A couple of weeks ago, the French developpez.com website launch a challenge in collaboration with Microsoft to help developers discover the Windows Azure platform.The goal was to succeed 5 different steps in order to win the challenge and get two prizes. The first one was a wifi teeshirt and the second one the new Microsoft Arc Mouse.

It was my first real experience with the Azure platform and I was very happy to be able to manipulate the platform through various real-world example. The steps were the following:

  1. Deploy an existing application on Azure
  2. Modify an existing application and then deploy it on Azure
  3. Deploy an existing application using Blob storage
  4. Fix a Winforms application using the Azure API to backup files and folder
  5. Answers several questions about the Azure platform

The steps were both educational (each time we discovered a new feature) and challenging (we must make it work !). I would like to thank very much the organizers of this event: Jérôme Lamber, Louis-Guillaume Morand, Phillippe Vialatte, Pierre Couzy and Thomas Lucchini.

Hopefully, we’ll see more challenges in the future on the developpez.com website.