Time to be a spreker again: TechDays Belgium & DevDays Nederlands

I am back from sunny Vegas, where we finally announced the RTW of the new ACS, to the less sunny Redmond; but not for long. Next Saturday I’m scheduled to fly back to EU, where I’ll have the honor and privilege to blabber about my favorite topics at TechDays Belgium and Nederland’s DevDays.

TechDays Belgium

This will be the third time that I speak at the BeLux TechDays. The last 2 times I had a lot of fun, and I’ve been impressed with the excellent work that Katrien and the rest of the Belgian crew put together; I am sure that this year they’d deliver just as well .

Note: for scheduling reasons I ended up getting a travel plan that will bring me to Belgium well ahead of schedule, on the 24th; hence, if your company wants to meet and chat about Identity and/or Windows Azure, or even grab a Duvel, please get in touch with me.

The first session I am doing is a pretty standard intro to identity and the cloud: if you already know about claim, that’s not the session for you.

Identity and Access Control in the Cloud with Windows Azure

Wednesday the 27th

13:00-14:15

If you don’t yet know what claims-based identity is, it’s time to get busy. Signing users in and granting them access is a core function of almost every cloud-based application, and claims-based identity is the best way to take care of that. In this session we will show you how to simplify your user experience by enabling users to sign in with an existing account such as a Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or on-premises Active Directory account, implement access control, and make secure connections between applications. You will learn how the AppFabric Access Control Service, Windows Identity Foundation, and Active Directory Federation Services use a claims-based identity architecture to help you to take advantage of the shift toward the cloud while still fully leveraging your on-premises investments.

The second session is, surprise surprise, not exclusively focused on identity: it’s going to be about architecting and developing SaaS applications on the Windows Azure platform. I’ll share in detail my experience in leading the www.fabrikamshipping.com project.

Developing SaaS Solutions with the Windows Azure Platform

Thursday the 28th

14:30-15:45

Come to this session to learn about how to take advantage of the Windows Azure platform for developing and running your subscription based applications. Discover, through concrete examples, how to onboard customers, dynamically provision application instances, handle single sign-on, and offer self-service authorization. Explore the patterns and the tradeoffs you need to consider in order to meet the needs of a wide variety of customers, all the while maintaining control over your resources and the way you run your business.

Right after the SaaS session I’ll jump on a train (bus?) and head down to Amsterdam for the DevDays.

DevDays Nederland

I’ve been to Amsterdam many times for customer meetings, but never for one event: that’s why I am so grateful to Arie for inviting me for the this year’s DevDays.

In fact, rather than a usual speaking engagement this will be a bit of a vocal cords marathon: I have all my 3 sessions on the 29th . Luckily there is some buffer between time slots, and hopefully by then the jetlag will be under control; and of course I’ve done much worse, for example at the WIF Workshops I motormouthed for 2 days in a row for each of the 6 cities I visited. But I digress. Here there are times and abstracts.

The first session is the same standard intro I mentioned above. The title lacks the “with Windows Azure” but – trust me – that’s what I’ll use whenever I need the cloud.

Identity and Access Control in the Cloud

Friday the 29th

09:15-10:30

If you don’t yet know what claims-based identity is, it’s time to get busy. Signing users in and granting them access is a core function of almost every cloud-based application, and claims-based identity is the best way to take care of that. In this session we will show you how to simplify your user experience by enabling users to sign in with an existing account such as a Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or on-premises Active Directory account, implement access control, and make secure connections between applications. You will learn how the AppFabric Access Control Service, Windows Identity Foundation, and Active Directory Federation Services use a claims-based identity architecture to help you to take advantage of the shift toward the cloud while still fully leveraging your on-premises investments.

The second session is a deep dive in ACS. Whereas in the intro ACS plays a very important part, I never have the time to really dig in the features and specific scenarios that ACS enables. The idea is that with one session exclusively on ACS I should be able to, but it largely depends on YOU: the amount of features and advanced scenarios I’ll be able to cover depends on how much need there will be for introductory content, and I’ll gauge that by observing how you react as we go along . 

Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service: Deep Dive

Friday the 29th

13:15-14:30

The Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) offers you a great way of offloading authentication and access control woes away from your applications, giving you more time and resources to focus on your business goals.
In this session we will take a detailed look at how ACS can help you to broker authentication between your application and many different providers; how you can use ACS to address browser-based, rich client, Web site to Web site and mobile application scenarios; and how you can take advantage of the rich management OData API to seamlessly integrate the ACS capabilities in your own solutions.  

The last session is the SaaS one I described for Belgium, too. Tough topic for the end of the day but very, very important.

Developing SaaS Solutions with the Windows Azure Platform

Friday the 29th

16:15-17:30

Come to this session to learn about how to take advantage of the Windows Azure platform for developing and running your subscription based applications. Discover, through concrete examples, how to onboard customers, dynamically provision application instances, handle single sign-on, and offer self-service authorization. Explore the patterns and the tradeoffs you need to consider in order to meet the needs of a wide variety of customers, all the while maintaining control over your resources and the way you run your business.

That’s it! Looking forward to meet you in Antwerp & Amsterdam… now I better start working on the decks