The Windows Azure Training Kit June 2012 release is out now with the following features:

• 12 new hands-on labs for Windows Azure Virtual Machines
• 11 new hands-on labs for Windows Azure Web Sites
• 2 new hands-on labs demonstrating Windows Azure with Windows 8 Metro-style applications
• Several new hands-on labs for Node.js …

Just finished at the Hacking Imagination event in County Durham. My role was to help mentor and encourage the students from Universities and Colleges in the North East of England to help them to develop their ideas for their Imagine Cup entries.

The event was held in a secret location in county Durham and the students …

If you attended the [Black Marble Architecture Event](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Architecture Forum in the North 4) yesterday you would have seen a number of talks around Azure and the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit was mentioned a number of times.

The latest update to the training kit is here: …

AppFabric

Microsoft have announced two new Azure AppFabric CTPs.

May 2011 CTP will include Service bus enhancements including

• A more comprehensive pub/sub messaging
• Integration with the Access Control Service V2
• Queues based upon a new messaging infrastructure backed by a replicated, durable store.

See here for more …

When deploying an Access Control Service enabled web application from my development environment to Windows Azure I got the following error:

“Unable to find assembly ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0. . .”

class="image_figure image_internal image_unprocessed" …

If you are an MSDN subscriber (Ultimate or Premium) you now get more Windows Azure resources. Professional subscribers are now also included in the promotion.

See here for more details. If you have already taken up this offer and you are an MSDN Premium subscriber then you will automatically be upgraded to the MSDN …

Following on from my previous blog on “Creating your own identity provider …” The following changes can be made to add in your own claims.

Firstly in the App_DataCustomSecurityTokenService.cs file of your identity provider web site I changed the following code

 1outputIdentity.Claims.Add( new Claim( …