Are you a concerned citizen with ideas on how technology could solve social problems? A developer with the knowledge, technical skills, vision, and desire to contribute to the future? Have you been waiting for a reason to write a Metro App for Windows 8 or publish to the Azure Marketplace? Your time has arrived.

MOBILE AMERICA is a public app contest for Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Windows Azure. Entries in each category have a chance to win $1500 or $500 and a Windows Phone (full contest rules). Ready to get started, but still waiting for that great idea?? Check out some sources of inspiration like Apps for Democracy (an app contest in Washington DC) and Data.gov repository of public data and applications. As you build these applications, I’d ask that you think about open-sourcing your applications (github, codeplex, whatever) so that people all over can benefit from your innovative creations. Good Luck!!

After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, people worldwide jumped to donate money, time and expertise to help the victims. Software developers jumped to support the information sharing required by the Megacommunity of government agencies, non-profits, media, and public. The Crisis Camp movement is a framework for people to meet locally, and coordinate globally to support disaster relief efforts. Although the focus is on software development (the crisis camp idea stems from the BarCamp movement), volunteers with any experience and background are needed and welcome.

In one week, a distributed team from Washington DC and Los Angeles released the first application, "We Have, We Need". This project will create a online marketplace for the exchange of resources and services to suit the needs of the NGOs in Haiti, providing Earthquake relief operations. This application is being hosted in Amazon Web Services to provide scalability and quick developer ramp up. (If you or your company would like to provide long-term sponsorship, see the contact information on the project wiki.)

My previous post shows how to migrate a SQL database to Azure SQL. Now we will complete the app migration by migrating the web application to Windows Azure as well.

1. We'll start by creating a "New Azure Web Cloud Service" in Visual Studio (2008 or 2010). You'll need to install the Windows Azure SDK to get this new project type. When this project starts up you'll have an Azure project, and a traditional web application.
2. Follow the directions in this blog post to add an existing web application to the project.
3. Edit the ServiceDefinition file by adding enableNativeCodeExecution="true" to the webRole element. This places the web worker role in full trust mode.
4. Upload your project and service definition into a new Windows Azure project.
5. Start your project, test it, and promote to Production.