Keyvan Nayyeri

I’m finally recovering from the recent illness and antibiotic effects, so I can write about topics that I wanted to write earlier. I always become sick when I shouldn’t be and it’s one of the worst things about my body! Last week was a busy one for me and this illness stopped me from many tasks.

I think that almost all the active ASP.NET community developers know ASP.NET Podcast as one of the first webcasts dedicated to the .NET community started by Wallace McClure (Wally) in 2005.

The podcast had a lower rate of activity in the past year and we didn’t see many new shows coming out, but in the last couple of months, Wally reactivated the webcast channel and got a new host on board. Now David Penton is a new active host on the show who collaborates with Wally and Paul Glavich to deliver rich content to the community.

One of the new active topics on the .NET community is Windows Azure which was introduced in PDC08 as the Microsoft’s solution for cloud computing, and there have been many reactions against the new product/service that is still under development.

Recently Wally did a great job on dedicating a set of ASP.NET Podcast shows to this topic, and recorded two podcasts and two screencasts about cloud computing and Windows Azure:

• In the first show Wally and Dave recorded a podcast with Scott Cate and talked about general topics around cloud computing.
• The second show was a screencast about Windows Azure Blob Storage system which is one of the three storage options in Azure.
• The third show was also a screencast about a storage option in Windows Azure and that is table storage which describes this option very well.
• And the last part of this series is another podcast that wraps up the past discussions and gives an overview of Windows Azure.

If you’re going to dig into Windows Azure and developing services for new Microsoft cloud computing service, you should find this series of webcasts an invaluable resource of information. It’s cool to see that ASP.NET Podcast is back again and we’re getting information about new technologies from the site.

Speaking of the great work done by Wally on ASP.NET Podcast, I also have to point to his newest Wrox Blox entitled New Features in ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 that was published in the latest days of 2008, and covers new features in ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1. As you may know, .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 was bigger than a regular service pack specifically in the area of ASP.NET development, and in this PDF book Wally has gone over these new features very well.