You see, our service is many things to many people. It has to be – it’s part of the value we bring to the table. For example, consultants are traditionally either technical or non-technical. It’s rare to find someone who is a good blend of both, and at the right times. Rarer still is to find a whole team of them together and arm them with the some of the best technologies and the right kind of ethos.

I was actually a little shocked at some of the responses I got back. Most were positive, but some are clearly designed to probe deeper: why do I want to know this? Is it aligned to other activities? How does it relate to those – does it replace them? The tone is defensive and it saddens me (perhaps though, I have misunderstood) that people may not see the value in defining something more clearly – if not to the outside world but at least to ourselves.

We all do fantastic work and I want to make sure that we do, each of us, share the best bits of what we do and capture those. I suspect we’ll see many common themes occurring but I hope we’ll be pleasantly surprised at some of the ‘secret ingenuity’ that I’m sure goes on.

Our identity

Whenever we are engaged in conversations internally or externally about what it is we do, we invariably start off by listening. We try to understand what is important to our audience and figure out if we have something that we can offer along those needs. Sounds sensible, right? And I think it absolutely is.

What I’m interested in, though, is how those folks who are not on my team – folks who we task with making initial introductions – how do those guys view us? What do they think we do? How much do they understand? Are they good evangelists for our service?

And that, right there, is our identity. Not what we want it to be. Well, if we are lucky – it might be! But ultimately I think another team member actually summed it up beautifully:

Your brand is what you want. Your identity is determined by others.

And this ties in neatly with my belief that there is actually a stark difference between ‘brand’ and ‘identity’ and the two are not to be confused with ‘brand identity’ which is an altogether separate beast invented by marketing people.

So we need to work on our identity – and if it is given to us by others, I’d like to influence them in the most positive way possible to align that identity with our brand.

And that’s why I believe a conversation, with everyone on the team, is absolutely critical to defining what that is. Every one of us will have a perspective and a view on what it is we do and what the magic of our service actually is. And although I’m driving this activity, I’m certainly not arrogant enough to believe I can answer such a complex question myself.

Diversity

Part of the problem is our diversity and flexibility to work across the key stakeholders both vertically and horizontally.

But there’s strength in our diversity: we cover a range of technologies, and we have a broad range of expertise, each of us bringing our own unique experiences from our careers and hobbies and interests into the mix. There’s also strength in the team – nobody knows everything, but between us we are very likely have some of the best subject matter experts in the field and importantly, we network with other areas of the business to find the answers if we don’t have them.

So the question I am asking is, what is our brand and identity and more importantly, how do we communicate the value of something which is so many things to so many people? It might be that the output of this exercise is actually the discussion itself – the conversation and the thoughts and the emotion that goes into it will in and of itself, I think, be a valuable task. But it might also be true that the results can be fed back into all these existing activities to enhance and complement them – double win!

First impressions

We obviously do a good job of this today. Our business is growing. Our team is strong and getting stronger. But I wonder how much of this is ‘by default’ or ‘by design’? We rely a lot on a member of our team to ‘get in through the door’ and then start making headway to scope out requirements. I think that’s absolutely fine, and of course it is a requirement when discussions start to progress. But is it enough to expect someone to be able to do a decent job of promoting what we do and recognising if there’s potential by simply telling them that they should ‘call us in at the first sign’? No, I don’t think it is.

And here’s why I think that.

At that moment – at that very first introduction to the notion of working with us, a potential customer is forming an opinion. They’re forming a first impression. And most of that first impression is going to come to them from someone who doesn’t, in all probability, understand our diverse and complex service well enough to be able to communicate it’s benefits clearly and succinctly.

So we lose momentum at that very point. And I want everyone to know that we work in a great team; we have some fantastic people and I know, having worked on this team, that we deliver brilliant and lasting change into the customers we work with. I am excited about that. It drives me to get out of bed every day because I love my job.

And I just don’t think that other resources perhaps ‘get that’ – and maybe they can’t. Maybe they never will. And if that’s the case, I still don’t think there’s any harm in doing what I suggested which is taking a good look at how we ourselves describe our service. What is our key message?

I know our team has done a lot of great work defining cornerstones and pillars and guidelines and processes and what not. There’s even, I’m sure, some brilliant marketing collateral. But there’s no substitute for watching someone enthusiastic describe something to you because you catch a bit of that. And the best introductions for potential are when a customer sees that enthusiasm, understands what might be doable and are inspired to come talk to you about it.

Because in my mind, that’s a win – and that’s where the real value conversation starts.

Where next?

‘Sales’ and ‘pre-sales’ is one such obvious application for a better, cleaner and neater description of what it is we do. Of course it is – clear communication is key. But it is not the only purpose for having such a discussion and I shudder at the thought that it becomes labelled as a sales-related activity.

It’s actually a business development activity, I think. And that’s where I went wrong in my email – or at least, one of the places

Some of my team have – rightly – focused on the output, but unfortunately immediately; asking what are the deliverables? Where do they apply? What is the delivery mechanism? These are great questions – but for me, at this point, the value of this exercise is in the conversation and the understanding. This is arguably such a fundamental task that to focus on the output would skew the discussion; the fact of observation altering the outcome.

If we can’t talk to each other – or explain to a colleague in passing what it is we do – then perhaps we have a little more work to do!

In certain circumstances, you might find yourself with a need to install SQL Server Express on one of your Windows Azure worker roles. Exercise caution here though folks: this is not a supported design pattern (remember, a restart of your role instance will cause all data to be lost).

It was however exactly what I needed for my scenario and I thought I’d share it in case it serves a purpose for you.

There are a couple of approaches you can take, of course, one of which is ‘startup tasks’ specified in the service definition files. However, these offered me limited configuration options because I needed to customise some of the command line arguments being passed to the installer based on values from the Role Environment itself.

The trickiest part was actually figuring out the correct command line parameters for SQL Server 2008 R2 Express, which to be honest wasn’t that fiddly at all. Here are the parameters you’ll need:

/Q/ACTION=Install/FEATURES=SQLEngine,Tools /INSTANCENAME=YourInstanceName
/HIDECONSOLE /NPENABLED=1 /TCPENABLED=1 /SQLSVCACCOUNT=”.\YourServiceAccount\” /SQLSVCPASSWORD=”YourServicePassword” /SQLSYSADMINACCOUNTS=”\.\ADMINACCOUNT” /IACCEPTSQLSERVERLICENSETERM S/INSTALLSQLDATADIR=”FullyQualifiedPathToFolder”

In the parameters above, we’re specifying a silentinstall with the /Qparameter, installing the SQL Database Engine and Management Tools (basic) with the /FEATURESparameter, setting the instance name, enabling named pipes and TCP, while setting service accounts and specifying the SQL data directory.

The next part then, is to actually build this as a command line and execute it in the cloud environment. How do we do this? Simples: we use System.Diagnostics to create a new Process()object and pass in a ProcessStartInfoobject as a parameter:

var taskInfo=new ProcessStartInfo
{
FileName=file,
Arguments=args,
Verb="runas",
UseShellExecute=false,
RedirectStandardOutput=true,
RedirectStandardError=true,
CreateNoWindow=false
};
//Start the process
_process=new Process(){StartInfo=taskInfo,EnableRaisingEvents=true};

For good measure, we’ll also redirect the standard and error output streams from the process so that we can capture those out to our log files:

//Log output
DataReceivedEventHandler outputHandler=(s,e)=>Trace.TraceInformation(e.Data);
DataReceivedEventHandler errorHandler=(s,e)=>Trace.TraceInformation(e.Data);

//Attach handlers
_process.ErrorDataReceived+=errorHandler;
_process.OutputDataReceived+=outputHandler;

Then, we’ll execute our task and ask the role to wait for it to complete before continuing with startup:

//Start process
_process.Start();
_process.BeginErrorReadLine();
_process.BeginOutputReadLine();

// Wait for the task to complete before continuing...
_process.WaitForExit();

Stick all of that into a method that you can re-use, and don’t forget to add parameters called fileand args(strings) that contain the path to the SQL Server Express installation executable and the command line arguments you want to pass in.

How to build your command line argument

If you’re wondering why I didn’t hardcode my command line options, it’s because up in Azure, the standard builds for web and worker roles don’t come preloaded with any administrative accounts – you have to specify those during design time. I actually ‘borrow’ the username of the Remote Desktop user (which is provisioned as an administrator for you when you ask to enable Remote Desktop).

I actually end-up with this quick-and-dirty snippet:

string file=Path.Combine(UnpackPath,"SQLEXPRWT_x64_ENU.exe");
string args=string.Format("/Q/ACTION=Install/FEATURES=SQLEngine,TOOLS/INSTANCENAME={2}/HIDECONSOLE/NPENABLED=1/TCPENABLED=1/SQLSVCACCOUNT=\".\\{0}\"/SQLSVCPASSWORD=\"{1}\"/SQLSYSADMINACCOUNTS=\".\\{0}\"/IACCEPTSQLSERVERLICENSETERMS/INSTALLSQLDATADIR=\"{3}\"", username,password,instanceName,dataDir);

So, ultimately, you’ll then want to wrap all of this up in to your role’s OnStart() method. Include a check to see whether SQL Express is already installed, too.

And, if you’re stuck trying to debug what’s going on with your otherwise silent installation, SQL Server Setup Logs are your friend. You’ll find them by connecting to your role via Remote Desktop and opening the following path:

%programfiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\Log\

Enjoy!

I didn’t quite get around to blogging as much as I’d have liked during 2011, but 2012 is a new year and I’ll have a lot more things to blog about, including my new job and the discoveries we make. So, go on – subscribe; you know you want to!

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 22,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 8 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Slides everywhere, but not a coherent flow in sight!

Way back on 11th June 2011, I was lucky enough to be invited to present my session – “Getting Started in .NET” – at the DDD Southwest 3 conference. I remember thinking, “gosh, I’d really love to speak at one of these events but I missed the deadline for submitting sessions”. So, I pinged an email over to Guy Smith-Ferrier and asked him if they needed any help, thinking maybe they’d want room monitors or other volunteers to ferry folks around. As it turned-out, Guy actually still had two slots to be filled on the ‘Getting Started’ track. And this is how my presentation was born…

Nervous? Me?

It was to be the first training session I’d ever given on a topic such as this, so I was both very excited and a little nervous (geeks can be so nit-picky!).

Fortunately though, the bunch of folks that attended my session (some 30-odd I think) were all very friendly and eager to listen – I couldn’t have asked for a better group!

In the top 3? No way!

In fact, I think they were so nice they voted me in to the Top 3 “Speakers by Knowledge of Subject” and “Speakers by Presentation Skills” – accolades that I will soon be transferring onto a tattoo on my forehead, such is the level of my humility (and astonishment!) at appearing here with these two other fantastic speakers. Maybe it had something to do with the fact I was lobbing ‘Telerik Ninjas’ – stress toys – at anyone who asked a question (as a reward, folks – not as punishment)…

By Knowledge of Subject

1. Steve Sanderson and Getting Started in ASP.NET MVC - 8.88 out of 10
2. Richard Campbell and Why Web Performance Matters - 8.85 out of 10
3. Richard Parker (that’s me!) and Getting Started in The .NET Framework - 8.56 out of 10

If you’ve never been to a DDD event, then stop whatever it is you’re doing right now (well, after you’ve finished reading this post, of course) and go figure out when the next one is. They’re all over the place now – even Australia! It won’t cost you a penny to go as the events are all supported by sponsorship, so you’ve really got no excuse to go. The speakers are excellent (yes, even at the events I don’t speak at) and you’ll get a chance to mingle with some very friendly and amazing folks.

I’ve attended these events in the past as a delegate and have always had an absolutely brilliant time. And, this time around I was fortunate enough to be able to attend as a speaker; an experience I enjoyed thoroughly and would love to repeat again (if they, and you, Dear Reader) will have me again …

The .NET community, put simply, rocks. You guys are awesome!

#1 Specifying multiple file formats

Let’s take a sample player:

<video width="320" height="240" controls="controls">
<source src="video.ogg" type="video/ogg" />
Sorry, your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

This works great, but only if the client can play Ogg video. If you have multiple formats of the same media, you can offer them up to the HTML5 video player as well and it will pick the first one which the client can play. It’s a little bit of magic, really:

<video width="320" height="240" controls="controls">
<source src="video.ogg" type="video/ogg" media="screen" />
<source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4" media="screen" />
<source src="video.webm" type="video/webm" media="screen" />
Sorry, your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

Pretty neat, don’t you think? Now, rather than giving up when the .ogg video cannot be played, the player will check to see if .mp4 or .webm videos can first be played, too.

#2 Specifying differently encoded media for different devices

So we’ve got our multiple-format player. But can we extend this further so that we can choose different video based on the capabilities of the particular client making the request? The answer is Yes.

Let’s assume we have ‘movie-hi.ogg’ and ‘movie-lo.ogg’ – both are essentially the same video but one is optimised for small screen and the other is optimised for a full HD experience. We can have the HTML5 video player figure out which one to load using source media attributes:

<video width="320" height="240" controls="controls">
<source src="movie-lo.ogg" type="video/ogg" media="screen and (min-width:320px)" />
<source src="movie-hi.ogg" type="video/mp4" media="screen and (min-width:720px)" />
Sorry, your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

Let’s take a closer look at the media attribute. The screen keyword tells the HTMl5 video player we’re targeting computer screens, rather than say braille which would target braille feedback devices.  Next, we’ve got the boolean operator and which connects the statement on the left with the statement on the right, so that if both conditions are true the statement is satisfied and that will be the source element we use (you could replace and with not or a comma – which signifies the ‘or’ operator). Finally, we have the min-width selector, which could just as easily be max-width or min-height, for example. [There's a big list of all the currently supported filter values over at w3schools).

#3 Making pages with video load faster

The HTMl5 video tag will attempt to pre-load the contents of the video element on page load by default. You can change this behaviour so that is loaded on-demand, by adding the preload attribute with the value none to the video element:

<video width="320" height="240" controls="controls" preload="none">
<source src="movie-lo.ogg" type="video/ogg" media="screen and (min-width:320px)" />
Sorry, your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

#4 Using an image as a placeholder for video while it is loading

Using a single frame from somewhere within the video can be a nice way to give a user a hint of what the video contains. It’s also a great way to fill the video container with something relevant while the video is still loading in the background. Fortunately, this is nice and easy to do. Just add the poster attribute to the video element:

<video width="320" height="240" controls="controls" poster="image.jpg">
<source src="movie-lo.ogg" type="video/ogg" media="screen and (min-width:320px)" />
Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

#5 Execute custom javascript code triggered by video player events

As a first-class citizen in HTML5, the video element has a full-featured javascript event model that you can hook into in order to execute your own custom code. Here are a selection of my favourites:

• oncanplay – fires whenever the media can start to play
• onended – fires when the media has reached the end
• onprogress – fires whenever the browser requests media from the server

In a move which is hopefully slightly more interesting than my outrageously poor opening line, I figured it would be fun to expand out and showcase how I actually use some of this technology in my day job and my home life because I enjoy reading about the interesting things others have done, so perhaps others out there will appreciate this!

Highlights

Before I can kick-off any mini series style articles, let’s set the foundations:

• Gigabit Ethernet cabled throughout
• Netgear GS605 Gigabit Switch
• Connectix Home Network Cabinet
• Connectix Home Network Patch Panel (8 RJ45 + 4 telecoms)
• HP ProLiant N36L MicroServer (4TB storage)

Infrastructure

Our apartment is cabled using gigabit ethernet, with at least two outlets in each bedroom plus four in my home office, and four in the living room behind the TV. This all terminates back to a Conectix Home Network Patch Panel which provides 8 termination points for each of the sockets, plus 4 telecoms connections which can be used to route the BT line to any of the RJ45 outlets scattered around. The network sockets all terminate back to a Netgear GS605 Unmanaged Gigabit Ethernet Switch, which sits inside my Connectix Home Network Cabinet.

I really like having the flexibility to swap-out any active hardware or install new stuff without any hassle, plus having the freedom to route connectivity about as I need it is pretty neat.

Network Cabinet Setup

Energy Metering

Within the network cabinet is a Current Cost Envi and Current Cost Bridge, although I have to say that I am not overly impressed with the bridge’s capabilities since it connects only to the my.currentcost.com web site, which although powered by Pachube, locks all your data away.

In the coming months, I will hopefully be announcing my revised ‘Arduinometer’ project, which is now based on the new Netduino Plus. This open-source platform will be capable of reading simultaneously from different energy meters, including gas, electricity and water.

Connectivity

Right now, I’m using BT as my broadband provider. Until their Infinity service is available in my area (September 2011 is the ETA – yikes!), I’m using their Total Broadband package. As you can see, I get relatively decent connectivity, but I’d obviously like to improve on that and I have high hopes for the BT Infinity Service (when it becomes available):

What matters most to me is reliability: as I work from home, I need a robust connection that’s there when I need it.

Servers & Storage

At the heart of my home network is a new HP ProLiant MicroServer N36L with 4TB of storage capacity. It runs the newest Windows Home Server 2011 operating system. All my client PCs (including my main development station) are backed-up daily by the server. That makes for a total of 4 PCs and 1 laptop being regularly backed up by the server, quietly and transparently.

As an added bonus, after a clean build of my development station, I took a full backup of it and that should allow me to do a complete rebuild simply by restoring the backup (which is actually an image of my machine) to go back to my ‘ideal state’ at any point in time.

Development rig

My main development machine is an Intel Core i7 870 @ 2.93GHz. It has 8GB of Corsair DDR3 RAM and runs Windows 7 Ultimate. I’ve fitted out the very lovely  Antec P90 case with a Corsair sealed liquid-cooling unit for keeping the processor nice and cool. Having a nice big radiator and 12cm fan means the RPMs can be kept low and that in turn reduces noise from the case.

Storage wise, I’m running a 120GB OCZ Colossus SSD as my primary drive with a 600GB Western Digital Green Caviar for storing most of the data. I also have a secondary 60GB Corsair SSD which has holds code I’m working on with Visual Studio 2010 (which, by the way, is installed on my primary SSD).

Driven by the NVidia GeForce GTX 275 primary graphics card are two 24″ LCD monitors, but I have aspirations to update those this year to a couple of IIyama 27″ panels. I also have a cheaper standard graphics card driving a 3rd 21″ CTX LCD monitor on which Twitter sits (yes, it is an addiction – live with it).

Back in January this year, I wrote a neat little utility library for sending template emails. Tonight, it caught the attention of fellow developer Benjamin Howarth, famous for (among other things) his Umbraco mastery.

After a quick discussion, Ben decided to join me in maintaining the library and christened his membership in the project by adding a new ‘load from URL’ feature. And, a short while later, a package was available on Nuget. Not bad for around an hour’s work I thought!

To download and install the package easily via Nuget, bring up the Package Manager window within Visual Studio and type:

I created the initial version of the library with simplicity in mind: it’s not fancy, or complex. It was designed purely to provide a solution to developers who have to send templated emails in their projects.

Perhaps my favourite ‘feature’ of this library though isn’t really a feature at all, so much as it is actually a by-product of the way it has been designed: because it picks up template files from disk (or from a remote URL), you can easily allow your end-users to modify their own templates using your favourite rich-text editor. Pretty neat.

Please feed back!

I think it would be cool if we could get a little community of users together who could help drive the project forward with further suggestions. Head on over to the project hub at Codeplex to get involved, or download the latest version. And, if you decide to use the library, please, please, please – do rate it on Codeplex and/or drop me a note to let me know how you’re using it. It’s not a requirement, of course, but since we do this stuff for free in our spare time, we love to read feedback.

Thanks!

Navibot's self-charging dock

“But we need one, darling!”

Naturally, the first thing you have to do after any impulse purchase is convince other people that you had a good reason for doing so, and that what you’ve bought will actually be suitable. At least, someone with my reputation for buying just about anything that has a plug on it has to anyway!

Hoovering isn’t a particularly fun chore, and with two cats and hardwood flooring everywhere, this is a task we have to repeat fairly often. The Samsung Navibot SR8855 comes with an on-board scheduling feature which means you can program it to wake up daily and go to work. Potentially, this could save us 20 minutes per day and over a full week, that’s over two hours - a full five days a year!

So, does it work?

Having just spent the morning assembling IKEA flat-pack furniture, the floors were covered with sawdust and other general packaging mess. Plus, a few days’ worth of cat fluff. It was time to put the Navibot to work.

After charging for 90 minutes (the unit is supplied at an almost empty charge), you simply press the “auto” button on the Navibot and it undocks itself and starts mapping your room. I chose the Navibot, rather than it’s main competitor the ‘Roomba’ from iRobot, because it appears to follow a much more logical pattern when cleaning your rooms than the Roomba does, which seems to do most of its navigation by bumping into things.

The Navibot has an upward-facing cameara which continuously takes pictures of your ceiling to determine the layout of your room, in connection with some distance ranging and kinetic sensors mounted on the first 180 degrees of the unit.

In just a minute or two it appeared to have figured out exactly where it was, and started linearly moving backward and forward around the room picking up cat fluff and sawdust neatly over every section it covered.

Carpets

As I mentioned above, we don’t have carpet, and I imagine the Navibot wouldn’t perform very well at all on those. Being very quiet, it clearly doesn’t have a lot of power and relies mainly on the two counter-rotating triple-brush ‘arms’ at the front of the unit to guide surface dust and fluff into the main brushes at the rear of the unit, rather than using vast amounts of suction.

In our front room, however, there is a fairly thick rug. It seems to navigate over it just fine initially, but it is a bit too thick for the unit to comfortably turn and it makes all manner of struggling sounds as it tries to desperately back away to firmer ground.

My verdict would be to avoid this if you have a carpeted house as it’ll only really pick up loose surface fluff and small debris. If you have hard flooring though, this thing is awesome!

Results

It cleaned our entire apartment, minus bathrooms, in approximately 20 minutes. The dust container was pretty full of all the usual things, indicating that it’d done quite a good job. In ‘auto’ mode, Navibot is apparently ‘afraid’ of walls, so it leaves about a 5cm margin around each wall where it doesn’t clean very effectively, relying instead on the exterior brushes to try to reach corner dust. It does, however, have an ‘edge’ mode, which you can run a few times per week if you want.

I suspect with a few uses it will get slightly more efficient at navigation, particularly since I couldn’t help myself from tinkering with its ‘manual mode’ occasionally, which lets you take control using the remote.

Once in manual mode, however, the unit stops remembering the route back to the charging dock, so you have to manually steer it back (if you ask it to return to dock on its own, it will fail miserably). On full auto though, it navigates back just fine.

Overall, I am pleased to say that this is one household gadget I’ve purchased that is actually pretty good at its job. Plus, my better half is also happy with the purchase, too – so it’s win/win. Having been programmed to wake up every morning at 6am and go to work, by the end of the week we should still have a cat-fluff and dust free floor area throughout our apartment. And neither of us will have lifted a finger.

~

No doubt I’ll be tweeting updates on the #navibot so follow me for the latest!

This test flight was the first step in our move towards building a fully automated UAV platform using a Netduino. This flight, however, is 100% manual, with no auto-pilot assistance. The objective is to get to grips with manual flight as we need to be able to launch and land the aircraft and take over in the event of an autopilot failure.

Now, bearing in mind that neither of us have any flight experience whatsoever, below is a video clip of some of the flights during the day. There are, as you might expect, several crashes and some very unsettling flight patterns, but don’t worry, as neither I nor anybody else involved have any aspirations to become a commercial pilot.

Lessons learned

As the pilot, I gleaned some useful insight into the flight characteristics of the platform. Here are my initial thoughts:

• The stock rudder is way too small to have any authority, particularly with the upgraded brushless motor. It has a control surface of just 2.5cm x 10cm (approx.). In light wind, it was pretty much uncontrollable and at speed, no chance. We later modified the rudder to 6cm x 15cm and are looking forward to testing that out next weekend.
• After the first crash, the tail completely detached from the body. It was way too brittle and broke in the only place we hadn’t reinforced with glass tape. After fixing, we ended up with a plane that was, well, a bit ‘warped’. That’s fine for our trainer, but in a future version before we integrate the UAV electronics we’ll probably need to embed some carbon-fibre rods throughout the body to improve the rigidity.
• Ailerons would make the model much more responsive, so we’ve added those too (I’ll probably blog about the modifications in a separate post) and these will be tested next weekend.
• We should have taken time to balance the centre of gravity properly. This might account for some of the more ‘wild’ elevator action seen in some of the clips.
• Even when flying into a headwind, very little motor input is required in order to maintain stable flight. I think I only used 100% throttle maybe once, just to see how it reacted.

This video will show you that it can be done in 90 seconds or less, without writing a single line of code!

In the screen cast, I’ll show you how to create a new Azure project in Visual Studio 2010, add a web role to the project, create a deployment package, upload it to the cloud, and then view it running in the cloud.

Before you begin though, head over to the Windows Azure site, and make sure you’ve activated a Windows Azure subscription. If you’re an MSDN or BizSpark subscriber, you get a free basic subscription anyway which is great for this demo. If you’re not, don’t worry, because until June 30th, Microsoft are giving you a free trial, too. Just get started at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/free-trial/.

It’s seriously easy to do, so what are you waiting for – get going!

EDIT 30/03/2011: In this video, I’ve shortened the “deployment” sequence to fit within the timeframe, but it should be noted it is normal for this part of the process to take anywhere between 15-30 minutes (while the Azure platform does what it does to spin up the resources it needs to run your solution). Thanks to all the watchers who pointed out that this fact was probably worth mentioning!

As always, feedback is appreciated and welcome.