On Thursday, I held the April meeting of the Phoenix Windows Azure User Group in our new location at Interface Technical Training in downtown Phoenix. There were only two attendees, but they’re presence was greatly appreciated. More importantly, we actually had a meeting!!!

Because of the problems with meetings in February and March, I ended up condensing all of the content that was going to be presented in those meetings into the April meeting. We covered the changes to the Windows Azure services that Microsoft announced at the MIX conference a couple of weeks ago. We also went into great detail about my implementation of an HTTP handler to support the Windows Live ID authentication protocol. I can’t remember if I posted the source code to that on my blog or not, so I’ll have to do that if I haven’t.

The new meeting location is wonderful! I really can’t say anything more about it. The people at Interface Technical Training could not have been any nicer and more helpful. I really appreciate all that they did to support our user group, and I look forward to working with them in the coming months. Hopefully, we’ll be able to continue to use this space for a while.

Our new meeting date is set for the first Thursday of every month, so in May, the next meeting will be on May 7th. If you’re interested in Windows Azure, please feel free to attend. The meetings are only going to get better from here on out.

This week was a notably abysmal week for the cloud computing initiative in Phoenix. Actually the whole month of February and March seem to be just plain bad. Let me explain. More...

I apologize in advance, because we’re still figuring out the kinks in the user group strategy. Basically, the meeting scheduled for this Thursday, February 12, is going to have to move because of a conflict with the Phoenix Connected Systems user group. Both user groups were schedule to meet at the same place at the same time, which obviously cannot happen. Since the other user group has been around for longer, I gave them the slot for their meeting.

We’re now going to be meeting on Thursday, February 26, in the conference room in the Neudesic office on the 15th floor at 2929 North Central Avenue. Same building as before, just one floor above the Microsoft offices. The meeting time is the same, with the meeting starting around 5pm.

The topic of the February meeting is integrating with the Windows Live web services, notably the Windows Live ID web service.

Be sure to keep up with the latest news about the Phoenix user group on the user group web site: http://www.azureusergroup.com/group/phoenixazureusergroup.

I have to stop and give praise to a new tool that I found today: CloudBerry Explorer. The author of this great tool actually found my earlier Twitter post from this morning about Amazon S3 and sent me a link to it. First of all, it’s currently freeware, which is good. Second, compared to some of the other tools that I’ve been using, it looks and works great. I highly recommend checking it out if you want to explore and use the Amazon S3 service.

I’ve been playing with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service for several months now. In case you’re not familiar with S3, it’s a storage service for files or any kind of data that you want to put out there. The data can be kept out on Amazon’s servers for your personal use, or you can make them publicly available. For example, for some of my installed programs or content on my website, I store the static data, downloads, and other support files out on the Amazon S3 service. My web server on my shared hosting account is only used for application logic and processing requests. The static data is getting downloaded from (or will be downloaded from soon) the Amazon S3 servers. The benefit to this is that I can take advantage of the lower cost bandwidth fees and pay-for-what-you-use space on Amazon’s servers, and I can keep the main web application server for doing the more complex operations. Plus, in the future, I can expand and take advantage of Amazon’s CloudFront content delivery network to serve my content faster depending on where in the world people are located and viewing my web site.

Amazon’s S3 service has two APIs for interacting with the service and uploading or downloading data from the storage service. The first API is SOAP-based web services, and in the past this would have probably been the preferred way of interacting with S3. However, with .NET 3.5, the REST-based APIs are simple to implement and very easy to use. Over the next several posts, I’ll be showing you how to interact with different Amazon S3 services in order to store and retrieve data. I’ll also be explaining more about how I’m planning on utilizing S3 storage for the new web site that I’m building using Umbraco.

In this first post, I’ll show you how to connect to the Amazon S3 service to view the list of buckets associated with an account. For those new to the concepts of S3, S3 works by storing objects in buckets. A bucket might be similar to a disk drive, for example. It’s a place where you’re going to build a file system and store files. An object is a file or a BLOB. It’s basically a large group of bytes that can be anything that you want. With your Amazon S3 account, you can create any number of buckets that you want for different purposes, and you can store as many objects as you want in your bucket. Once the objects are in a bucket, they can be accessed over HTTP (or HTTPS) because Amazon S3 supports basic web server-like features.

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The Azure/Cloud Computing User Group will be meeting at the Microsoft offices for one more time for the February meeting of the Cloud Computing User Group next Thursday, February 12th. I believe the topics will be aligned with discussing Windows Live ID, which is a very interesting topic even if you’re not doing Azure development.

The click-to-attend link is here: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=135461

I’m actually going to make this meeting!!! (At least that’s the plan right now.) I’m also scheduled to present on the topic. Hopefully work doesn’t get in the way again this month.

While I was originally planning on presenting on cloud storage tonight, things have unfortunately become a bit more complicated. A client is in town and I will instead be meeting with him today to help him out with problems that he is having.

Not to fear, though. David Pallmann from Orange County just happened to be working with another client in Tucson this morning and will be able to jet up to Phoenix to lead this month’s user group meeting and will present on cloud storage.

Maybe one of these days, I’ll actually be able to make one of these user group meetings.

The second meeting of the Phoenix Windows Azure Cloud Computing User Group (we have to come up with a better name) is going to be Thursday, January 22nd, 2009, at the Microsoft office in downtown Phoenix. The meeting is scheduled from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. The focus of the evening is going to be Azure’s storage systems. More...

On Thursday, December 11th, the Phoenix Neudesic office is hosting the first Cloud Computing User Group meeting based around the Microsoft Windows Azure technologies. If you’re interested in attending, here’s the link to the invite: https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=133685. More...