James Conard

On April 12th – 14th Microsoft will hold the annual Mix conference in Las Vegas.  The Mix conference is just that – a mix of topics ranging from design to development and from HTML5 to the cloud, with a few Phone and MVC sessions thrown in.

Earlier this week we published the first set of sessions focused on the Windows Azure Platform that we’re planning for the Mix11.  Some of the specific sessions include:

Build Fast Web Applications with Windows Azure AppFabric Caching

Speed up Web Applications using the new Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service. This session will cover concepts, scenarios, and features of the Caching service through a great many samples and demonstrations. We’ll talk through different approaches to optimize new and existing applications through new ASP.NET session state and page output providers that leverage the Caching service, as well as ways to directly use the cache APIs to store and retrieve data. After attending this talk, developers will be able to make their Windows Azure applications match increasing demand with increasing throughput by using the skills they’ll learn in this session.

Speakers:  Karandeep Anand and Wade Wegner

Building Windows Phone 7 Applications with the Windows Azure Platform

Learn how to build Windows Phone 7 applications that are backed by scalable cloud components hosted in Windows Azure. This demo-focused session will cover the end-to-end experience and address how to tackle issues such as authentication, storage, notification, and data synchronization using the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.

Speaker: Wade Wegner

Identity Unraveled with the Access Control Service

Come learn how to use the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service as a key building block for your web applications. See how your applications can seamlessly work with LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and corporate identities – all from a single codebase. Watch the barriers to entry disappear, and behold the emergence of a simple way to deal with identity in your applications. It’s guaranteed to be a show you won’t want to miss.

Speaker:  Justin Smith

Node.js, Ruby, and Python in Windows Azure: A Look at What’s Possible

Most people using Windows Azure are using ASP.NET and PHP, but Windows Azure is much more general than that. Steve Marx will show how he built a few web apps (including his blog) that run on Windows Azure and don’t use .NET or PHP. Server-side JavaScript, Ruby, and Python will be the most prominent examples.

Speaker:  Steve Marx

Powering Data On the Web and Beyond with SQL Azure

This session will be jam-packed with demos and guidance on lighting up web experiences using SQL Azure, Microsoft’s suite of cloud database services. Using Visual Studio we’ll go through the steps to quickly architect cloud data-driven web user experiences in ASP.NET MVC3 that also scale for high volumes of users and data. Next, we’ll demonstrate how SQL Azure quickly and powerfully extends user experiences farther – spanning mobile devices, AJAX experiences with jQuery, and synchronized data with on-premises applications.

Speaker:  David Robinson

You can find the complete list of Mix11 sessions here:  http://live.visitmix.com/mix11.

Finally, if you haven’t registered for Mix yet, go to http://live.visitmix.com and register before it’s too late.