Hopefully by now, most techies who follow MSFT keenly have had a chance to learn about Windows 8. BUILD Conference launched the pre-beta version of Windows 8, along with the developer tools that helps us build touch-centric Metro apps for Windows 8. There is obviously much to digest & learn .. these are the two best places to start:

• http://www.buildwindows.com/ — For the BUILD Keynotes & Session recordings.
• http://dev.windows.com — For the Windows 8 Developer Preview & development tools.

To keep up with the hype, I decided to do a 20-25 min grok talk at our September Central Ohio .NET User Group [CONDG] meeting; details here. I believe we had an enthusiastic session with lot of audience interest in what’s new in Windows 8 and hope that folks enjoyed my little high-level overview. The slides for the talk can be found here. With Jeff Blankenburg (@jeffblankenburg) doing his brilliant “What’s new in Windows Phone Mango” session & me talking about Windows 8, there was no dearth of Metro UI love for the evening 🙂

If you attended the CONDG meeting, I would appreciate feedback. So, why is this Windows 8 stuff important? No, it is not another ecosystem that we are being asked to fill up with apps; it is WINDOWS!! And yes, that means 400 million PC users as potential customers when they eventually switch to Windows 8. And that, my developer friend, is opportunity! So, what are you building?

Adios!

With my first article (here) with SilverlightShow (@silverlightshow) being well-accepted, I was encouraged to write some more. A second article was just published, which dabbled around the broad subject of Windows Phone applications leveraging Azure. It can be seen as a natural continuation of the first; but in this article, we talk about using WCF Services hosted in Windows Azure, instead of using OData feeds. This way, we get to empower our Mobile applications with remote data connectivity and have fine-grained control over security & operations supported through a universally-accessible Service. You may find the article here:

Azure Services connecting Windows Phone to Data

Please feel free to leave me some feedback. Thanks to SilverlightShow for publishing my article & to you for reading.

Adios!