Project Riviera is a comprehensive code sample to demonstrate how to develop multi-tenant highly-scalable line-of-business application on Windows Azure Platform, built by a cloud ISV partner, Cumulux.

Cumulux is a Microsoft partner who’s built their business around  delivering solutions that leverage cloud computing and are keenly interested in making Azure their primary platform for delivering custom solutions for customers.

The reference application been published to the MSDN code gallery at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/riviera.  You can also see a brief video, architectural slides and related material here (http://cumulux.com/riviera.html)

The main tenants of Azure demonstrated by Riviera Include:

• Federated Security (using custom STS, .NET Access Control Service and Windows Live ID)
• Multi Tenancy (On demand provisioning, Tenant Management, extensible metadata)
• Extensibility  (using Silverlight 3, Workflow)
• Scalability (using Azure Queues , Async patterns)
• Flexible SLAs (using SQL Azure / Azure storage partitioning)

Head over to the MSDN Code Galleryand check this solution out.  It’s a great showcase of what can be done on the Windows Azure Platform.

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Sanjay and our ISV Team are at it again and is putting on another great incubation event.  This time it’s around Windows 7!

If you’ve enjoyed the Dynamics CRM Incubation weeks Sanjay and our ISV Team have put on (in Reston and Boston), you’re certainly in for a treat!

For those of you out in the blogsphere who’re local to the Reston, VA area and has a startup business, or is contemplating building competencies around the delivery of solutions on our latest and greatest Windows release, I welcome you to attend the inaugural Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Week for Windows 7, to be held in at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston, VA the week of August 24th, 2009.  The event will cover the following:

• Learning and building next generation applications utilizing new and unique Windows 7 capabilities with help from onsite advisors and off-shore development teams
• Getting entrepreneur coaching from guest speakers and a panel of industry experts
• Generating marketing buzz for your brand
• Creating an opportunity to be highlighted at the upcoming Windows 7 launch

My colleagues, Sanjay Jain and Ashish Jaiman, and the ISV Evangelism Team is hard at work putting this outstanding event together.  To get more details about this event, head on over to Sanjay’s Blog or e-mail him or Ashish directly to nominate your team.

To learn more about how Microsoft can help startups, head over to the Microsoft BizSpark Website.

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The April Update of the Azure Services Training Kit has released and is ready for download. Below is a brief overview (taken from the download site) of what’s included in the latest release.

Overview
The Azure Services Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Azure Services Platform. The April release includes the following updates:

• New Presentation for SQL Data Services
• 2 additional hands-on labs for WIndows Azure PHP and Native Code support

This technical content covers services including: Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services.

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The final March 2009 CTP for the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for SharePoint (v1.3) has now been recently released.  Head on over to Paul Andrew’s Blog (Paul is a Technical Product Manager on the SharePoint Team) for a rundown of the new capabilities available in this CTP.  Also with this release, we released a set of ten fresh new themes for SharePoint built as VSeWSS projects. Here’s a thumbnail of the new designs available to VSeWSS SharePoint Developers now.

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Hi Software and Microsoft recently released version 2.0 of the Accessibility Toolkit for SharePoint. The intent of this solution is to provide a accessible development framework for Office SharePoint Server environments.

Key features of AKS v2.0 include:

• Smart Control adapters which greatly reduce the amount of custom configuration previously required for AKS control adapters.
• The Web Part Zone Control Adapter, a special Smart Adapter that modifies the output of SharePoint so that it does not use tables for layout of the Web parts.
• HiSoftware’s Compliant Code Engine (HCCE) to assist organizations in creating code that is compliant to standards-based HTML or XHTML.
• Additional requirements under Canadian Common Look and Feel 2.0 (CLF 2.0) guidelines.
• Examples of remediation to comply with WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
• French language version of AKS components.

The toolkit is freely available through the Microsoft Public License through CodePlex and can be downloaded at https://aks.hisoftware.com.

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