The Microsoft Patterns and Practices group has release a new guidance package on Cloud Design Patterns. The public announcement can be found on Masashi’s blog. I had the opportunity to help out with this project as a Technical Reviewer of the material. It was a great opportunity and I thank Masashi and the team for it. The material covers 24 different design patterns, along with 8 guidance topics and 10 different code samples.

Thanks to all those that came out to the Columbus Dev Unleashed hackathon for Windows Phone and Windows Store apps. I showed off using BLOB Storage, Mobile Services and Notification Hubs in my segment of the day. If you have an interest in any of these, this is the promised list of links that point to articles, Microsoft documentation and tutorials for each of these features of Windows Azure. Introduction to BLOB Storage: http://bit.

I’ve been giving technical presentations ever since Mike Levy conned me into one back in the early 2000. I got into speaking more heavily around 2005. I don’t recall when now, but things really kicked off when I did a “tour” of Michigan hitting user groups in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids and Flint. Since then I’ve been lucky enough to speak at user groups and conferences all over the heartland of the US, and even conferences overseas.