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EXT18 – Developing iPhone and iPad Apps that Leverage Windows Azure

You are building apps for the iPhone/iPad, yet you remain curious about what the cloud can offer. Is it possible to deploy scalable, mobile Web applications on Windows Azure? How about storing data in the cloud? Is it possible to use the cloud for push notifications to the device? In this session you’ll learn how to integrate iOS applications into an existing Windows Azure infrastructure, and what types of applications other organizations are building. You’ll walk away confident in knowing how to extend your existing applications to take advantage of features on the device together with services in the cloud.

Lagoon F on Thu, Apr 14 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

I’m hoping it’s going to be a fun session, and we’ll be investigating the many different ways that Windows Azure can be used to create applications for iOS devices. 

Hope to see you there!

Instead, I’m asking for your help in voting for my session at MIX11 this year:

Using iPhone, iPad and Android devices with Windows Azure

You have invested a lot learning how to build applications on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. But your customers are asking for solutions that target iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Now What? How do you leverage your Microsoft skills, while supporting this new user base? How do you connect these devices to services hosted on Windows Azure? What strategies do you need for data sync between the two? Is it possible to develop applications using Microsoft technology that spans all devices? In this session you’ll learn how to integrate iPhone, iPad, and Android platforms into an existing Windows Azure infrastructure. You’ll walk away confident in knowing how to extend your existing applications to take advantage of this new wave of mobile devices, working together with the cloud.

If you would like to see me present this at MIX this year, click here and follow the cats (you’ll see what I mean!)

My esteemed colleagues at Neudesic also have submitted sessions.  If you would like to know about Black Belt Windows 7 Development, follow Steve Saxon’s link and click here.  If you would prefer to hear our UX director Chris McCurry talk about How to build a Showcase Windows Phone 7 Application, click here.

We are doing some great work in the mobility practice here at Neudesic, and we hope that you’ll vote us in!  Voting ends on February 4th, so cast your ballots now!

If so, you may want to attend an evening panel session on  Where mobile business applications are headed in 2011.  I’ll be presenting together with Kevin Boyle from Microsoft, Autumn Radtke from Geodelic, and Jack Bicer from Septium.  The event is catered, and I think it’s going to be a lively and engaging discussion!

Click here for more information, and here to register.

QCon is one of my favorite conferences.  Although it’s a relatively small gathering compared to TechEd or JavaOne, it always has an awesome selection of sessions and speakers.  Last year was amazing, and I had the honor of presenting a session (Patterns for Cloud Computing) in one of the many great tracks.

This year (San Francisco, Nov 3 – 5, 2010), I’ll be participating in a panel to talk about data in the cloud.  For most organizations, I think this is one of the most important aspects of moving applications to the cloud.  For example: How should organizations store data in the cloud?  What type of storage is best (relational, non-relational, structured, blob, something else)?  How do organizations manage encrypted data in the cloud?  All in all, I’m really looking forward to an exciting discussion.  Fellow panelists include Amir Awadallah (CTO of Cloudera), Damien Katz (Creator of CouchDB), and Roger Bodamer (SVP of MongoDB).

If you are planning on attending this year, I look forward to seeing you there.  If you are not, and would like to get a discount on your registration, feel free to use the following promotional code: GUES100.  By using the code, you’ll receive $100 off your registration price and the organizers of the event will donate $100 to the St. Anthony Foundation in San Francisco. 

But wait!  There’s more!  If you use the registration code I’ll donate an extra $100 to St. Anthony’s for the first ten attendees.  So that’s a great conference, $100 off the ticket price, plus $200 on your behalf to a great cause!  Hope to see you there!

Here is an overview of what I will be showing:

Step 1 – What you’ll need to get started

As you might imagine, you are going to first need a Windows Azure account.  I would recommend going to www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers and signing up for the introductory special, which will allow you to test your application for free.  The introductory offer gives you the first 25 hours at no cost, which should be more than enough time to get up and running.

If you are at JavaOne however, I have a limited quantity (100) of tokens that give you 30 days worth of access with no need to submit any registration or credit card information.  See me at the end of the panel session or throughout the conference, and in exchange for a business card, I’ll be happy to give you one at no cost!

After you have your account, you’ll want to download and install the Windows Azure SDK.  After installation, set your PATH environment to include the location of the SDK binaries (typically C:Program FilesWindows Azure SDKv1.1bin).  This is important to ensure that the SDK is accessible from the command line.

Finally, you’ll need to install the Windows Azure Tomcat Solution Accelerator.  Feel free to install this in any directory you’d like – I’m using c:devjavaone2010tomcatazure for the purposes of this tutorial.

JavaOne is one of my favorite conferences, so I’m really looking forward to returning this year.  Although I spoke last year, my favorite JavaOne was in 2005, where my session on Advanced Web Services Interoperability (co-presented with Raghavan) was one of the top ten of the conference!  I have a beautiful glass trophy with a Java logo in my office – quite a rarity on the Microsoft campus!

This will be my third trip to Korea and I’m really looking forward to returning even though my trip is short this time.  My goal is to learn a few phrases and words in Korean before I come – I can converse at an intermediate level in Japanese, but I feel completely lost in Korean – maybe I can learn enough to at least introduce myself in front of the attendees! 

Although I’m not immune to this (I had an epic demo fail at JavaOne last year), in this post, I wanted to share a few things that I’ve found successful in preparing for and presenting technical demos.

All About State

I’ve lost count of how many demos I’ve seen that have failed on stage.  One of the most common post-demo excuses is “That’s strange…  it worked OK in my hotel room”.  What these presenters don’t realize is that it’s all about state – and how two types of state changes can affect demos.

Predictable State.  When you boot your machine, it starts in a particular state (let’s call it S1).  When you test your demo in your hotel room, at the end of the demo your machine is in a different state (let’s call it S2).  The demo was successful, and you assume that everything is going to be great for your talk.  However, when you walk up to the podium, your machine is no longer in it’s original S1 state, it’s in S2 (because you’ve just run the demo previously).  What many presenters fail to realize – until they have 250 people staring at them – is that the demo doesn’t work if the machine is in state S2.  Maybe temporary files weren’t cleaned up, or the database connection was left open, etc. 

Timeout State.  Another case I see frequently is with time lag.  I’ve also heard this referred to as “your machine being baked on stage”.  In your hotel room, you boot your laptop (which is in state S1) and run the demo – and it works.  What many presenters face however is a time lag between starting their talk and presenting their demo.  For example, your machine could be sitting on stage for 50 minutes before you actually get to the part where you need to show your demo.  By that time your machine is in a different state (maybe some kind of power saving / indexing / virus scanning has kicked in – or maybe your application has a memory leak / has closed database connection) and as a result fails.

How do you mitigate these two changes of state?  There are a couple of things that I’ve found really help. 

Firstly in your hotel room – either before the presentation or the night before – run the demo as you would, and then re-run it directly afterwards.  At the time I’m often thinking “of course this is going to work”, but I’ve been amazed at how many times the demo actually fails on the 2nd attempt.  For my more complex demos, one of the things that I’ve been considering is using some TDD approaches to help setup.  For example, having a build script that will clean, compile, and run my demo together with a set of unit tests that will check the output.  I can run this multiple times in the hotel room previously, and also again when I reach the podium before my talk begins.

Secondly, the only way to deal with the lag issue is to recreate the conditions that you’ll face.  A full rehearsal in the hotel room the night before is often the only way to get around this.  Many times I’ve been amazed to see that demos that normally need a few seconds to complete take much longer once the machine has been sitting there idle for half the presentation.  There are a few things that I normally set by default to help mitigate this (e.g. ensure the machine is in high power mode, turn off unwanted settings etc.)

Scripts

To help recreate a successful state, for each demo I always use two scripts, in printed format.  One is my “pre-req” script, another is my “run-through” script.

My pre-req script lists all of the things I need to do in order to get the demo in to a known state for presentation.  This can include pre-opening the IDE, setting fonts correctly, minimizing windows, resetting config values, deleting output files, etc.  I also have a master “pre-req” list that includes many things that I don’t need every time (switch off IM client, close Outlook, etc.)

My run-through script is exactly as it sounds – a script that I use during the presentation to run through the steps of the demo.  I know many people feel uncomfortable reading from a script during a presentation – and for the slides, I completely agree – but for the demo, everyone in the audience tends to be looking at the screen and not at you directly, so while reading from a script might not feel natural, you’ll see that the audience won’t actually notice.

One thing I will say about the run-through script is that it needs to a set of mental prompts, not a set of instructions.  For example, if the first part of your demo is to open a new browser window to your demo page, a mental reminder like this would work:

*  IE –> http://myapp

Whereas this would not:

*  Click on start, select Internet Explorer.  Wait for browser to start.  Go to address bar, enter demo address and click on OK.

In the heat of the moment, you won’t have time to process everything and you’ll end up ditching the script half way through.

Video Recording

You face your worst nightmare and your demo spectacularly fails.  What’s your backup plan?  For me, it’s a video recording of the demo produced the night before and made accessible before the presentation.

Many people dislike creating video recordings because they think the audience won’t like the format – or worry that it will take too much time to prepare.  I disagree.  The audience would prefer to see something in context of your presentation, even if it’s a recording.  For example, let’s imagine that your demo doesn’t work during your presentation.  It’s perfectly acceptable to spend a few seconds to try and recover before saying “Well, I seem to be having some trouble with the demo – let me switch to a recording instead and walk you through what I was going to show”.  I open the video and within seconds the audience is able to keep context with the main flow of the presentation – and they’ll forgive me more for using a video than if they couldn’t see the original intended version.

In addition, if you are doing a full rehearsal the night before, it’s little effort to start some screen capturing software and record your demos.  The video doesn’t have to be a Hollywood masterpiece – remember, this is for backup purposes only – and you don’t need to worry about audio (as you’ll be talking over the top of this).

When you record the videos, always set your machine to the resolution of the projector that you’ll be using (this is good advice for running through any demo prep).  If you don’t know the resolution of the projector beforehand, I would recommend 1024×768.  Your audience will prefer to see a demo with additional screen real estate vs. a demo that’s looks crammed because the resolution was too high.

After you’ve created the videos, I recommend copying a version of them to a folder on your desktop for quick access, and to either a USB stick or online storage where you can access them from another machine if need be.  Many conferences that I’ve presented at often have a second presenter machine than I can use in case my demo machine dies.

As a final note, if all of this sounds way over the top, I like to remind myself of the time investment from the audience.  If I have 100 people show up to a talk and I have a 15 minute demo, the audience is investing 25 man hours co
llectively just for that demo (100 people x 15 minutes).  I feel that adding a few more minutes of my prep time to ensure the demo runs flawlessly is worth justifying the investment of everyone in the room.