Scottish Developers in partnership with Microsoft bring you a morning of developer-focused content. The event will include a session on Windows Azure and a session on the user experience of Visual Studio (including a sneak peak at vNext!)

Microsoft's UK Managing Director Gordon Frazer is also in town and will be delivering a keynote. 

Agenda

09.30 - Doors Open & Registration
10.00 - Keynote by Gordon Frazer
10.20 - Windows Azure with Steve Plank
11.20 - Break
11.30 - What are those guys at Visual Studio thinking about? (Steven Clarke)
12.30 - Q&A
13.00 - Closing

Venue

Microsoft (Edinburgh Office)
Conan Doyle
4th Floor Waverley Gate
2-4 Waterloo Place
EH1 3EG
Edinburgh

See: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/about/offices/edinburgh.aspx

Windows Azure
Steve Plank

This session will explain the mystery and mystique behind some of the common cloud computing terms – private cloud, public cloud, IaaS, PaaS. It will contrast the way an on-premise development project is deployed compared to a cloud-based project. You’ll understand the over-arching Windows Azure Platform and then we’ll dive in to each component – Windows Azure Compute (including Storage), SQL Azure and Windows Azure App Fab. There will be demos of how to create simple apps and deploy them as live internet-accessible services. The talk will also show how to integrate applications in to the online enterprise environment. Also, for the consumer-focused developer there will be a section on how to easily consume facebook, google and live-id users in to Windows Azure applications.

Bio

Steve Plank or “Planky” as he is more usually known works in the UK as a Cloud Evangelist. He writes, presents and blogs on Microsoft cloud technologies for the developer, IT Pro and business audiences. You can usually catch him at his blog or at events such as TechEd, Gartner, RSA and so on. He also has an active interest in security and digital identity and wherever the worlds of cloud, identity and security collide you are sure to find him enthusing. He’s an old-timer at Microsoft, having been around since ‘93 when the first version of Windows NT was released.

What are those guys at Visual Studio thinking about?
Steven Clarke

Have you ever wondered why Visual Studio is the way it is? Ever been curious to see a little bit behind the scenes and see how Visual Studio is designed? Or do you just want a sneak peek at some of the new features that will be part of the next release of Visual Studio?

In this talk I’ll describe the work that my team, the Visual Studio User Experience team does. I’ll show you how we gather feedback from developers and how we use that feedback to identify and design new features and experiences for Visual Studio. In the process I’ll show you some of the new features that we’re working on for the next release of Visual Studio – and I’ll be asking for your feedback, so that we can make it even better.

Bio

Steven is a User Experience Researcher on the Visual Studio team in Redmond, USA. He works on understanding how to improve the experience that developers have with the programming languages, frameworks and tools they use every day. He’s been with the team since November 1999. Prior to joining Microsoft, Steven was a developer at Motorola in East Kilbride.