Buy a Windows 7 PC and get Windows 8 Pro for € 14.99.

The Windows Upgrade Offer went live on Saturday 2^nd June. Here’s how it works:

• Purchase a Windows 7 PC
• Register for the Windows Upgrade Offer on www.windowsupgradeoffer.com and receive a registration confirmation email
• Upon the release of Windows 8 (GA), customers will receive an email with a promotion code to purchase Windows 8 Pro for €14.99 incl. VAT
• Customers will be able to purchase a downloadable version of Windows 8 Pro (no matter which edition of Windows 7 they purchased!)

More details and FAQ available from www.windowsupgradeoffer.com.

Calling all Designers – how do you design great Windows 8 apps?

Windows 8 represents an unprecedented opportunity for designers and creative agencies as leading brands, businesses and app publishers around the world are beginning to re-imagine their experiences and differentiate themselves on Windows 8. The fastest way to get ready for Windows 8 is to learn about User Experience and Design from the team that built the platform. The Windows team would like to extend an exclusive invitation to this online training session on June 14^th 2012.

The goal of the training is to give designers a solid understanding of how to design great Windows 8 apps that leverage the full capabilities of the platform and follow the UX guidelines. After this training, you’ll understand the tenants of a great app, how to think about information architecture as well as best practice for designing flexible layouts, touch and how to leverage contracts and much, much more.

Logistics

Enjoy

Content from last Friday’s Azure session

On Thursday 7th June Scott Guthrie presented the Meet Windows Azure session  To say that what he announced was amazing would be an understatement!

I personally find this part of the announcement awesome – who’d of thought that Microsoft would ever be selling you a Linux virtual machine?

If you have the time I strongly suggest you watch Scott’s presentation: http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/Conversations#ScottGuthrieMeet

On Friday 8th June, I held an online meeting to discuss Windows Azure for IT Professionals.  It was timed to be the day after Microsoft launched a plethora of new features onto the Azure platform.  Vikas Sahni & I had been planning this event for quite a while, but were not “allowed” to tell you what we would be talking about.

We had a few technical “issues” but got there in the end.  We did record the session, but even had issues with that!  I’d say that the Friday afternoon gremlins were at play (we didn’t get to record it all).

The idea was to introduce Windows Azure to IT Professionals – Azure has been positioned/sold to Developers up until now.  As of last week, it’s very much targeted to everyone.  IT Professionals will LOVE Windows Azure.

The slides we used are here: http://sdrv.ms/LtbhBg

I’ve broken the recording down into these pieces:

Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure (8 minutes)

Azure in the Datacentre (11 minutes)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Part 1

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Part 2

Web Sites (3 minutes)

And that was where the gremlins took over!

Vikas continued to create a Wordpress blog site.  Then I went on to explain the new networking features (VPN directly between your infrastructure and Azure – virtualised networking).

Read up about the new Windows Azure here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/