Last week I flew out to Houston, Texas to attend this year’s TechEd North America conference. TechEd is the big Microsoft conference for IT Professionals and Enterprise Developers. The big difference between this conference and the Build conference we just had is the technology focus. While TechEd really does have an Enterprise focus, Build is centered around development (whether it’s Enterprise or Commercial or what have you). At this year’s conference I delivered two sessions.
Java on Azure
This session explained the different ways you can host or run Java on Azure. Together with Brian Benz, we went over the following topics:
- Running Java on VMs (Oracle, Linux, Windows Server)
- Running Java on Platform-as-a-Service (Cloud Services and Web Sites)
- Accessing Azure Software-as-a-Service features with Java (tons of stuff)
This session wasn’t super coding deep but was really mostly an overview. There isn’t a ton of focus on Java at TechEd (shocking I know) so instead of trying to go deep into one specific area, we tried to give everyone a general idea of their options for Azure and Java. You can check out the video for the session here:
High-Volume, Low Latency Mobile Push Notifications
The second session I did covered how to use Azure Notification Hubs to do push notifications down to Mobile apps. This session included some really cool topics like:
- Registering with Hubs and pushing notifications
- Registering with Tags and pushing to specific tags
- Tag expressions
- Geo-based push
- Template based registration
- Server vs Client registration
I really enjoyed this session because I was able to demonstrate Notification Hubs working with iOS, Android, and Windows Store apps all at once! There was a lot of code used and walked through as part of this session so I posted it all, along with a brief walkthrough on setting it up, on GitHub. You can check out the video for this session here:
If you have any questions or feedback about either of the sessions, please let me know.
