Azure Mobile Services is a new set of services hosted in preview at Windows Azure which give you an extremely productive way of building a scalable back-end for your mobile applications regardless of the client platform. In this session we’ll provide an introduction to Azure Mobile Services taking a look at how we can make data available, how we can provide authentication and authorisation, push notifications and host server-side logic in the cloud. We’ll look at some examples of using services from a Windows 8 Store application. Prepare to be dazzled by the simplicity of it all.

Microsoft has a cloud platform which runs .NET, NodeJS and PHP. All 101 talks out there will show you the same: it’s easy to deploy, it scales out on demand and it runs WordPress. Great! But what about doing real things? In this session, we’ll explore the things they don’t teach kids in school. We’ll cover the different deployment options for Windows Azure Web Sites, the development flow, awesome things you can do with the command line tools, modifying the automated build process and explore some lesser known techniques of this platform.

As cloud computing becomes more popular and cloud-based solutions the norm rather than the fringe, the need to efficiently migrate your database to the cloud is crucial. This demo-filled session will discuss the tips and tricks, methods and strategies for migrating your on-premises SQL Server databases to Windows Azure SQL Database. Focusing primarily on SQL Server Data Tools, the DAC Framework and the Import/Export service, this session will focus on how these tools can make you a kung-fu migration master by showing how these tools can simplify the migration process, provide flexibility and more granular control of the migration, and ultimately ease many of the challenges of getting your on-premises database ready for migration to Windows Azure SQL Database. This session will also look at how these tools can be used to implement backup and restore functionality, and how these tools can be implemented into a software development lifecycle. If time permits, we'll also take a look at migrating other databases types to WASD such as Microsoft Access.

A common request from Azure developers is whether they will be able to white label the Windows Azure Management Portal in the future. In this session Richard Conway will take you through one of the most important and pervasive technologies within Windows Azure which permeates everything. The Service Management API can be used to control everything from Cloud Services to Databases to Mobile Services. It underpins technologies such as the Azure Powershell CmdLets, the CLI and the Microsoft Autoscaling Application Block WaSaBi. Most importantly it underpins the Windows Azure Management Portal and Visual Studio Deployments. Richard will take you through how this works, what you can do with it and show how you can use Azure Fluent Management, an open source wrapper he published to build and customise your own Management Portal.

This talk will demonstrate the Internet of Things with Windows Azure. Using embedded devices that interact with Windows Azure cloud technologies, the Internet of Things ideology is enabled with scalable and resilient cloud systems that imbue the resource constrained devices with elastic, on-demand additional computing power that allows any network connected device to achieve amazing computational feats. The talk features three main device/cloud interactions: persisting unbounded data from sensors, communicating through resilient channels and interacting directly with the Windows Azure cloud to provision and control cloud based infrastructure.