Yesterday I had the great privilege of presenting to the Oklahoma Chapter of the IAMCP (International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners). This was the first time in a few years that I presented to a mostly non-developer audience. I really enjoyed the challenge and hope to have the opportunity to do that more frequently. It is much more challenging, since you have to actually explain something without really being able to dive into code and show exactly what your talking about.

Since SQL Data Services along with the rest of the Windows Azure framework is still in beta, I tried to make the session as interactive as possible with Q & A, Open Discussion, etc.

Here are the slides that I used: zip (2.4 mb – Office 2007/pptx).

I grabbed them from our awesome Microsoft Developer Evangelist Zain Naboulsi, who presented VS2008 Debugging, Mobile and Azure back on Jan 30th.

Since he was covering so much and pressed for time, he didn’t get to cover SQL Data Services much. On top of that, it was just two days earlier on Jan 28th that Microsoft actually released the beta for SQL Data Services SDK.

Of course, as I left the meeting, I received the announcement in my mailbox that Microsoft just pushed a new version of Azure SDK:

• Install both the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and SDK: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128752
• Install the Windows Azure SDK alone: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130232

I’ll be delivering the same slides, but with a LOT more code demonstrations on March 28th, 2009 at the second annual School of Dev event! This year for the first time it is joining forces with the first annual SharePoint Saturday Tulsa event, where I’ll be giving the presentation that I have been more frequently doing for awhile now: Building Powerful WebParts for SharePoint 2007. With all the speakers and topics, you wont want to miss this event! See you there!