Developers explore Microsoft Azure at last Azure Xmas Workshop

Ruiwen Chua, developer at BillPin, recaps key highlights from last year’s Azure Xmas Workshop.

With the holiday season round the corner and 2012 just coming to a close, members of the tech community  in Singapore were treated to the Azure Xmas Workshop — an evening of learning about Azure, made only more enjoyable with the on-coming Christmas cheer and the upcoming holiday season.

With three well-respected speakers in the tech scene, attendees of the Azure Xmas Workshop took part in an evening filled with useful tips on how they could make Microsoft Azure work for them, be it in their work, or professional projects.

Michael Cheng, senior software engineer at social entertainment platform, mig33 kicked off the evening with an introduction to his very own open source project, PHP-Queue. Put simply, PHP-Queue is “a unified front-end for different queuing backends”, that helps developers to manage communication between components of their application. What’s great about PHP-Queue is that it manages to abstract away the differences in the myriad different cloud queueing/messaging systems, freeing you up to concentrate on more mission critical code.

Next up was Varun Chatterji from text messaging startup, Sent.ly . Sent.ly allows any company or organisation to very easily send and receive SMSes from users. Once the domain of only richer companies who could afford their own SMS gateways, Sent.ly brings the accessibility of SMS communication to the masses with just a simple web service and a smart phone app.

Introducing the audience to how Microsoft’s Visual Studio tools helped him manage Sent.ly’s backend architecture, Varun demonstrated how Visual Studio’s deep integration with the Azure cloud platform made managing the system, along with testing and deploying the application, a piece of cake.

The final speaker of the day was Winston Khoo, software engineer at Rockmoon Singapore. With Rockmoon recently expanding into Thailand with Trail Shuttle, their learning journey application for schools, Winston shared important tips on how to Rockmoon ensured that their servers on Azure stayed stable through the increased load. Naturally, as a company that develops software that schools rely on to conduct their lessons, being able to provide a stable, and secure service is something that is of key concern to the engineers at Rockmoon.

It was past 10pm by the time the audience finally left the venue, with some even staying behind to chat and find out more about the available technology and upcoming events. And while this might have been the last community Azure event in Singapore for 2012, it most certainly isn’t going to be the last for a while yet, as Microsoft continues to drive the Azure platform into the waiting hands of the community.

Speakers, organisers, and sponsors from left to right: Michael Cheng, Ruiwen Chua, Varun Chatterji, Winston Khoo and Yap Neng Giin.