Project Riviera is a comprehensive code sample to demonstrate how to develop multi-tenant highly-scalable line-of-business application on Windows Azure Platform, built by a cloud ISV partner, Cumulux.

Cumulux is a Microsoft partner who’s built their business around  delivering solutions that leverage cloud computing and are keenly interested in making Azure their primary platform for delivering custom solutions for customers.

The reference application been published to the MSDN code gallery at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/riviera.  You can also see a brief video, architectural slides and related material here (http://cumulux.com/riviera.html)

The main tenants of Azure demonstrated by Riviera Include:

• Federated Security (using custom STS, .NET Access Control Service and Windows Live ID)
• Multi Tenancy (On demand provisioning, Tenant Management, extensible metadata)
• Extensibility  (using Silverlight 3, Workflow)
• Scalability (using Azure Queues , Async patterns)
• Flexible SLAs (using SQL Azure / Azure storage partitioning)

Head over to the MSDN Code Gallery and check this solution out.  It’s a great showcase of what can be done on the Windows Azure Platform.

Sanjay and our ISV Team are at it again and is putting on another great incubation event.  This time it’s around Windows 7!

If you’ve enjoyed the Dynamics CRM Incubation weeks Sanjay and our ISV Team have put on (in Reston and Boston), you’re certainly in for a treat!

For those of you out in the blogsphere who're local to the Reston, VA area and has a startup business, or is contemplating building competencies around the delivery of solutions on our latest and greatest Windows release, I welcome you to attend the inaugural Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Week for Windows 7, to be held in at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston, VA the week of August 24th, 2009.  The event will cover the following:

• Learning and building next generation applications utilizing new and unique Windows 7 capabilities with help from onsite advisors and off-shore development teams
• Getting entrepreneur coaching from guest speakers and a panel of industry experts
• Generating marketing buzz for your brand
• Creating an opportunity to be highlighted at the upcoming Windows 7 launch

My colleagues, Sanjay Jain and Ashish Jaiman, and the ISV Evangelism Team is hard at work putting this outstanding event together.  To get more details about this event, head on over to Sanjay's Blog or e-mail him or Ashish directly to nominate your team.

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