On Saturday, February 8th, 2014, there will be a Windows DevUnleashed hackathon event at the Columbus Microsoft office. If you have an interest in writing a Windows 8 or Windows Phone application come out and get started. The morning will cover basics of developing for the Windows store ecosystem, how to build games using Unity & MonoGame, as well as a quick introduction to how Windows Azure can help. The rest of the afternoon is going to be heads down coding on your app!

On January 16th, 2014 it was announced that Windows Azure met PCI DSS Level 1 compliance. You can check out ScottGu’s blog post about the announcement, or the Windows Azure Trust Center, but what does this actually mean? Does it mean you can go host a payment gateway on Windows Azure, or store open credit card data there? PCI compliance is a standard used for being able to handle card holder data for things like credit cards and debit cards.

Every year I attend CodeMash I have a list of technologies to watch, utilities to try out and topics to research. I don’t always get around to them all as there just never seems to be enough time. Here is my list for this year: A Managed code library for AR Drone exists, but seems to be older. Need to find if there is anything newer. Not that I have time to do anything with it.