I’ve been spending my day coding for Azure in preparation for a Firestarter event on May 8th. As a member of the Boston Azure User Group (bostonazure.org), that’s organizing the event, I’m getting myself psyched up and working on some potential code exercises. This event really can be a spark to Azure development. A lot of times, new technologies can be overwhelming, and if you can have some dedicated time and thoughtful, deliberate exercises to walk you through examples of how to use the technology (Hello World +), you can really build up momentum.

BTW, One of these deliberate exercises, which I used to get started, was the CodeProject.com Azure contest. I created an entry for the contest they held in February, but they’ve also run ones in March and now in April. There’s no coding required!, just some configuration; and I found this to be a great way to get a development environment running, learn a little about the Development Fabric, and to deploy a working application to Azure. Once you’re running, you can customize your app anyway you like.

I don’t have any code samples ready yet to post, but I will recommend a couple of other resources for folks who want to start with Azure development, resources that I’ve used a lot: The Azure Platform Training Kit and the MSDN Channel 9 Show, Cloud Cover.