The folks at Canadian Developer Connection are running a series of profiles this week in advance of Canada Day festivities. Jonathan Rozenblit writes:

I thought it would be fitting to celebrate Canada’s birthday by sharing the stories of Canadian developers who have developed applications on the Windows Azure platform. A few weeks ago, I started my search for untold Canadian stories in preparation for my talk, Windows Azure: What’s In the Cloud, at Prairie Dev Con. I was just looking for a few stores, but was actually surprised, impressed, and proud of my fellow Canadians when I was able to connect with several Canadian developers who have either built new applications using Windows Azure services or have migrated existing applications to Windows Azure. What was really amazing to see was the different ways these Canadian developers were Windows Azure to create unique solutions.

The first interview is with John White, CTO of UnlimitedViz (Microsoft SharePoint Server MVP). When the recent federal election was called, White and his team developed Election Night, an application "that would help local campaign scrutineers get their results in quickly and easily":
Jonathan: When you and your team were designing Election Night, what was the rationale behind your decision to develop for the Cloud, and more specifically, to use Windows Azure?

John: The technology to support these requirements have been around for quite some time. However, and election campaign is ephermal. It lives for about 5 weeks and then disappears. The cost required to implement the required infrastructure to support such a solution has been prohibitive, and the skill required to support remote access has been beyond the ability of most local campaigns. Windows Azure was an obvious fit, primarily because it required no infrastructure, but also because it was easy to access from anywhere.

Jonathan: What Windows Azure services are you using? How are you using them?

John: The solution uses both Windows Azure and SQL Azure. The Windows Azure instance contains a Silverlight application that uses RIA Services to connect back to an Entity Framework model. That model connects to the data housed in SQL Azure. In addition, standard ASP.NET pages are also available for interaction with generic smartphones and tablets. When the visualization capabilities were needed by a major media outlet, we were able to package a subset of the application, allow them to deploy it to their Windows Azure instance, and still maintain the data in our SQL Azure instance.

Check out the full interview for more ... and take a look at the actual apps: they're very cool.

What’s In the Cloud: Canada Does Windows Azure – Election Night
Jonathan Rozenblit | 27 Jun 2011
blogs.msdn.com/b/cdndevs/archive/2011/06...-election-night.aspx

Election Mapping In The Cloud With Silverlight and Azure
whitepages.unlimitedviz.com/2011/05/elec...lverlight-and-azure/

To view Election Night Apps
They’re currently available on the PostMedia website here:
www.canada.com/news/decision-canada/past-results-ridings.html
www.canada.com/news/decision-canada/past-results.html

From John White (whitepages.unlimitedviz.com/2011/05/elec...lverlight-and-azure/) Basically, you can see the results for the last two federal elections on a national basis, or on a poll by poll basis for individual ridings.

In case PostMedia removes these links after the current election, you can see the same applications here:

electionresults.cloudapp.net/NationalViewer.aspx

electionresults.cloudapp.net/DistrictViewer.aspx