to talk about Azure :)

On my part of the session I had to show something on ServiceBus so I showed Steve Marx’s AnnoySmarx sample. I changed a few thing from the listener, one thread would never end unless you close the cmd window, and added a few messages for demoing purposes. The sample is pretty cool cause it let you change the wallpaper of my computer by clicking the images from an online web page (in this case hosted on Windows Azure). For my sample I deployed the web app at http://gomezwallpaper.cloudapp.net/ and people from the audience would get online and click on the images while on the main screen you could see the wallpaper of my notebook changing. I was pretty cool and showed how you can get servicebus up & running with a little extra work from what you do to host regular WCF services.

Another tool I used is Windows Azure Storage Explorer which I built myself to browse and manage items from a Storage Account. I recently uploaded the source code to codeplex, the project is here.