The UK AzureNET user group is back and we have an evening of Azure talks and giveaways lined up. We have got a massive venue, meaning that we can welcome many more people than previously.

Aside from the great content, the best bit is we will be giving away hundreds of free subscriptions to the Windows Azure Platform during the evening. The subscription includes up to 20 Windows Azure Compute nodes and 3 SQL Azure databases for you to play with over the 2 weeks following the event.

Follow us on twitter @ukazurenet for more details as they are published.

Agenda:

6:30pm-7:00pm: Registration

7:00pm: See the difference: How Windows Azure helped build a new way of giving
Simon Evans and James Broome (@broomej)
They will cover the business context for Azure and then go into patterns used and lessons learnt from the project....as well as showing off the app of course!

8:00pm: UK AzureNET update

8:15pm: NoSQL databases or: How I learned to love the hash table
Mark Rendle (@markrendle)

In this session Mark will look at how Azure Table Service works and how to use it. We’ll look briefly at the high-level Data Services SDK, talk about its limitations, and then quickly move on to the REST API and how to use it to improve performance and reduce costs. We’ll make-up some pretend real-world problems and solve them in new and interesting ways. We’ll denormalise data (for fun and profit). We’ll talk about how certain social networking sites can deal with huge volumes of data so quickly, and why it sometimes goes wrong.

9:15pm: Wrap up and close