I often have people ask me how they can get started with Windows Microsoft Azure (that one’s gonna take a while for me). Generally I start by telling them to grab a free trial and start off by publishing some web apps using Azure Web Sites. It’s great to start there because it’s so easy to get up and running and it gives you a nice introduction to the Azure portal and some of the awesome diagnostics and configuration features that appear for a lot of the Azure services.

Recently, I did a few hours of presenting and lab facilitation at the Perth event for Global Windows Azure Bootcamp with Matt Davies. In preparation for that event we prepared some content (slides, live demos and hands-on labs) on our open source organisation (MRCollective). If you are learning Azure then I encourage you to check it out, since I think it gives a nice overview of the main features of Azure you are likely to start out using as well as some examples of how to use them and get started with them.

It’s a tiny bit out of date after the huge amount of announcements that were made about Azure after that event, but it’s still 95% right and all the hands-on labs and demos should still work.