The April Update of the Azure Services Training Kit has released and is ready for download. Below is a brief overview (taken from the download site) of what's included in the latest release.

Overview
The Azure Services Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Azure Services Platform. The April release includes the following updates:

• New Presentation for SQL Data Services
• 2 additional hands-on labs for WIndows Azure PHP and Native Code support

This technical content covers services including: Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services.

The final March 2009 CTP for the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for SharePoint (v1.3) has now been recently released.  Head on over to Paul Andrew's Blog (Paul is a Technical Product Manager on the SharePoint Team) for a rundown of the new capabilities available in this CTP.  Also with this release, we released a set of ten fresh new themes for SharePoint built as VSeWSS projects. Here’s a thumbnail of the new designs available to VSeWSS SharePoint Developers now.

Hi Software and Microsoft recently released version 2.0 of the Accessibility Toolkit for SharePoint. The intent of this solution is to provide a accessible development framework for Office SharePoint Server environments.

Key features of AKS v2.0 include:

• Smart Control adapters which greatly reduce the amount of custom configuration previously required for AKS control adapters.
• The Web Part Zone Control Adapter, a special Smart Adapter that modifies the output of SharePoint so that it does not use tables for layout of the Web parts.
• HiSoftware’s Compliant Code Engine (HCCE) to assist organizations in creating code that is compliant to standards-based HTML or XHTML.
• Additional requirements under Canadian Common Look and Feel 2.0 (CLF 2.0) guidelines.
• Examples of remediation to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
• French language version of AKS components.

The toolkit is freely available through the Microsoft Public License through CodePlex and can be downloaded at https://aks.hisoftware.com.

Due to the popularity of the inaugural Dynamics CRM Incubation Week event , Sanjay and his team are at it again with the 2nd installment of this great event.

For those of you out in the blogsphere who are local to the Boston, MA area and has a startup business, or is contemplating building a new business around the delivery of business solutions, a co-worker of mine, Sanjay Jain, recently made an announcement of a great event, called the Dynamics CRM Incubation Week, that's being held at the Microsoft Technology Center in Boston, MA from 4/20/2009 to 4/24/2009.  The event will cover the following:

• Learning how to build next generation business solutions on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform
• Getting entrepreneurs coaching from an industry panel of experts (to include VC and Angel Investors, Academic, Marketing)
• Generating marketing "buzz" and recognition for various Awards

This event is interesting in that its geared at empowering entrepreneurs to build successful businesses leveraging Microsoft as a key partner.

To get more details about this event, head on over to Sanjay's Blog or e-mail him directly to nominate your team.

To learn more about how Microsoft can help startups, head over to the Microsoft BizSpark website.

Microsoft has recently published the first 9 or 40 Azure Services Platform “How Do I” (HDIs) videos for public consumption.  The intent of the HDI videos are to provide additional training and resources around building cloud-aware applications on the Windows Azure Services Platform.  These HDI videos are freely downloadable and contains a ton of useful information and guidance.  Over time, more HDI videos will be published that addresses many aspects of developing solutions on top of Windows Azure.  Included in the first round of videos are the following:

	Get Started Developing on Windows Azure?	If you’re a developer and you’re new to Windows Azure, start here! You’ll see what you need to download and install, and how to create a simple “Hello World” Windows Azure application.
	Deploy a Windows Azure Application?	You’ll see what it takes to move your application into the cloud – you’ll see how to request and register a token, how to upload your Windows Azure application and how to move it between staging and production in the cloud.
	Store Blobs in Windows Azure Storage?	Learn how to leverage Windows Azure storage to store data as blobs. You’ll learn about blob storage, containers and the API that makes it easy to manage everything from managed code.
	Leverage Queries in Windows Azure?	Learn how to use queues to facilitate communication between Web and Worker roles in Windows Azure.
	Debugging Tips for Windows Azure Applications?	The Windows Azure SDK includes a development fabric that provides a "cloud on your desktop." In this screencast, learn how to debug your Windows Azure applications in this environment.
	Get Started with .NET Services?	.NET Services are a set of highly scalable building blocks for programming in the cloud. In this brief screencast, you'll learn about the registration process, the SDK and the built-in samples - everything you need to know in order to get started.
	Harness the Microsoft .NET Service Bus?	The .NET Service Bus makes it easy to access your Web services no matter where they are. In this brief screencast, you'll see how to take a basic Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service and expose it to the Internet with the .NET Service Bus.
	Get Started with the Live Framework?	If you are looking to get started developing with the Live Framework, this is the place to start! In this screencast you'll learn how to get a Live Services token and what you need to download in order to start writing Live Framework applications.
	Use the Microsoft Live Framework Resource Browser?	The Live Framework Resource Model is a simple, straightforward information model based on entities, collections and relationships. In this brief screencast you'll learn how to navigate the relationships between entities by using the Live Framework Resource Browser, which is a tool that ships with the Live Framework SDK.
	Stay tuned!

To keep abreast of new HDI videos, head over to the overall HDI landing page regularly and sign up for the RSS feeds. 

The February Update of the Azure Services Training Kit has released and is ready for download. Below is a brief overview (taken from the download site) of what's included in the latest release.

Overview
The Azure Services Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Azure Services Platform. The February release includes the following updates:

• 19 demo scripts that walkthrough several of the services
• 10 presentations covering the entire Azure Services Platform
• 3 additional hands-on labs for Live Services

This technical content covers services including: Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services.

The SharePoint Conference is a great event to attend.  This year's conference will be especially good as we begin to unveil a lot of great information around the next version of SharePoint (codenamed SharePoint "14").  You don't want to miss this one.  Here's an excerpt (below) from an e-mail that's circulating to the SharePoint community.

Thanks to all of those who attended my MSDN webcast entitled "Discover the Windows Azure Services Platform" that I delivered on January 28th (click here to see a reply of the webcast).  I had a pretty lively audience who asked some great questions!

There was one question in particular that was asked by an attendee around and issue he was experiencing with .NET Services that I promised to get an answer to by pinging some folks from the .NET Services Product Team.  Well, I have his answer, and I promised my audience that I'd post it on my blog.  The question that was asked was the following:

"I understand at this time,with the Service Bus the registration of my Service in the Service Registry times out and is deleted after a few minutes. When will this change and Service registrations remain active in the Registry?"

Fortunately, I was able to get an answer from Clemens Vasters, who works as a Senior Technical Lead on the .NET Services Team:

"One of the issues here is that we don’t want to turn the registry into an easily approachable and sticky spam magnet (that the former public UDDI registries unfortunately degenerated into) while the service is effectively free-for-all. We are currently allowing for 15 minutes (which is obviously too short) and will extend the TTL for those entries upwards to 1-2 days in the next CTP. In the released product we will allow for significantly longer TTLs for production accounts."

So there you have it.  Straight from the "horses mouth"!  Clemens is a great guy and I sincerely appreciated him chiming in and answering this great question.

Again, thanks to all who attended the webcast!

Dot Net Solutions recently released a new version of its Wikipedia Explorer application built on top of Windows Azure. The project is about visualizing relationships between documents within Wikipedia and features a cool user interface built on Windows Presentation Foundation.

To learn more about this great sample application, head over to Dot Net Solutions' website.  You can actually download and run the application (via ClickOnce) here. 

The Azure Issue Tracker application is a sample application that allows users to capture and track various types of issues. This sample demonstrates a real-world SaaS architecture and scenario using the Azure Services Platform to perform federation and multi-tenancy. Technologies used include the Access Control service (part of .NET Services) as well as SQL Data Services (part of SQL Services).

This sample is being released in two versions: Standard and Enterprise. The Standard version allows ad-hoc users to use LiveID federation with the .NET Access Control Service and authorize other LiveID users. The Enterprise version of IssueTracker wile use the same claims-based authorization capabilities as the standard version, but allow greater control by customers over claims and authorization decisions.

To learn more about this great sample application and download the source code, head over to the Azure Issue Tracker CodePlex project website.