Gee whiz, I sure did have fun this past weekend.  I’ve only been to one SharePoint Saturday event before, and that was as an attendee.  This time I was honored to be asked to speak, and so I presented my session “Getting Started with SharePoint 2013 on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services” right at 9:00am, had about 20 attendees, and was happy to find that my audience was interactive, relaxed, and I received a lot of positive feedback.  With my first SPS speaker role fulfilled, I’m going to try to get out a bit more and make it out to other events as I can.

All of my session content can be found on my SkyDrive here:  http://sdrv.ms/17K722b.  You’ll notice I’m not big on slides.  I prefer to jump right in and do some demonstration and have a working discussion most of the time.  Of course, it doesn’t always go perfectly, but those are the breaks.  In my case, my database VM did not re-provision correctly and so I wasn’t able to actually bring up SharePoint 2013.

My session was completely based on Keith Mayer’s (@KeithMayer) post here:  http://bit.ly/19t7LDf.  The emphasis of my discussion was related to removing VMs from Azure while you’re not using them to preserve compute time.  Ironically enough on Monday, Microsoft announced that this is no longer necessary; with the recent updates to Windows Azure, we can now just shut down the VMs and won’t be charged compute time.  Oh, and MSDN subscribers get $100 credit every month to use towards Azure Services.  This is very cool stuff!  There’s no reason not to at least play around in Azure now.  The 90-day free trial they offer is plenty of time to teach yourself some cool tricks and play with things like Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012, SharePoint 2013, and the list goes on.  You can read up on the updates here:  http://bit.ly/11GYTCq.  A big thanks to @vandre for bringing this to my attention.

Aside from my session, I ran around talking to everyone I could and working my company’s (EKI) booth.  Being my first SPS speaking engagement, I was able to meet the likes of @marcykellar, @ManuelLongo, @MichaelBL, @paulschaeflein, @TamaraBred, @RobBogue, @buckleyplanet, @KimFrehe, @ChrisJohns0n, @pserzo, @vcmonkey, @nmoneypenny, @shellecaldwell, @sharepointjack, and @SharePointMetro.

If you’ve never been to a SharePoint Saturday event, I encourage you to go and check one out.  Whether you go to learn, network, or just show up to grab the swag, you’ll have some fun and meet some interesting people.  I can’t wait for the next one.

Oh yeah, and to keep up with the SharePoint Saturday events that are coming up, keep an eye on spsevents.org and for SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs specifically, visit SPSChicagoSuburbs.com.