While I was out in Redmond last month I attended a MVP pre-PDC event the day before PDC. It was a really great event where we got to interact with some of the product team folks (thanks to Susan, Emily and the other MVP program folks for putting it on!) . Before the event Brian Prince and I sat down and gave an interview which has now been released on the MVP blog (and YouTube).

Today I received a contact on my blog from someone asking some good resources to start learning Azure. I thought the answer I sent might be useful to others, so I’m posting it here. Hope it helps. I picked up Windows Azure by just jumping into anything I could find to help me get the basics, then explored from there. There is a book coming out this month “Azure in Action” that I would highly recommend.

A month or so ago I wrote a simple utility to help Azure Developers make sure they don’t accidentally get a larger bill than they expect. The purpose of the GreyBox application is to alert you that you have deployments in your Azure account that you are being charged for. This might sound like it’s backwards in that most people might be looking for something telling them that their applications aren’t running or have gone down.