Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups: A step-by-step guide to create easy solutions to build your business using Windows Azure services with this book and ebook.

Geotopia is a brand new company that was founded at the end of 2011. It is a small company with only a few developers, who are also in charge of the company. The company is innovative and agile and is therefore willing to explore new technologies and opportunities that are made possible by cloud technologies. All developers and architects are skilled in Microsoft technologies, and by applying Windows Azure technologies they can leverage their current knowledge and only need to learn new concepts offered by the platform. By applying Windows Azure, it enables them to learn these new concepts and gain experience. Geotopia strongly believes in its concept and wishes to launch the next-generation social network as soon as possible. The team has a perfect mix of skills to quickly start realizing the next-gen social network.

As Geotopia is a startup company that just opened their doors, they are looking for low-cost initiatives to support them and help them start their business quickly. Microsoft offers a program called BizSpark that helps startup companies succeed and offers them all the resources they need.

BizSpark is a global program that supports startups by offering them access to critical resources, such as software development tools, a network of industry experts to connect to, and marketing support to enhance visibility.

The reason why Microsoft offers this program is that it believes that accelerating startups helps them to build partnerships with future successful companies.

In order to file for a BizSpark position, a company needs to be:

The program is renewed annually and lasts for a maximum of three years ...

After several brown-bag lunch sessions, the people from Geotopia identified several key features, from both a user's perspective and from nonfunctional requirements, that must be implemented in the first release of Geotopia. Time to market is very important and will make or break the success of Geotopia.

Geotopia concluded that the unique concept for their social network is based on location. The standard environment for users will be a map, focused on their current or preset location, that offers them an overview of interesting events, messages, and multimedia localized around their current whereabouts.

The main canvas of Geotopia is a map based on Microsoft's Bing Maps technology and offers the user a central overview of his or her activities and interests, around a specific location.

In order to make Geotopia easy to access and make use of existing identity providers, it will enable users to sign up using their existing credentials (besides signing in with a dedicated Geotopia...

After a few sessions on the brand new concept of Geotopia, a developer built a Geotopia prototype by using Microsoft Expression Blend. This development tool can help you to create Silverlight or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications quickly and helps you prototype or demonstrate initial versions of your product.

See the following screenshot to get an impression of the very first prototype of the Geotopia canvas:

As you can see on the canvas, messages are decorated with a so-called pushpin. In order to be able to filter messages and comments, layering will be added to the solution. Users need to be able to turn layers on and off, grouped by friends, by region, or by interests. The next prototype will contain these concepts. Ideally, only pushpins are shown on the map to get a plain canvas. Hovering over a pushpin will display the comments, photo, video, or other content.

A brand new, ambitious company just opened its doors. Geotopia consists of enthusiastic developers and architects who have jointly created a new view on social networking. This is not a basic user interface where plain text dominates, but a compelling map interface, offering users to treat it as their social canvas and drop video and images and create messages based on their location or on the location of their interest. Users can recommend locations, shops, or other points of interest by adding comments or multimedia and telling their friends about it.

Opening up their solution for mobile users will increase the number of users for Geotopia in an unpredictable way. As the solution evolves, the Windows Azure platform usage will also evolve and necessitate the need for a detailed look inside in the use of Geotopia.

By entering the Microsoft BizSpark program, the company can make use of Windows Azure resources and get in contact with experts and get some marketing power and visibility...