The Azure Services Training Kit

The first Azure Services Training Kit was released during the week of PDC and it contained all of the PDC hands-on labs. Since then, the Azure Services team has been creating new content covering new features in the platform.

The Azure Services Training Kit April update now includes the following content covering Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services:

1. 11 hands-on labs – including new hands-on labs for PHP and Native Code on Windows Azure.
2. 18 demo scripts – These demo scripts are designed to provide detailed walkthroughs of key features so that someone can easily give a demo of a service
3. 9 presentations – the presentations used for our 3 day training workshops including speaker notes.

The training kit is available as an installable package on the Microsoft Download Center.

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Book Review :97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know by Richard Monson-Haefel, is a very nice book for aspiring architects. It covers the real time problems architects face while architecting any solution. You can get this book from Amazon .
Some of the unedited text of the book is also available in following site
http://97-things.near-time.net/wiki/97-things-every-software-architect-should-know-the-book

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Code Contract in Visual studio 2010

Microsoft has included the Code Contract feature in Visual Studio 2010 with .NET Framework 4.0 which was earlier published by Microsoft Research team.Code Contract is a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. The contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation. Code Contracts bring the advantages of design-by-contract programming to all .NET programming languages.

The VS.NET 2010 CTP includes a CodeContracts class in the System.Diagnostics.Contracts namespace that allows you to write contracts in your code. All contracts are static methods that return void. They take a Boolean expression which encodes the condition that must be true. They also have an overload that takes a string parameter as a message for when the contract is false. Contracts are declarative and come at the beginning of your method. You can think of them as part of the signature.

To know more details visit the Microsoft Research site

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/contracts/

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Microsoft Social Desktop

In the computer world there is clear difference between WEB platform and PC. It will be really good if we will have a technology which will allow every document in the PC to have the ability to have a backing social URL for sharing without having to upload or copy or move it from its natural location.

Microsoft Research team came up with a new technology named “Social Desktop” which will blends the Web and PC by embedding Web oriented sharing inside your desktop.
To know more about social desktop visit Microsoft research website
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/socialdesktop/

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