Scott Guthrie, David Campbell and Mark Russinovich at the Cricket

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[I originally posted this as an editorial for the MSDN Flash]

Happy New Year!

As some of you may have spotted, I'm a certified cricket tragic. In fact, I'm writing this from the top deck of the M A Noble stand, waiting for play to start on day 2 of the Sydney test. I've had plenty of time to kill since I started queuing at 4am both today and yesterday and apart from the good-natured and very knowledgeable banter with my fellow tragics, I've been whiling away the hours watching recordings from the Learn Windows Azure event that was held in Redmond and online on December 13 last year.

The event features some of the top technical brains at Microsoft including Scott Guthrie, David Campbell and Mark Russinovich.

We made some interesting announcements at the event including:

  • Support for Node.js, as well as a number of other Openness initiatives for Azure;
  • A new 90-day trial subscription model that guarantees you won't get charged for the trial
  • A tripling of the maximum database size in SQL Azure to 150GB, along with built-in support for federation of SQL Azure databases

There are some great presentations that were recorded at the event itself, as well as a bunch of supporting interviews and webcasts that area available from the event landing page. My favourites so far are:

I've not yet watched, but am very much looking forward to:

Of course, these sessions are all available to watch streamed, but I suggest you do yourself a favour and download them so you can watch them in half the time.