The last time I tried to write a program was when I was at university using a program called Delphi.  I knew back then that I wasn’t going to set the world on fire with my jqueries and there was nothing rapid about my application development.   My peers in our software development team tell me that technology has moved on since then and the whole process is much faster.  They are working with people wanting to develop applications for Windows 8 and you could be one of them.

The team has set up a series of camps to help individuals develop their first Windows 8: 

The Windows 8 Camps have been designed to show you how to build a Windows 8 app. You can tailor the day to make it as personally productive and rewarding as possible. You can work on your own projects with assistance from Windows 8 experts, network with others and also have the option of attending short tutorial sessions on Windows 8 related topics.

Win 8 Agenda:

These events are hands-on and flexible so you can tailor the day to suit what you need; from working on your own project with assistance from our Windows 8 experts to networking with others and attending short tutorial sessions.  Our tutorial sessions will include topics such as the ‘Basics of the OS and interaction with the OS’, ‘Metro style UX’

Find out more and book your place:-

Thursday
19^th July, London: Windows 8 DevCamp

Friday
20^th July, London: Windows 8 DevCamp

Saturday
21^st July, London: Windows 8 DevCamp

Tuesday
24^th July, London: Windows 8 DevCamp

Wednesday
25^th July, London: Windows 8 DevCamp

Thursday
26^th July, London: Windows 8 DevCamp

To help get a headstart before attending these events why not try out Windows 8 Release Candidate for free now and get the tools onto your machine to get started writing Windows 8 Applications here – these are also free!

When we were at TechEd Europe we were looking for those things that some of you may have missed and the things that were a bit out of the ordinary. 

We managed to persuade one of the Office 365 team to take us on a virtual tour of their data centre which they had in Lego format at the event.  This is probably as close to a real tour of a Microsoft data centre as you can get as camera’s are not allowed inside the real ones!

Find out more about Office 365 or and try out the new Office release.

Some people will do anything to get Internet Explorer 9 at work! In our latest TechNet Competition we’re showcasing unique skills that people are using to convince their IT Manager that it’s the best browser for their office. Pampering, head shaving, even some questionable body painting, they’ll do anything to impress you.

Visit the ‘What would you do for IE9?’ competition page on TechNet and vote for your favourite video of people doing something to get Internet Explorer 9. If they impress you, they deserve your vote and you could win £1000 of Lastminute.com and Virgin Experience Days vouchers. Good luck, hopefully someone will impress you enough to convince you that Internet Explorer 9 is the way to go!

Vote on TechNet now!

For more information and resources to help you in evaluating and deploying Internet Explorer 9, check out the Springboard.

Empower all users to gain breakthrough insights as a natural part of their day-to-day activities using PowerPivot and PowerView, now in Excel.

• Analyse data ranging from a few rows to hundreds of millions of rows with extreme analytical performance on your desktop using Excel data models powered by xVelocity in-memory analytics engine
• Speed up analysis in Excel by using Quick Analysis to preview and apply conditional formatting, suggest and create charts, PivotTables, and tables; by using Quick Explore to easily navigate multidimensional and tabular data models and create Trend charts to analyse information over time
• Quickly clean and shape up data in Excel via intelligent pattern recognition and smart auto-complete with Flash Fill.
• Empower users of all levels to access, mash-up and analyse data from virtually any source and rapidly create compelling analytical applications with PowerPivot, now in Excel.
• Provide stunning data visualization to discover new insights with a highly interactive and familiar data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience for users of all levels with Power View, now in Excel
• Easily share and collaborate on self-service BI solutions within your organization with SharePoint Server

User created, IT managed - Enable enterprise grade IT governance for your BI solutions via SQL Server and SharePoint

• Improve governance and compliance and easily track your business critical Excel assets by enabling
• Discovery and assessment of user-created spread sheets with SharePoint 2013.
• Comparing spread sheets, tracking lineage, conducting interactive diagnostics and creating spread sheet analysis reports with Inquire in Excel

Download links

• Office Professional Plus 2013 Preview
• SharePoint 2013 Preview
• SQL Server 2012 SP1 CTP3

We are currently planning the next set of IT Pro Camps and are looking for your input.

What cities would you like to see the camps run in.  We’ve posted the poll on our Facebook Page.

Get your voice heard and vote now! 

In case you missed the post on the Microsoft Learning site Born to Learn, we thought it would be good to draw your attention to the “Windows Server 2012 Jump Start: Preparing for the Datacenter Evolution” video series.

Windows Server 2012 Jump Start | Target Audience & High-Level Overview
• Designed for Microsoft Partners, early adopters, and experienced IT Pros/ITDMs familiar with Microsoft server technologies
• All twelve (12) modules are under an hour and packed with engaging discussion and real-world demos -- watch them all!
• 85% said the course motivated them to deploy WS2012 sooner than originally planned!
• 63% said they are more likely to virtualize on Hyper-V 2012 sooner as a result of what they learned!
• 34% had attended previous Jump Starts

Links to Every Module from this Jump Start
The HD-quality video recordings of this course are published to TechNet Edge and are highly recommended. Windows Server 2012 is a game-changing release for so many reasons and this course will help experienced IT Pros truly understand why -- check it out!

• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (01): Core Hyper-V
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (02a): Virtualization Infrastructure, Part 1
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (02b): Virtualization Infrastructure, Part 2
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (03a): Storage Architecture, Part 1
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (03b): Storage Architecture, Part 2
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (04): Continuous Availability
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (05a): Multi-Server Management, Part 1
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (05b): Multi-Server Management, Part 2
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (06a): Security and Access, Part 1
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (06b): Security and Access, Part 2
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (07): Remote Connectivity and Networking
• Windows Server 2012 Jump Start (08): IIS, DHCP and IPAM

This news was brought to you via the Born to Learn blog.

Mark Parris is an MVP and MCM in Directory Services, with over 20 years of Experience in IT, specialising in Active Directory and Windows Server. Connect with Mark on his blog, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Last week in Amsterdam, I had the privilege to once again staff the Active Directory stand answering attendee’s technical questions around Active Directory. This year unlike other TechEd’s I have staffed, I seemed to grab the lucky straw and only have to man the stand during evening events or lunchtimes; leaving me with lots of capacity to attend the technical breakout sessions, of which I took full advantage. 

All of my previous visits to TechEd have been as a self-employed consultant; this year for the first time ever, I attended TechEd as an employee of a global organisation and therefore the breakout sessions I went to were focused on the areas of technology that I believed would benefit the company (and not me as an individual).  The breakout sessions I attended in summary were focused around Active Directory, Windows Deployment and Systems Management and out of all the breakout sessions I attended, the technology highlight for me was “Windows Server 2012 - Dynamic Access Control”.

Dynamic Access Control enables centrally controlled access policies for file servers based on an Active Directory attribute, i.e. if a user has the attribute ‘Department’ set to Finance, they will automatically receive access to all of the Finance data permissioned under the centralized file access policy.  Dynamic Access Control, unlike normal Windows groups has the ability to “and” permissions,  for example if the user has their ‘department’ attribute set to Finance and has the ‘Country’ attribute set to United Kingdom and the centralized access policy is defined accordingly, they will only be able to see the United Kingdom, Finance data.

In terms of administration, Dynamic Access Control could help to reduce the burden of support on IT by enabling other departments such as Human Resources the ability to manage users data access by populating the correct attributes when a user joins or by modifying a user’s attributes when they move department.  This does come with a word of caution, where as a user’s Department, used to be just a text description, it could now control how they access the majority of their data and the impact of modification needs to be understood.

For further insight I would recommend viewing these sessions:

Windows Server 2012 Dynamic Access Control Overview

http://channel9.msdn.com/events/TechEd/Europe/2012/SIA207

Windows Server 2012 Dynamic Access Control Deep Dive for Active Directory and Central Authorization Policies

http://channel9.msdn.com/events/TechEd/Europe/2012/SIA341

Windows Server 2012 Dynamic Access Control Best Practices and Case Study Deployments in Microsoft IT

http://channel9.msdn.com/events/TechEd/Europe/2012/SIA316

Over the years that I have been attending, TechEd has changed due to many reasons such as budget, costs and different management; but the two things that have not changed are technical content and networking opportunities, with these two things in mind, I am “Jolly Excited” about the next TechEd, when and wherever that may be.

Geoff Evelyn is a Microsoft MVP and has an active interest in SharePoint security and the consumerization of IT.  He recently attended an event and has put together an article that moves beyond that event. 

The article talks about how personal devices as part of Consumerization have impacted SharePoint, some features available to mobile users, what implications are there in terms of security and finally a look at what Support needs to address.

The article is pretty long but includes a lot of detailed and interesting information covering the broad range of subject areas shown below:

• Striking a Balance
• How do we deal with the increased level of devices in an organisation?
• So what is Consumerization?
• Using personal devices to access not only SharePoint content but other services
• SharePoint fitting to the mobilized workforce
• Mobile View
• SharePoint Workspace 2010
• VPN Access and Direct Access
• SharePoint Online
• Some Security issues
• Lost Devices
• Lost IP
• Security Breaches
• Information Leaks
• Patching of Mobile Devices
• Getting Support Sorted
• Governance of the Mobile Device is the key
• Get the Users involved

Here’s the article: http://www.sharepointgeoff.com/consumerization-and-sharepoint-security-challenges/

Over the last week or so we’ve been collecting questions from those of you who follow us on Twitter and Facebook for Alex.  Alex has been interning here at Microsoft on the DPE team for the last 12 months.  The video below gives some great insights into his time here and highlights some of his most memorable moments.

Please join us in wishing Alex all the best in his final year at university and welcoming Marcel to the team!  

If you want to follow Alex's progress through his final year at university you will find him on Twitter here! 

We have just released information about even more Windows 8, Windows Phone, UX and Windows Azure camps for the period until the end of September!

To avoid disappointment register for a camp near you now!  Here’s what to expect with each of the different types of camps.

Microsoft Windows 8 DevCamp
The Windows 8 Camps have been designed to show you how to build a Windows 8 app and get it published in the Windows Store. These events are hands-on and flexible so you can tailor the day to suit your needs; from working on your own project with assistance from our Windows 8 experts to networking with others and attending short tutorial sessions.

Windows 8 UX Workshops
These workshops are suitable for designers who want to know a bit more about Metro, UX professionals who are looking to create wireframes and supporting technical documentation for application developers. The workshop is also suitable for people who already have applications on other platforms and are looking to bring them across to Windows 8.

Microsoft Windows Phone DevCamp
The Windows Phone Camps are events which will show you how to learn and build Windows Phone apps. You can work on your own projects with assistance from our Windows Phone MVPs, network with others and also have the option of attending short tutorial sessions on Windows Phone related topics. If you are new to Windows Phone, this is the ideal event for you as you will have the opportunity to understand the general approach and capabilities of Windows Phone development.

Windows Azure Developer Camp
Want to get up to speed quickly with Windows Azure? The Windows Azure Developer Camp will take you from knowing nothing about the cloud to actually having deployed a simple application to the cloud and made it available on the public Internet.  During the Camp there'll be experienced people available to guide you through each exercise. Once you have the basics in place, you'll be up and running.

Developer Weekly Drop-In Clinics, Tuesdays 12-1pm from 7^th August
We will have a team of technical and marketing experts on standby ready to answer any question you have about Window 8 app development – whether it be questions about an idea for an app, development, design, getting your app into the Windows Store, or any other burning question you have.