Here’s the latest roundup of tech- and developer-focused events here in the northeastern US (and several online). Most are free, but the exceptions are noted with [$].
If you know of other free (or nearly free) developer-focused events, please let me know.
-Chris
[Last updated 5/22/2013]
Now Through June 20 Windows 8 Hands-On Labs Online Live presentation and work on lab exercises, with experts offering assistance (by chatting with you one-on-one or by virtually taking control of your lab)
May 22 LIDNUG & Wintellect “Performing Asynchronous I/O Bound Operations” – Jeff Richter
June 5 Microsoft Webcast: Windows 8 App Mashup Webcast Series ”Exploring the Mashery APIs” Microsoft Technical Evangelists walk you through creating a Windows 8 app using Starter Kits based on APIs from Yelp, StackOverflow, Mashery, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, and more.
June 12 Microsoft Webcast: Windows 8 App Mashup Webcast Series ”Exploring Social Networking APIs” Microsoft Technical Evangelists walk you through creating a Windows 8 app using Starter Kits based on APIs from Yelp, StackOverflow, Mashery, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, and more.
June 12 LIDNUG & Developmentor “Building Rich Input Forms in ASP.NET MVC” – Michael Kennedy
June 19 Microsoft Webcast: Windows 8 App Mashup Webcast Series ”Exploring the Yelp API” Microsoft Technical Evangelists walk you through creating a Windows 8 app using Starter Kits based on APIs from Yelp, StackOverflow, Mashery, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, and more.
June 25 Microsoft Webcast: Windows 8 App Mashup Webcast Series ”Exploring the Bing Maps API” Microsoft Technical Evangelists walk you through creating a Windows 8 app using Starter Kits based on APIs from Yelp, StackOverflow, Mashery, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, and more.
Each Friday Startup Café – Hartford, CT ”Friday Mornings at Tisane Café – ‘CountMeIn! Hartford”
May 20 Fairfield/Westchester SQL Server UG - Stamford, CT “Development Lifecycle with SQL Server Data Tools” – John Flannery
May 20 Software Startups – Farmington, CT Monthly Meeting
June 1 MSDN Event – Game Development for Beginners – Farmington, CT Join Microsoft’s Chris Bowen to build a game with Construct 2, even if you’ve never programmed before. You’ll get assistance from getting started through publishing your game to the Windows Store! (Repeats on 6/15 & 29, so join whichever works best for you, or more than one if you’d like!)
June 8 MSDN Event – Windows 8 Mashup Series – Farmington, CT Join Microsoft to learn about tapping into the world of APIs to create your own Windows Store app. This event is part-lecture, and part hands-on, so bring a laptop with Windows 8 and get ready to code! (This workshop repeats, but with a different API, on 6/22, so join whichever works best for you, or more than one if you’d like!)
June 11 ByteArray CT – TBD ”Learn jQuery / jQuery Mobile Fundamentals”
June 12 New Haven Design & Technology Meetup – New Haven, CT ”Monthly Networking Event”
June 13 Startup Café – Farmington, CT “Xcellr8 Innovation Cell”
June 15 MSDN Event – Game Development for Beginners – Farmington, CT Join Microsoft’s Chris Bowen to build a game with Construct 2, even if you’ve never programmed before. You’ll get assistance from getting started through publishing your game to the Windows Store! (This workshop repeats on 6/29, so join whichever works best for you, or more than one if you’d like!)
June 17 Software Startups – Farmington, CT Monthly Meeting
June 19 ByteArray CT – Storrs, CT ”One Developer’s Experience with Windows Phone” – Tim Laubacher
June 22 MSDN Event – Windows 8 Mashup Series – Farmington, CT Join Microsoft’s Chris Bowen to learn about tapping into the world of APIs to create your own Windows Store app. This event is part-lecture, and part hands-on, so bring a laptop with Windows 8 and get ready to code!
June 29 MSDN Event – Game Development for Beginners – Farmington, CT Join Microsoft to build a game with Construct 2, even if you’ve never programmed before. You’ll get assistance from getting started through publishing your game to the Windows Store!
Schedule TBA Agile Connecticut - Farmington, CT Connecticut .NET Developers Group – Farmington, CT Connecticut Access Users Group – Farmington, CT Connecticut SharePoint User Group – Farmington, CT Connecticut Web Innovators – Hartford, CT Fairfield County SharePoint User Group – Fairfield, CT Fairfield/Westchester .NET User Group – Stamford, CT Hartford Area Build Guild – Hartford, CT Hartford Tech Meetup – Hartford, CT HartfordJS – Wethersfield, CT Proto Greater Hartford ACM Chapter – East Hartford, CT
May 28 Bangor Area .Net Developers (BAND) - Bangor, ME
June 19 Django Maine – Portland, ME ”How to Build a REST API with Django” – Hugh Morgenbesser
June 20 Southern Maine Microsoft User Group – Portland, ME ”Microsoft Exchange 2013”
June 25 Bangor Area .Net Developers (BAND) - Bangor, ME
Schedule TBA Maine Agile User Group – Portland, ME Maine Bytes User Group - Portland, ME Maine Developer Network - Augusta, ME Portland Maine Startup – Portland, ME SharePoint Maine User Group – Portland, ME
Every Tuesday Microsoft Office Hours (11:30 AM – 1:30 PM) – Cambridge, MA Get help with your Windows 8 or Windows Phone app/game idea or project. Test devices available as well. No appointment necessary, just show up (at our 1 Cambridge Center office).
May 20 Boston Indies - Boston, MA All about independent game development
May 21 Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA “May Presentation Night” – Kenneth Reitz
May 21 intelligent.ly – Boston, MA ”Legal Land Mines: What to Know When Starting Your Startup” – Mick Bain & Janene Asgeirsson
May 22 Boston Windows Game Developers – Cambridge, MA
May 22 Boston Front End Developers – Boston, MA ”Data Visualization in the Browser” – Rob Larsen
May 22 Boston PHP Meetup – Cambridge, MA “Show n’ Tell & Code as Well”
May 22 Agile Boston User Group (Waltham) - Waltham, MA
May 23 Agile Boston User Group (Boston) – Boston, MA
May 23 Boston Predictive Analytics – Cambridge, MA “Interactive Web Visualization - Project, Networking, and Startup Night”
May 23 Worcester Web Technology – Worcester, MA “Using LESS or SASS to Improve Your CSS Workflow”
May 23 Boston New Technology Meetup – Allston, MA “May 2013 Boston New Technology Meetup #bnt29”
May 23 *New Group!* Cape Cod Startup – Centerville, MA “Meet, eat and get to know others in the startup community”
May 23 *New Group!* Cloud Centric Boston – Andover, MA “Score the Cloud!”
May 24 Northampton Web Developers – Northampton, MA ”Northampton Web Dive – After Dark”
May 27 Boston WordPress – Cambridge, MA WordPress 10th Anniversary Party
May 28 Boston WordPress – Cambridge, MA “Importing Content Into WP Using WP-CLI [Dev] and TBA [Beg]”
May 28 Cascade BOS – Boston, MA “What Are Designers Thinking?”
May 28 App Development Meetup – Hingham, MA ”Coffee + Chat + Networking (South Shore)”
May 29 HTML5 Boston – Boston, MA “Lightning Talks on JS Frameworks”
May 30 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA ”Matthew Grace Has an Azure Framework”
May 30 Lean Startup Circle Meetup – Cambridge, MA “Continuous Deployment: Better Software, Faster”
May 30 OpenHack Boston – Boston, MA
June 1 MSDN Event – Windows 8 Mashup Series – Cambridge, MA Join Microsoft to learn about tapping into the world of APIs to create your own Windows Store app. This event is part-lecture, and part hands-on, so bring a laptop with Windows 8 and get ready to code! (This workshop repeats, but with a different API, on June 15th, so join whichever works best for your schedule, or more than one if you’d like!)
June 1 Boston WordPress – Cambridge, MA “Boston WP + Toolbox Beginner WordPress Workshop” & “Boston WP + Toolbox Intermediate WordPress Workshop”
June 4 Northampton Web Developers – Northampton, MA ”Northampton Web Dive”
June 5 Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA “June Project Night”
June 6 Microsoft DevBoston – Cambridge, MA “RESTful Service Design with the Web API” – Rob Daigneau
June 6 New England Microsoft Professionals - Waltham, MA “New Features of Azure”
June 6 Boston Mobile C# Developers’ Group – Cambridge, MA “Using Xamarin with Visual Studio”
June 10 Mobile Monday Boston – Boston, MA Tablet Commerce
June 10 *New Group!* Boston Cloud Computing 2.0 – Burlington, MA Boston Cloud Computing 2.0 Kickoff
June 10 *New Group!* Enterprise Web Library Developers’ Group – Framingham, MA
June 10 [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”Wrangling HTML (2-class series)”
June 11 Boston Windows 8 Meetup – Cambridge, MA ”Big Windows 8 App Development Meeting!”
June 11 New England Artificial Intelligence – Cambridge, MA “AI, Pizza, & Beer”
June 12 Boston Accessibility Roundtable – Cambridge, MA
June 13 New England SQL Server User Group – Cambridge, MA “Database Design with CA and SoftMart”
June 15 MSDN Event – Windows 8 Mashup Series – Cambridge, MA Join Microsoft to learn about tapping into the world of APIs to create your own Windows Store app. This event is part-lecture, and part hands-on, so bring a laptop with Windows 8 and get ready to code!
June 18 Hacks / Hackers Boston – Cambridge, MA “From Blogger.com to Kim Dotcom: Legal Considerations of Digital Publishing” – Amy Mugherini & Larry Stanley
June 18 App Development Meetup – Cambridge, MA ”App Development: What’s Hot, What’s Next?”
June 19 Boston Area SharePoint Users Group – Cambridge, MA “Build, Customize of Buy?” – Richard Harbridge
June 19 Tech in Motion - Cambridge, MA “Building Cross-Platform Native Mobile Apps in C# Using Xamarin 2.0” – Talbott Crowell
June 19 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA “HTML5 Game Development Monthly Meetup”
June 20 Worcester Web Technology – Worcester, MA “Twitter Bootstrap: Simple HTML, CSS, and JS for User Interfaces”
June 22 MSDN Event: Game Development for Beginners – Cambridge, MA Join Microsoft to build a game with Construct 2, even if you’ve never programmed before. You’ll get assistance from getting started through publishing your game to the Windows Store!
June 24 *New Group!* Greater Boston Software Testing Interest Group – TBD Inaugural Meeting – “The Value of Software Testing” - Keith Klain
June 24 [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”CSS Basics (2-class series)”
June 24 Web Innovators Group – Cambridge, MA
June 25 Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA “June Presentation Night”
June 25 Cascade BOS – Boston, MA “Leveraging the Cascade”
June 26 Boston Windows Game Developers – Cambridge, MA
June 27 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA ”Cloud Storage (Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3)”
June 27 Lean Startup Circle Meetup – Cambridge, MA
Schedule TBA Beantown ALT.NET Group – Cambridge, MA Boston .NET Architecture Study Group - Waltham, MA Boston Arduino Users Group – Somerville, MA Boston Area Pluralsight Study Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Artists + Coders – Boston, MA Boston BizSpark Meetup – Cambridge, MA Boston Business Intelligence – Cambridge, MA Boston Cloud Services – Waltham, MA Boston d3.js User Group – Cambridge, MA Boston JavaScript Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Node.js Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Orchard CMS User Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Software Craftsmanship – Cambridge, MA Boston Software Engineering Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Unity Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Web Design Meetup – Cambridge, MA Boston Web Performance Group – Boston, MA Build Guild Salem – Salem, MA Build Guild Cape Cod - Sandwich, MA Cape Cod .NET – Plymouth, MA Cloudy Mondays – Newton Center, MA DotNetNuke Boston Meetup – Cambridge (TBD), MA Drinks on Tap – Boston, MA Emerging Business Tech – Cambridge, MA Game Dev Night – Boston, MA HPC & GPU Supercomputing Group of Boston – Cambridge, MA jQuery Boston Meetup – Boston, MA Kinect Boston Users Group – Cambridge, MA MetroWest Web Developers – Maynard, MA New England F# User Group – Cambridge, MA New England Windows Phone User and Developer Group - Waltham, MA Node.js in the Wild – Boston, MA North Shore Web Geeks – Newburyport, MA OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Cambridge, MA Refresh Boston – Cambridge, MA Western Mass Microsoft Technology Users Group - Agawam, MA
May 22 Web Dev Meetup – Portsmouth, NH ”Web Dev Lightning Talks”
May 30 NH PHP – Manchester, NH “Reboot – With Guest Speaker Alan Forbes”
June 5 Seacoast NH WordPress Developers – Portsmouth, NH
June 6 *New Group!* Seacoast Drupal User Group – Portsmouth, NH
June 12 *New Group!* Seacoast Mobile Group – Portsmouth, NH
June 20 *New Group!* Granite State Windows Phone Users Group – Salem, NH
June 21 Seacoast SQL Server Users Group – Portsmouth, NH “Adam Machanic & Windowing Functions!”
Schedule TBA eBrew – Portsmouth, NH Granite State SharePoint User Group – Nashua, NH Joomla NH User Group – Durham, NH Nashua CLOUD .NET User Group – Nashua, NH NH .NET User Group, Concord – Concord, NH NH .NET User Group, Seacoast – Portsmouth, NH NH Database Meetup – Manchester, NH Portsmouth Startup Meetup – Portsmouth, NH Systems Engineering and Administration Technical User Group – Portsmouth, NH
May 21 Tech Valley .NET Users Group – Albany, NY “App Product Development Concepts” – Richard Nalezynski
May 21 Ithaca Web People – Ithaca, NY ”Third Tuesday”
May 21 Syracuse Innovators Guild – Syracuse, NY ”All About LabVIEW”
May 30 Syracuse Innovators Guild – Syracuse, NY ”Arduino 201”
May 31 Tech Meetup – Syracuse, NY ”Rounded Presents Doug Crescenzi”
June 4 AppRochester – Rochester, NY “Exploring Photoshop for Pixel Art”
June 4 Ithaca Web People – Ithaca, NY ”Beer and Code”
June 5 Central New York .NET Developer Group - East Syracuse, NY “Blend for Visual Studio: Creating Windows Store Apps” – Andy Beaulieu
June 5 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
June 6 Rochester Tech Startups – Rochester, NY ”Startup Drinks”
June 11 Buffalo PHP – Buffalo, NY
June 18 Ithaca Web People – Ithaca, NY ”Third Tuesday”
June 19 Microsoft Developers of Western NY – Buffalo, NY “Advanced PowerShell Scripting”
June 20 Rochester Ruby Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
Schedule TBA Build Guild – Troy, NY Capital Area SQL Server Users Group – Albany, NY IA/UX Rochester (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY OpenHack Rochester – Rochester, NY OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Rochester, NY Refresh Rochester – Rochester, NY Rochester SharePoint User Group – Rochester, NY Syracuse Game Makers – Syracuse, NY Upstate NY PowerShell Users Group – Rochester, NY Visual Developers of Upstate NY - Rochester, NY Western New York Back Office Technology User Group – Blasdell, NY Western NY SQL Server PASS – Amherst, NY
May 28 Providence UX Meetup – Providence, RI ”Designers with Drinks”
May 30 Prov.JS – Providence, RI “Create Cross Platform Apps with Appcelerator Titanium” – Michael Tracy
June 5 Rhode Island SharePoint User Group – Providence, RI
June 12 Southern New England SQL Server Users Group – East Greenwich, RI “Using File Partitioning and Data Compression for an Effective Data Warehouse Solution” – John Miner
June 13 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI ”Freeform discussion of all things web”
June 19 Providence Geeks – Providence, RI
June 25 Providence UX Meetup – Providence, RI ”Designers with Drinks”
June 27 Prov.JS – Providence, RI “Testing with Node, Mocha, and jsdom” – Sam Saccone
Schedule TBA MoDevRI (Mobile Developers & Entrepreneurs) – Providence, RI Providence Functional Programmers – Providence, RI Providence PHP Meetup – Providence, RI WordPress Providence Meetup – Providence, RI
May 22 Burlington Web Application Group (BTVWAG) – Burlington, VT “Tools of the Trade”
May 28 Northern Vermont SharePoint Users Group – Essex Junction, VT “Sustainable SharePoint 2010 Customizations” – Bill Keys
June 3 [$] Girl Develop It Burlington – Burlington, VT ”Intro to HTML/CSS”
June 10 Vermont .NET User Group – Winooski, VT “Using the Decorator Design Pattern to Address Cross-Cutting Concerns”
June 20 Girl Develop It Burlington – Burlington, VT ”Code & Coffee”
Schedule TBA Burlington JavaScript – Burlington, VT Burlington PHP Users Group – Burlington, VT
As you consider your Windows 8 game development options, have a look at Construct 2 by Scirra. It helps you create games quickly, providing a visual, no-coding-required experience supporting a number of platforms, including the Windows Store and Windows Phone. (And behind the scenes, games are based on JavaScript and HTML5!)
There’s a free version of Construct 2 available (just read the terms so you know what’s supported) and plenty of resources to help you learn:
When you create a new project, you’ll see many helpful options, from simple examples to full games with walkthroughs. Nine of these (named “Template: …”) are game starters, including platformer, driving, turret defense, and other types of games. You should try each of them and look through them to see how they work.
Construct 2 supports publishing Windows Store games, but you need to support a few things, so I’ve extended the nine included game templates with features like the Windows 8 object, a “Pause" layer, snapped view support (with game pause), touch support, and some project property updates.
With thanks to Scirra, here are the 9 templates, available on GitHub:
Download all templates as a ZIP, or get individual templates below, just click the link and choose “View Raw”, which will let you save the template.
After you select a template, you’ll want to customize the game to your liking with new images, mechanics, sounds… whatever you can imagine! When you’re ready to publish to the Windows Store, just follow these steps.
And with each game you publish, you can earn money with the Keep the Cash offer through June 30, 2013!
Enjoy! And drop me a line if you find these useful or have any recommendations to make them more helpful.
[Last updated 4/12/2013]
Now Through April 30 Windows 8 Hands-On Labs Online Live presentation and work on lab exercises, with experts offering assistance (by chatting with you one-on-one or by virtually taking control of your lab)
April 4 LIDNUG & Wintellect “IntelliTrace – The Key to Better Day-to-Day Debugging” – John Robbins
April 9 Windows Game Development with Unity Live stream on Channel 9 (from the in-person event, running April 8-10 in Mountain View, CA)
April 1 Fairfield/Westchester .NET User Group – Stamford, CT “Test Driven Development: Blueprint Toolbox and Master Craft” – Stephen Ritchie
April 2 Agile Connecticut - Farmington, CT “Planning for User Story Gold” – Damon Poole
April 3, 10, 17, 24 Startup Café – Hartford, CT ”Informal Hartford Co-Working”
April 4, 11, 18, 25, & May 1 ByteArray CT – Storrs, CT ”HTML Course” (5 parts) – Mark Lassof
April 9 Connecticut .NET Developers Group – Farmington, CT “Introduction to Microsoft TypeScript” – Allan Da Costa Pinto
April 9 Hartford Area Build Guild – Hartford, CT “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
April 9 *New Group!* Proto Greater Hartford ACM Chapter – East Hartford, CT ”Can You Be a Little Bit Agile?” – Sue Burk
April 10 Connecticut Access Users Group – Farmington, CT
April 10 New Haven Design & Technology Meetup – New Haven, CT ”Monthly Networking Event”
April 12 Fairfield/Westchester SQL Server UG - Stamford, CT “T-SQL Enhancements in SQL Server 2012” – Lenni Lobel
April 15 CTDEVSTARTUP (CT Software Developer Startups) – Farmington, CT ”The Lean Startup Process for Mobile Apps” – Bob Familiar ”Mobile Healthcare Startup – Applivate” – John Fitzpatrick
April 18 *New Group!* HartfordJS – Wethersfield, CT Fist meeting & lightning talks
April 27 ByteArray CT – Storrs, CT ”HTML5 Mobile App Development with PhoneGap” – Mark Lassof
May 8 New Haven Design & Technology Meetup – New Haven, CT ”Monthly Networking Event”
May 18 Hartford Code Camp 6 – Bloomfield, CT
Schedule TBA Connecticut SharePoint User Group – Farmington, CT Connecticut Web Innovators – Hartford, CT Fairfield County SharePoint User Group – Fairfield, CT Hartford Tech Meetup – Hartford, CT
April 4 Southern Maine Microsoft User Group – Portland, ME ”SQL Server – SSIS 2012 and Data Quality Services”
April 5 Maine Agile Gathering – Portland, ME
April 9 SharePoint Maine User Group – Portland, ME Chris McNulty
April 16 Maine Agile User Group – Portland, ME Mobile Agile development with Alex Bakman
April 23 Bangor Area .Net Developers (BAND) - Bangor, ME
May 14 SharePoint Maine User Group – Portland, ME Chris McNulty
May 16 Southern Maine Microsoft User Group – Portland, ME ”SQL Server Performance Monitoring”
Schedule TBA Maine Bytes User Group - Portland, ME Maine Developer Network - Augusta, ME
April 2 Drinks on Tap – Boston, MA “Demos, Drinks and Discussions About Mobile Development (21+)”
April 2 intelligent.ly – Boston, MA ”Building a Modern Web Application: Full Stack JavaScript” – Jamie Davidson & Roberto Fuentes
April 2 Northampton Web Developers – Northampton, MA ”Northampton Web Dive”
April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 Windows 8 Office Hours (11:30 AM – 1:30 PM) – Cambridge, MA Get help with your Windows 8 app/game idea or project. Test devices available as well. No appointment necessary, just show up (at our 1 Cambridge Center office).
April 2 Boston Software Engineering Meetup – Boston, MA “Cloud Data Night Sponsored by NUODB”
April 4 Microsoft DevBoston – Cambridge, MA “SignalR – Real Time Web Apps in ASP.NET” – Phil Denoncourt
April 4 New England Microsoft Professionals - Waltham, MA “Windows 8 Phone Development” – Lance McCarthy (Nokia)
April 4 Boston JavaScript Meetup – Boston, MA “The Future of JS Modules and Dependency Management” – John Hann
April 6 SQL Saturday Boston – Cambridge, MA
April 7 Northampton Web Developers – Northampton, MA ”JavaScript: Help!”
April 8 Mobile Monday Boston – Boston, MA Mobile Healthcare
April 9 Boston Windows 8 Meetup – Cambridge, MA ”Windows 8 Games & Social Apps Event” – Bob Familiar & Michael Cummings (Microsoft) Note this group is meeting at Microsoft’s One Cambridge Center office (not NERD)
April 9 Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA “April Project Night”
April 9 Build Guild Salem – Salem, MA Build Guild Cape Cod - Sandwich, MA “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
April 9 New England Artificial Intelligence – Cambridge, MA “AI, Pizza, & Beer”
April 10 Boston Area SharePoint Users Group – Cambridge, MA “Overview of the Top 10 Ways that SharePoint Will Help Drive End User Adoption” – Chris Bortlik
April 11 Boston Web Performance Group – Boston, MA “Waterfall Anti-Patterns” – Rick Viscomi
April 11 New England SQL Server User Group – Cambridge, MA “Deciding Between Relational Databases and Storage Tables in the Cloud” – Michael Stiefel
April 11 [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”Wrangling HTML (2-class series)”
April 11 [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”Get Started with iOS (2-class series)”
April 11 Worcester Web Technology – Worcester, MA “High Performance Agile Teams”
April 13 Boston d3.js User Group – Cambridge, MA “Open Discussion – Hackday”
April 13 & 14 The Boston Hackathon – Cambridge, MA Learn to write great Windows Phone apps with Lance McCarthy of Nokia & Telerik.
April 15 Boston Indies - Boston, MA All about independent game development
April 16 Boston Unity Group – Cambridge, MA “Applifier and EveryPlay”
April 16 Boston Predictive Analytics – Cambridge, MA “Interactive Web Visualizations”
April 16 Refresh Boston – Cambridge, MA “Design is Common Ground: Creating Community Through Design” – Sam Aquillano & Derek Cascio (Design Museum Boston)
April 17 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA “HTML5 Game Development Monthly Meetup”
April 17 Boston PHP Meetup – Cambridge, MA “Solution Design: The Hidden Side of UX” – Joe Baz
April 17 Boston Accessibility Roundtable – Cambridge, MA
April 17 Node.js in the Wild – Boston, MA ”Debugging Node.js Applications”
April 17 Hacks / Hackers Boston – Cambridge, MA “Fighting the Bar Chart: Workshop at MIT”
April 17 Hacks / Hackers Boston – Cambridge, MA “LinkedIn for Professionals”
April 20 Boston Arduino Users Group – Somerville, MA “Hardware Freedom Day”
April 22 Boston WordPress – Cambridge, MA
April 23 Boston New Technology Meetup – Allston, MA “April 2013 Boston New Technology Meetup #bnt28”
April 23 [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”Web Applications: PHP (4-class series)”
April 24 Boston Windows Game Developers – Cambridge, MA
April 24 Boston Front End Developers – Boston, MA ”Introduction to Ember with Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale of Tilde”
April 24 Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA “April Presentation Night”
April 24 Hacks / Hackers Boston – Cambridge, MA “Dave Winer: Using HTML5 as a Platform”
April 24 Agile Boston User Group (Waltham) - Waltham, MA
April 25 Agile Boston User Group (Boston) – Boston, MA
April 25 [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”CSS Basics (2-class series)”
April 25 Lean Startup Circle Meetup – Cambridge, MA
April 26-28 New England GiveCamp 2013 – Cambridge, MA ”GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where technology professionals – including designers, developers and database administrators as well as marketers and web strategists – donate their time and unique talents to provide software solutions for local charities and other non-profit organizations”
April 27 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA ”Global Windows Azure Bootcamp”
April 30 Tech in Motion - Cambridge, MA “Clash of the Clouds: Azure vs. Open Source Cloud Services”
May 1 Boston JavaScript Meetup – Boston, MA “May Project Night”
May 2 Western Mass Microsoft Technology Users Group - Agawam, MA “Web API” – Adam Santaniello
May 6 Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA “May Project Night”
May 7 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA ”PowerShell on Azure: Turbocharging Azure Automation” – Aleksandar Nikolic
May 13 Drinks on Tap – Boston, MA “Demos, Drinks and Discussions About Mobile Development (21+)”
May 15 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA “HTML5 Game Development Monthly Meetup”
May 15 Boston Accessibility Roundtable – Cambridge, MA
May 18 [$] Security B-Sides – Cambridge, MA ”Launched in mid-2009, Security BSides is a community-driven framework for building events for and by information security community members.”
May 22 Boston PHP Meetup – Cambridge, MA “Universal Analytics: The Future of Digital Measurement” – Justin Cutroni
May 23 Boston Predictive Analytics – Cambridge, MA “Project, Networking, and Startup Night”
May 30 Lean Startup Circle Meetup – Cambridge, MA
Schedule TBA Beantown ALT.NET Group – Cambridge, MA Boston .NET Architecture Study Group - Waltham, MA Boston Area Pluralsight Study Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Artists + Coders – Boston, MA Boston BizSpark Meetup – Cambridge, MA Boston Business Intelligence – Cambridge, MA Boston Cloud Services – Waltham, MA Boston Mobile C# Developers’ Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Node.js Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Orchard CMS User Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Software Craftsmanship – Cambridge, MA Boston Web Design Meetup – Cambridge, MA Cape Cod .NET – Plymouth, MA Cascade BOS – Boston, MA Cloudy Mondays – Newton Center, MA DotNetNuke Boston Meetup – Cambridge (TBD), MA Emerging Business Tech – Cambridge, MA Game Dev Night – Boston, MA HPC & GPU Supercomputing Group of Boston – Cambridge, MA HTML5 Boston – Boston, MA jQuery Boston Meetup – Boston, MA Kinect Boston Users Group – Cambridge, MA MetroWest Web Developers – Maynard, MA New England F# User Group – Cambridge, MA New England Windows Phone User and Developer Group - Waltham, MA North Shore Web Geeks – Newburyport, MA OpenHack Boston – Boston, MA OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Cambridge, MA Web Innovators Group – Cambridge, MA
April 2 NH .NET User Group, Concord – Concord, NH “JavaScript Games for Windows 8 with CreateJS” – Chris Bowen
April 3 Seacoast NH WordPress Developers – Portsmouth, NH
April 9 NH .NET User Group, Concord – Concord, NH “Win 8 Apps Boot Camp Series: MonoGame” – Michael Cummings
April 10 Portsmouth Startup Meetup – Portsmouth, NH “Startup Meetup – Beer and Pizza”
April 11 Granite State SharePoint User Group – Nashua, NH ”Automating Business Processes with SharePoint: InfoPath, Workflows, MS Access – 2010, 2013” – Marcel Meth
April 17 Nashua CLOUD .NET User Group – Nashua, NH ”Basic Windows Phone 8 Application Development with XAML & C#” – John Garland
April 24 Web Dev Meetup – Portsmouth, NH ”Web Dev Lightning Talks”
May 16 *New Group!* Granite State Windows Phone Users Group – Salem, NH
Schedule TBA eBrew – Portsmouth, NH Joomla NH User Group – Durham, NH NH .NET User Group, Seacoast – Portsmouth, NH NH Database Meetup – Manchester, NH NH PHP – Manchester, NH Seacoast SQL Server Users Group – Portsmouth, NH Systems Engineering and Administration Technical User Group – Portsmouth, NH
April 2 AppRochester – Rochester, NY
April 2 Ithaca Web People – Ithaca, NY ”Beer and Code”
April 3 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
April 4 Rochester Tech Startups – Rochester, NY ”Startup Drinks”
April 5 Refresh Rochester – Rochester, NY “How to Stay Authentic in a Self-Marketing World” - Andrea Levendusky
April 6 & 7 Hack Upstate – Syracuse, NY
April 8 Capital Area SQL Server Users Group – Albany, NY Alex Silverstein
April 9 Microsoft Developers of Western NY – Buffalo, NY “Bridging the Gap Between Business Administration and Development
April 9 Buffalo PHP – Cheektowaga, NY
April 9 Tech Valley .NET Users Group – Albany, NY “LightSwitch” – Michael Phipps
April 17 Rochester Tech Startups – Rochester, NY ”Lessons Learned at SoftLock.com” – Jon Schull
April 18 Rochester Ruby Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
April 20 BarCamp Rochester – Rochester, NY
April 23 Syracuse Innovators Guild – Syracuse, NY ”An Introduction to Knockout.js Framework”
April 24 OpenHack Rochester – Rochester, NY
May 1 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
May 2 Rochester Tech Startups – Rochester, NY ”Startup Drinks”
May 7 Ithaca Web People – Ithaca, NY ”Beer and Code”
May 11 SQL Saturday Rochester – Rochester, NY
May 14 Buffalo PHP – Cheektowaga, NY
May 15 Rochester Tech Startups – Rochester, NY ”Quick Pitch Night”
May 16 Rochester Ruby Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
Schedule TBA Build Guild – Troy, NY Central New York .NET Developer Group - East Syracuse, NY IA/UX Rochester (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Rochester, NY Rochester SharePoint User Group – Rochester, NY Syracuse Game Makers – Syracuse, NY Upstate NY PowerShell Users Group – Rochester, NY Visual Developers of Upstate NY - Rochester, NY Western New York Back Office Technology User Group – Blasdell, NY Western NY SQL Server PASS – Amherst, NY
April 3 Rhode Island SharePoint User Group – Providence, RI ”SharePoint 2013 – IT Pro Overview” – Jason Himmelstein
April 10 Southern New England SQL Server Users Group – East Greenwich, RI “SSIS Best Practices, Tips and Techniques” – Bryan Cafferky
April 11 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI ”Freeform discussion of all things web”
April 16 WordPress Providence Meetup – Providence, RI “Mobile Ready Responsive Sliders and Slideshows” – Michael Tracy
April 17 Providence Geeks – Providence, RI
April 23 Providence UX Meetup – Providence, RI ”Designers with Drinks”
May 9 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI ”Freeform discussion of all things web”
May 15 Providence Geeks – Providence, RI
Schedule TBA MoDevRI (Mobile Developers & Entrepreneurs) – Providence, RI Prov.JS – Providence, RI Providence Functional Programmers – Providence, RI Providence PHP Meetup – Providence, RI
April 10 *New Group!* Burlington JavaScript – Burlington, VT ”Lighting up with Ember.js” – Peter Brown “Paper.js” – Ian Metcalf
April 13 [$] Girl Develop It Burlington – Burlington, VT ”Intro to HTML/CSS”
April 15 Vermont .NET User Group – Winooski, VT
April 29 Northern Vermont SharePoint Users Group – Essex Junction, VT “SharePoint 2013: What’s New in Social” – Erica Toelle
May 13 Vermont .NET User Group – Winooski, VT
Schedule TBA Burlington PHP Users Group – Burlington, VT Burlington Web Application Group (BTVWAG) – Burlington, VT
Have you used Unity for game development? As announced by Unity, you’ll be able to put your work to even more use with coming support for Windows 8 / Windows Store games:
Unity Blog: "Unity 4 Early Access for Windows Store apps"
To help Unity developers learn how to create or reuse projects to reach the Windows Store, Unity is teaming with Microsoft to run a free event in Mountain View, CA from April 8-10:
Can’t make it in person? Not a problem. The main conference day (April 9th) will be streamed live via Channel 9:
For fellow Boston-area devs, a quick pointer to the Boston Unity Group, meeting monthly to network and share game development goodness.
Boston Code Camp, formerly New England Code Camp, is a community-driven day for hundreds of developers, returning on March 9th for its 19th event!
Registration (always free) has just opened! The Call for Speakers is also open, but closing soon (more below).
Boston Code Camp 19 Saturday, March 9, 2013 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM Microsoft, 1 Memorial Dr., Cambridge, MA www.bostoncodecamp.com #boscc
Code Camps are free events, held outside of regular work hours, organized by and for the developer community, offering a chance to learn, share, and network. They started here in New England in 2004 and have spread worldwide.
This will be the second time that Camp will be held in Cambridge, MA (after the first 17 events in Waltham, MA) again at the Microsoft New England Research & Development (aka NERD) Center. First time visiting NERD? Here are directions and parking details.
What kind of stuff might you see? Anything for tech pros and developers is fair game, and specific topics vary camp to camp, but take a look at the previous camp’s schedule to get an idea of how things work.
From first-time presenters to veterans of national conferences, Code Camps are made great because we hear from many perspectives – including yours. Have something to share? The community wants to hear from you!
How? Just create an account on the BCC site, then log in to submit as many session abstracts as you like. Proposals can be for any technology topic and sessions will likely be 70 minutes long.
However, don’t wait. The Call for Speakers will close on February 22nd.
Contributors (aka sponsors) are an important part of each Code Camp, providing the fuel for a day-long Code Camp experience.
Consider becoming a contributor, and if you have any questions or want to help, please contact the organizers.
Thanks to the organizing team: Robert Goodearl, Patrick Hynds, Chris Pels, and John Zablocki for the hours of planning and the care & feeding of this event.
Thanks also to the supporting companies and of course to the many speakers who volunteer their time and expertise.
See you all at Boston Code Camp 19!
[Last updated 12/5/2012]
Now Through January 11 Windows 8 Hands-On Labs Online Live presentation and work on lab exercises, with experts offering assistance (by chatting with you one-on-one or by virtually taking control of your lab)
December 6 LIDNUG & Wintellect “Pixel Shaders, Custom HLSL Supercharge your XAML” – Walt Ritsher
December 12 & 13 Windows Store App Development for iOS Developers Live stream at http://channel9.msdn.com (from in-person event in Mountain View, CA)
January 9 LIDNUG “Scott Guthrie XV Open Q&A”
December 3 Fairfield/Westchester .NET User Group – Stamford, CT “Smackdown: Metro Style Apps vs. Websites” – Ben Dewey
December 5, 12, 19, 26 Startup Café – Hartford, CT ”Informal Hartford Co-Working”
December 11 Hartford Area Build Guild – Hartford, CT “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
December 11 Connecticut SharePoint User Group – Farmington, CT “Leveraging the Power of SharePoint 2013 Search” – Reddy Kadasani & Mike Gerety
December 12 Fairfield County SharePoint User Group – Fairfield, CT
December 12 Connecticut Access Users Group – Farmington, CT
January 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 Startup Café – Hartford, CT ”Informal Hartford Co-Working”
Schedule TBA Agile Connecticut - Farmington, CT Connecticut .NET Developers Group – Farmington, CT Connecticut Web Innovators – Hartford, CT Fairfield/Westchester SQL Server UG - Stamford, CT Hartford Tech Meetup – Hartford, CT
December 11 SharePoint Maine User Group – Portland, ME “The Ribbon UI and Custom Actions in SharePoint 2010”
Schedule TBA Bangor Area .Net Developers (BAND) - Bangor, ME Maine Agile User Group – Portland, ME Maine Bytes User Group - Portland, ME Maine Developer Network - Augusta, ME
December 3 Web Innovators Group & Mobile Monday Boston – Cambridge, MA Special Joint Event - http://webinnomobile.eventbrite.com
December 4 Boston Business Intelligence – Waltham, MA ”Test Data Generation for SQL Server Using Visual Studio” – Slava Kokaev
December 4 [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”Practical & Realistic SEO”
December 4 Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA “December Project Night”
December 5 (1-5 PM) Windows 8 Office Hours – Cambridge, MA Get help with your Windows 8 app/game idea or project. Test devices available as well. No appointment necessary, just show up (at our 1 Cambridge Center office).
December 5 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA “Project Night!”
December 6 Microsoft DevBoston – Cambridge, MA “Hacker vs. Hacker” – Patrick Hynds & Duane Laflotte
December 6 New England Microsoft Professionals (formerly NE VB Professionals)- Waltham, MA “MVC vs. WebForms – Why Would You Use MVC?” – Carl Bergenhem
December 6 New England Mobile C# Developers’ Group – Cambridge, MA “Nokia DVLUP for Windows Phone Developers” – Lance McCarthy
December 6 Worcester Web Technology – Worcester, MA “KnockoutJS: Simplify JavaScript UIs with the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) Pattern”
December 6 [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”Project Night”
December 11 Boston Windows 8 Meetup – Cambridge, MA ”Top Windows 8 App Experts & Tips: Free Pizza & Prizes! Welcome W8, iOS & Android”. Note this group is meeting in our new One Cambridge Center office (not NERD)
December 11 Build Guild Salem – Salem, MA “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
December 11 Build Guild Cape Cod - Sandwich, MA “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
December 11 Boston Web Performance Group – Boston, MA “Environmental Design on the Web” – Tim Wright
December 12 (1-5 PM) Windows 8 Office Hours – Cambridge, MA Get help with your Windows 8 app/game idea or project. Test devices available as well. No appointment necessary, just show up (at our 1 Cambridge Center office).
December 12 Boston PHP Meetup – Cambridge, MA “How to Become a Web Developer” & “Celebrate 10 Years of Boston PHP” – Larry Ullman
December 12 Boston Accessibility Roundtable – Cambridge, MA
December 13 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA ”WazOps – DevOps on Windows Azure” – Todd Mancini
December 13 New England SQL Server User Group – Cambridge, MA “Lightning Talks”
December 14 HPC & GPU Supercomputing Group of Boston – Cambridge, MA ”2012 Wrap-up”
December 17 New England F# User Group – Cambridge, MA “M-Brace – F# in the Cloud” – George Stavroulakis
December 17 Boston Indies - Boston, MA
December 18 Boston Windows 8 Meetup – Cambridge, MA ”Windows Phone 8 Apps – Everything You Need to Know. Meet the Experts”. Note this group is meeting in our new One Cambridge Center office (not NERD)
December 18 Boston Unity Group – Cambridge, MA
December 18 Boston New Technology Meetup – Boston, MA Tech products and startup community
December 18 Boston BizSpark Meetup – Cambridge, MA “Funded Founders Panel and Networking”
December 19 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA ”Windows 8 HTML5 Game Development” – Chris Bowen
December 19 Boston XNA Developers Group – Cambridge, MA
December 19 Node.js in the Wild – Boston, MA ”Node.js in an Embedded Environment” – David Alexander & Matt Walters
January 3 New England Microsoft Professionals (formerly NE VB Professionals)- Waltham, MA “Building Windows Store Applications” – Kevin Ford
January 7 Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA “December Project Night”
January 8 New England Artificial Intelligence – Cambridge, MA “AI, Pizza, & Beer”
January 10 New England SQL Server User Group – Cambridge, MA “Big Data and Cloud at Microsoft” – Mark Souza
January 10 * New Group * Boston Area Pluralsight Study Group – Cambridge, MA ”SharePoint Developer Ramp-Up Part 1”
January 16 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA
January 16 Boston PHP Meetup – Cambridge, MA “Usability Speed Dating with Steve Krug!”
January 17 New England Mobile C# Developers’ Group – Cambridge, MA “Data Visualization with MonoTouch Using NucliOS” – Brent Schooley
January 17 Worcester Web Technology – Worcester, MA “Mobile App Creation: Dojo Mobile + Maqetta, Sencha Touch + Sencha Complete”
January 21 Boston Indies - Boston, MA
January 23 Boston XNA Developers Group - Waltham, MA
January 23 Boston Front End Developers – Boston, MA ”Forget Frameworks: Create Your Own Flexbile Grid System”
January 31 Lean Startup Circle Meetup – Cambridge, MA
Schedule TBA
Agile Boston User Group - Waltham, MA Beantown ALT.NET Group – Cambridge, MA Boston .NET Architecture Study Group - Waltham, MA Boston Arduino Users Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Area SharePoint Users Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Artists + Coders – Boston, MA Boston Cloud Services – Waltham, MA Boston CSS Meetup – Jamaica Plain, MA Boston d3.js User Group – Cambridge, MA Boston JavaScript Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Node.js Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Orchard CMS User Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Predictive Analytics – Cambridge, MA Boston Software Craftsmanship – Cambridge, MA Boston Software Engineering Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Web Design Meetup – Cambridge, MA Boston WebsiteSpark Group – Cambridge, MA Boston WordPress – Boston, MA Cape Cod .NET – Plymouth, MA Cloudy Mondays – Newton Center, MA DotNetNuke Boston Meetup – Cambridge (TBD), MA Drinks on Tap – Cambridge, MA Emerging Business Tech – Cambridge, MA Game Dev Night – Boston, MA Hacks / Hackers Boston – Dorchester, MA HTML5 Boston – Boston, MA jQuery Boston Meetup – Boston, MA Kinect Boston Users Group – Cambridge, MA MetroWest Web Developers – Maynard, MA New England Game Dev Meetup – Cambridge, MA New England Windows Phone User and Developer Group - Waltham, MA North Shore Web Geeks – Newburyport, MA OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Cambridge, MA Refresh Boston – Cambridge, MA Tech in Motion - Cambridge, MA UX Book Club, Boston – Cambridge, MA Western Mass Developers’ Group – Hadley, MA Western Mass Microsoft Technology Users Group - Agawam, MA
December 5 Seacoast WordPress Developers – Portsmouth, NH
December 12 Joomla NH User Group – Durham, NH
December 13 Granite State SharePoint User Group – Nashua, NH
December 19 NH .NET User Group, Nashua – Nashua, NH
January 10 Granite State SharePoint User Group – Nashua, NH Bob German
January 16 NH .NET User Group, Nashua – Nashua, NH
Schedule TBA eBrew – Portsmouth, NH Nashua Scrum Club – Nashua, NH NH .NET User Group, Concord – Concord, NH NH .NET User Group, Seacoast – Portsmouth, NH NH Database Meetup – Manchester, NH NH PHP – Manchester, NH Portsmouth Startup Meetup – Portsmouth, NH Seacoast SQL Server Users Group – Portsmouth, NH Systems Engineering and Administration Technical User Group – Portsmouth, NH Web Dev Meetup – Portsmouth, NH
December 4 AppRochester – Rochester, NY Paul Solt
December 4 Ithaca Web People – Ithaca, NY ”Beer and Code”
December 5 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
December 6 Rochester Tech Startups – Rochester, NY ”Startup Drinks”
December 7 Syracuse Innovators Guild – Syracuse, NY ”Pentesting Network Vulnerabilities and Web Applications”
December 11 Build Guild – Troy, NY ”A monthly gathering of web folks that enjoy chatting over drinks”
December 12 IA/UX Rochester (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
December 13 Upstate NY PowerShell Users Group – Rochester, NY “December Script Club”
December 18 Ithaca Web People – Ithaca, NY ”Third Tuesday”
December 19 Rochester Tech Startups – Rochester, NY ”Year in Review”
December 20 Rochester Ruby Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
January 2 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
January 8 Tech Valley .NET Users Group – Albany, NY Kosta Bidoshi
January 8 Buffalo PHP – Cheektowaga, NY
January 9 IA/UX Rochester (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
January 14 Capital Area SQL Server Users Group – Albany, NY
January 17 Rochester Ruby Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
Schedule TBA Central New York .NET Developer Group - East Syracuse, NY Microsoft Developers of Western NY – Buffalo, NY OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Rochester, NY Refresh Rochester – Rochester, NY Rochester SharePoint User Group – Rochester, NY Syracuse Game Makers – Syracuse, NY Visual Developers of Upstate NY - Rochester, NY Western New York Back Office Technology User Group – Blasdell, NY Western NY SQL Server PASS – Amherst, NY
December 4 Prov.JS – Providence, RI ”JavaScript and CSS Performance Tips and Tricks”
December 4 Providence PHP Meetup – Providence, RI
December 4 WordPress Providence Meetup – Providence, RI Tom Conte on SEO
December 5 Rhode Island SharePoint User Group – Providence, RI ”Meeting and SharePint”
December 12 Southern New England SQL Server Users Group – East Greenwich, RI “Lightning Talks” – various speakers
December 12 Providence Geeks – Providence, RI
December 13 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI
January 2 Rhode Island SharePoint User Group – Providence, RI ”Meeting and SharePint”
January 10 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI
January 22 Providence UX Meetup – Providence, RI ”Designers with Drinks”
January 28 * New Group * Providence Functional Programmers – Providence, RI
February 2 DowncityJS – Providence A 24-hour JavaScript Hackathon
Schedule TBA MoDevRI (Mobile Developers & Entrepreneurs) – Providence, RI
December 11 Vermont .NET User Group – Winooski, VT Special Guest & Special Night: Beth Massi on LightSwitch
January 14 Vermont .NET User Group – Winooski, VT “TypeScript” – Steve Levy
Schedule TBA Burlington PHP Users Group – Burlington, VT Burlington Web Application Group (BTVWAG) – Burlington, VT Northern Vermont SharePoint Users Group – Essex Junction, VT Vermont SQL Server User Group - Burlington, VT
A major series of free, full-day product launch events for Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012, Windows Server, and more begins on October 30th:
Attend a FREE one-day event and be part of the biggest product launch in our history. You’ll discover how the latest Microsoft technologies are transforming the way people work—from developers and managers to executives in the C-suite. The New Era of Work is here.
Each city will feature one or more of the following tracks of content: Developer, Developer Manager, IT Professional, IT Executive, and Business Executive.
Here’s the full list of “The New Era of Work” cities and dates:
10/30 Hollywood, CA
10/30 Waltham, MA
11/5 Houston, TX
11/5 New York, NY
11/7 Bloomington, MN
11/8 Bellevue, WA
11/13 Dallas, TX
11/13 Syracuse, NY
11/14 San Francisco, CA
11/14 Brookfield, WI
11/14 Irvine, CA
11/14 Orlando, FL
11/15 Miami Beach, FL
11/15 Reston, VA
11/15 Baton Rouge, LA
11/27 Columbus, OH
11/27 St. Louis, MO
11/28 Atlanta, GA
11/28 Chicago, IL
11/28 Denver, CO
11/28 Detroit, MI
11/28 Iselin, NJ
11/28 Kansas City, MO
11/29 Salt Lake City, UT
11/29 Charlotte, NC
12/4 Portland, OR
12/5 Oklahoma City, OK
12/6 Indianapolis, IN
12/6 Philadelphia, PA
12/7 Richmond, VA
12/12 Brentwood, TN
12/13 Pittsburgh, PA
[Last updated 10/9/2012]
Now Through October 25 Windows 8 Hands-On Labs Online ”Hands-on Labs Online (HOLOs) are online events where you listen to a live presentation and work on lab exercises. As you work on your labs, Microsoft experts can assist and provide guidance by chatting with you one-on-one or by virtually taking control of your lab.”
October 11 LIDNUG & Wintellect “.NET Performance Tuning” – John Robbins
November 8 LIDNUG & Wintellect “Practical Patterns with JS, MVC4, HTML5” – Mitch Harpur
November 15 LIDNUG & Wintellect “Building Single Page Apps” – John Papa
October 1 Fairfield/Westchester .NET User Group – Stamford, CT “Entity Framework for Real Web Applications” – Adam Tuliper
October 9 Connecticut .NET Developers Group – Farmington, CT “Cloud Architecture Patterns for Building Cloud-Native Applications” – Bill Wilder
October 9 Hartford Area Build Guild – Hartford, CT “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
Agile Connecticut - Farmington, CT Connecticut Access Users Group – Farmington, CT Connecticut DotNetNuke User Group - Bethany, CT Connecticut SharePoint User Group – Farmington, CT Connecticut Web Innovators – Hartford, CT Fairfield County SharePoint User Group – Fairfield, CT Fairfield/Westchester SQL Server UG - Stamford, CT Hartford Tech Meetup – Hartford, CT
October 11 Maine Bytes User Group - Portland, ME Visual Studio 2012 Community Launch
October 23 Bangor Area .Net Developers (BAND) - Bangor, ME
November 15 Maine Bytes User Group - Portland, ME Chris Bowen on Windows 8
November 27 Bangor Area .Net Developers (BAND) - Bangor, ME Windows 8 with Chris Bowen
Schedule TBA Maine Agile User Group – Portland, ME Maine Developer Network - Augusta, ME SharePoint Maine User Group – Portland, ME
October 1 Mobile Monday Boston – Boston, MA Mobile Demo Night
October 1 Boston Predictive Analytics – Cambridge, MA ”Predictive Analytics World: Lightning Talks”
October 2 Boston Business Intelligence – Waltham, MA ”Building BI Semantic Model with SQL Server Data Tools in VS 2012” – Slava Kokaev
October 2 Hacks / Hackers Boston – Dorchester, MA “Top 5 SEO Tips for Journalists & Media Websites / Using Social Media Platforms”
October 3 Windows App Development Office Hours – Microsoft, Cambridge, MA (No appointment necessary.) Drop by with your questions or to test your apps.
October 3 Boston Predictive Analytics – Cambridge, MA ”RapidMiner Predictive Analytics Software: Social Media & Segmentation Analysis”
October 4 New England Visual Basic Professionals - Waltham, MA “PowerPivot: PivotTable on Steroids” – Sunil Kadimdiwan
October 5 & 6 AT&T Mobile App Hackathon – Cambridge, MA
October 8 New England F# User Group – Cambridge, MA
October 8 SQL in the City Boston 2012 – Cambridge, MA
October 9 *New Group* Boston Windows 8 Meetup – Cambridge, MA Several speakers on Windows 8: Chris Bowen, Tushneem Dharmagadda, David Davis. The new group is meeting in our new One Cambridge Center office.
October 9 Build Guild Salem – Salem, MA “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
October 9 Build Guild Cape Cod - Sandwich, MA “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
October 9 New England Artificial Intelligence – Cambridge, MA “AI, Pizza, & Beer”
October 10 Windows App Development Office Hours – Microsoft, Cambridge, MA (No appointment necessary.) Drop by with your questions or to test your apps.
October 10 Boston Area SharePoint Users Group – Cambridge, MA ”Demystifying SharePoint 2012 – From Dependencies to Licensing” – Gina Montgomery
October 11 Boston PHP Meetup – Cambridge, MA “Show & Tell & Code as Well”
October 13 OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Cambridge, MA OWASP Boston Application Security Conference 2012
October 15 Boston Accessibility Roundtable – Cambridge, MA
October 16 Microsoft DevBoston – Cambridge, MA “Windows Identify Foundation in .NET 4.5” – Brock Allen
October 16 Boston New Technology Meetup – Boston, MA Tech products and startup community
October 16 Boston BizSpark Meetup – Cambridge, MA “Funded Founders Panel and Networking”
October 17-19 [$] MonkeySpace 2012 – Cambridge, MA Formerly MonoSpace, the official cross platform and open-source .NET conference
October 17 The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip! – Cambridge, MA Join Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell and guests as they tour North America. Colocated with the MonkeySpace 2012 conference.
October 17 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA
October 17 Boston Orchard CMS User Group – Cambridge, MA
October 18 *New Group* MetroWest Web Developers – Maynard, MA ”Add Sanity to Packaging and Organization with Require.js and Aura.js”
October 18 Worcester Web Technology – Worcester, MA “Using HTML5 Canvas and jQuery to Create Images, Graphs and a Coloring Book”
October 18 New England SQL Server User Group – Cambridge, MA “Data Quality Services (DQS) – End to End” – Matt Masson
October 18 Lean Startup Circle Meetup – Cambridge, MA
October 20 Boston Code Camp 18 – Cambridge, MA A free, full day event, by and for the developer community. After 17 events in Waltham, MA, this is the first in its new home at NERD in Cambridge, MA
October 22 Tech in Motion - Cambridge, MA “Windows 8: Opportunity Knocks” – Jim O’Neil
October 24 Boston Front End Developers – Cambridge, MA ”Environmental Design on the Web” – Tim Wright
October 24 Boston XNA Developers Group - Waltham, MA
October 24 Agile Boston User Group (Waltham) - Waltham, MA
October 25 Windows 8 Apps & SQL Server 2012 Book Launch – Microsoft Store, Boston, MA Tallan authors launch the books: "Getting Started with Windows 8 Apps” and "Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2012”
October 25 Agile Boston User Group (Boston) – Boston, MA
October 25 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA ”How EVault is Using Windows Azure” – David Langdon
October 29 Boston WordPress – Boston, MA
October 29 HTML5 Boston – Boston, MA ”Anatomy of a Virtual Self-Study Group” & “Essentials of HTML5 for Desktop & Mobile”
October 29 Refresh Boston – Cambridge, MA ”Designing Design Teams” – Martin Ringlein, Twitter
October 30 Microsoft 2012 Launch Event – Waltham, MA Part of “The New Era of Work” launch event series, a full day with 5 tracks of content on Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012, Office, Windows Server and more.
October 30 Beantown ALT.NET Group – Cambridge, MA ”Windows 8, XNA and MonoGame – How to Get Your Game into the Windows 8 Store” – Bob Familiar
October 30 Boston Software Engineering Meetup – Boston, MA “The Future of Communications with Nuance and Microsoft”
November 1 New England Visual Basic Professionals - Waltham, MA
November 1 [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”Project Night”
November 4 Boston PHP Meetup – Cambridge, MA “jQuery jAM, Season 2”
November 7 New England Mobile .NET Developers’ Group – Cambridge, MA ”Introduction to MonoTouch and Collection Views in iOS6”
November 8 Microsoft DevBoston – Cambridge, MA
November 8 Worcester Web Technology – Worcester, MA “Twitter Bootstrap: Simple HTML, CSS, and JS for User Interfaces”
November 8 & 9 [$] Web Unleashed 2012 – Waltham, MA Front end developer conference
November 9 [$] Startup Weekend: The Battle for the Charles – Cambridge, MA
November 12 Boston Accessibility Roundtable – Cambridge, MA
November 12 Cloudy Mondays – Newton Center, MA “Open Source in the Cloud”
November 13 Boston Windows 8 Meetup – Cambridge, MA ”Innovations in Windows 8 App Development”
November 13 DotNetNuke Boston Meetup – Cambridge (TBD), MA Mandeep Singh
November 14 Boston Software Engineering Meetup – Boston, MA “The Future is Real Time with IBT Technologies”
November 15 New England SQL Server User Group – Cambridge, MA “Big Data and Cloud at Microsoft” – Mark Souza
November 15 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA
November 16 [$] MassTLC Innovation 2012 Unconference – Boston, MA
November 17 Boston Software Engineering Meetup – Boston, MA “Realtime Web Workshop”
November 17 & 18 [$] AngelHack Hackathon Fall 2012 Boston – Boston, MA
November 19 Boston Orchard CMS User Group – Cambridge, MA ”Inside Module Development”
November 21 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA
November 26 Boston WordPress – Boston, MA
November 27 *New Group* Boston CSS Meetup – Jamaica Plain, MA
November 28 Boston XNA Developers Group - Waltham, MA
November 29 Lean Startup Circle Meetup – Cambridge, MA
December 6 Microsoft DevBoston – Cambridge, MA “Hacker vs. Hacker” – Patricks Hynds & Duane Laflotte
December 6 New England Visual Basic Professionals - Waltham, MA
December 11 Boston Windows 8 Meetup – Cambridge, MA ”Everything You Need to Know About Windows 8 Style App Development”
December 12 Boston PHP Meetup – Cambridge, MA “How to Become a Web Developer” – Larry Ullman
December 13 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA ”AAD/Authentication and/or AAL” – Brock Allen
December 19 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA
December 26 Boston XNA Developers Group - Waltham, MA
Boston .NET Architecture Study Group - Waltham, MA Boston Arduino Users Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Artists + Coders – Boston, MA Boston Cloud Services – Waltham, MA Boston JavaScript Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Node.js Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Software Craftsmanship – Cambridge, MA Boston Unity Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Web Design Meetup – Cambridge, MA Boston Web Performance Group – Boston, MA Boston WebsiteSpark Group – Cambridge, MA Cape Cod .NET – Plymouth, MA Drinks on Tap – Cambridge, MA Emerging Business Tech – Cambridge, MA Game Dev Night – Boston, MA HPC & GPU Supercomputing Group of Boston – Cambridge, MA jQuery Boston Meetup – Boston, MA Kinect Boston Users Group – Cambridge, MA New England Game Dev Meetup – Cambridge, MA New England Windows Phone User and Developer Group - Waltham, MA North Shore .NET User Group - Ipswich, MA North Shore Web Geeks – Newburyport, MA UX Book Club, Boston – Cambridge, MA Western Mass Developers’ Group – Hadley, MA Western Mass Microsoft Technology Users Group - Agawam, MA
October 3 Seacoast Wordpress Developers – Portsmouth, NH
October 4 PixelMEDIA Hosts Josh Clark! – Portsmouth, NH
October 10 Joomla NH User Group – Durham, NH “An Exclusive Look at Joomla 3.0”
October 11 Granite State SharePoint User Group – Nashua, NH
October 17 NH .NET User Group, Nashua – Nashua, NH
October 20 SQL Saturday Nashua – Nashua, NH
October 24 Web Dev Meetup – Portsmouth, NH “Hoopla Party – Halloween Style”
November 8 Granite State SharePoint User Group – Nashua, NH Bob German
Schedule TBA eBrew – Portsmouth, NH Nashua Scrum Club – Nashua, NH NH .NET User Group, Concord – Concord, NH NH .NET User Group, Seacoast – Portsmouth, NH NH Database Meetup – Manchester, NH Portsmouth Startup Meetup – Portsmouth, NH Seacoast SQL Server Users Group – Portsmouth, NH Systems Engineering and Administration Technical User Group – Portsmouth, NH
October 2 AppRochester – Rochester, NY “iOS6, iPhone 5, and In App Purchases”
October 3 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
October 3 Microsoft Developers of Western NY – Buffalo, NY “Product Development Concepts for Windows Store Apps”
October 9 Tech Valley .NET Users Group – Albany, NY “Building Your First Windows 8 Application” – Jim O’Neil
October 10 IA/UX Rochester (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
October 15 The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip! – Rochester (TBD), NY Join Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell and guests as they tour North America.
October 18 Rochester Ruby Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
November 7 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
November 13 Microsoft 2012 Launch Event – Syracuse, NY Part of “The New Era of Work” launch event series, a full day with 5 tracks of content on Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012, Office, Windows Server and more.
November 14 IA/UX Rochester (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
Schedule TBA Build Guild – Troy, NY Capital Area SQL Server Users Group – Albany, NY Central New York .NET Developer Group - East Syracuse, NY OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Rochester, NY Refresh Rochester – Rochester, NY Rochester SharePoint User Group – Rochester, NY Upstate NY PowerShell Users Group – Rochester, NY VDUNY - Visual Developers of Upstate NY - Rochester, NY Western New York Back Office Technology User Group – Blasdell, NY Western NY SQL Server PASS – Amherst, NY
October 3 Rhode Island SharePoint User Group – Providence, RI “How to Improve Your SharePoint Governance” – Chris Bortlik
October 5-7 [$] Providence Startup Weekend – Providence, RI Startup Weekends are about idea exchange, team forming, and startups.
October 11 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI
October 16 WordPress Providence Meetup – Providence (TBD), RI
October 18 Prov.JS – Providence, RI ”YUI Live Coding Presentation” – Simon Højberg
October 23 Providence UX Meetup – Providence, RI ”Designers and Code”
October 26 *New Group* Providence Functional Programmers – Providence, RI
October 27 WordCamp Providence 2012 – Providence, RI
November 7 Rhode Island SharePoint User Group – Providence, RI
November 8 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI
December 5 Rhode Island SharePoint User Group – Providence, RI
November 27 Providence UX Meetup – Providence, RI ”Designers and Code”
Schedule TBA MoDevRI (Mobile Developers & Entrepreneurs) – Providence, RI Providence Geeks – Providence, RI Southern New England SQL Server Users Group – East Greenwich, RI
October 15 Vermont .NET User Group – Winooski, VT “SQL Azure vs. Azure Table Storage: A Real World Comparison”
November 12 Vermont .NET User Group – Winooski, VT “Load Testing” – Mike Jones
December 11 Vermont .NET User Group – Winooski, VT “LightSwitch” – Beth Massi
Schedule TBA Vermont SQL Server User Group - Burlington, VT Burlington PHP Users Group – Burlington, VT Northern Vermont SharePoint Users Group – Essex Junction, VT
Boston Code Camp, formerly New England Code Camp, a community-driven day for hundreds of developers, returns for its 18th event, this time in its new home in Cambridge, MA!
Attendee registration is open (and free!) and the Call for Speakers is open as well (more below).
Boston Code Camp 18 Saturday, October 20, 2012 8:00 AM – 6:30 PM Microsoft, 1 Memorial Dr., Cambridge, MA www.bostoncodecamp.com #boscc
After 17 Code Camps in Waltham, MA, this will be the first one in Cambridge, MA at the Microsoft New England Research & Development (aka NERD) Center. First time visiting NERD? Here are directions and parking details.
How? Just create an account on the BCC site, then log in to submit as many session abstracts as you like. Proposals can be for any technology topic and sessions will likely be 70 minutes long. See Jim O’Neil’s helpful Call for Speakers guide for more.
The Call for Speakers will close on October 12th.
Thanks to the organizing team: Robert Goodearl, Patrick Hynds, Chris Pels, and (destined to be last in 95% of alphabetical lists) John Zablocki for the hours of planning and the care & feeding of this event. Thanks also to the supporting companies and of course to the many speakers who volunteer their time and expertise.
See you all at Boston Code Camp 18!
Are you working on a Windows 8 app or game, or want to get started but have some questions?
Drop by to chat/code/test with us at our new One Cambridge Center offices where we’ll have open time to answer your questions and discuss your apps.
We’ll be there each Wednesday starting tomorrow, 9/26, and for at least the next couple of weeks:
Drop by 1 Cambridge Center whenever you’d like – no appointment needed.
You may already be familiar with our New England Research & Development (aka “NERD”) center at 1 Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA.
We very recently opened more offices nearby (I’d call it a “stone’s throw” away, but you’d need a really good arm) at One Cambridge Center. The office has space for sales, marketing, and services, meeting rooms, and a Microsoft Technology Center.
Here’s the view of the building if you’re facing west (though it now has a shiny new “Microsoft” sign at the top):
If you’re looking at the building from this view, there’s a large, glassed-in entrance near one of the the MBTA Kendall (red line) stairways. Just head in and take the elevator to the 2nd floor (the only option) and check in at the reception. They’ll guide you from there.
There are some directions and parking details here.
See these announcements for some background on the new offices:
See you there! -Chris
Unless you’re aiming for the next great text-only game, chances are something’s going to move in your game. From ships and planets to fireballs and monsters, what are some ways to get them going?
JavaScript-based games in Windows 8 can take advantage of many different options. Here are some of them:
We’ll take a look at each of these, but first it’s important to know game loop options.
To get things going, you need code that handles input, updates game state, and draws/moves things.
You might think to start with a for loop, and move something across the screen. E.g.:
for (i = 0; i<10; i++){ smiley.x += 20; }
What the user actually sees:
You’ll probably just see the item popping instantaneously to the final location. Why? The interim positions will change more quickly than the screen will update. Not the best animation, is it?
Later, we’ll get to CSS features and animation frameworks that offer ways to chain animations with logical delays (“move this here, wait a bit, then move it there”), but in the meantime, let’s leave the for loop behind…
Generally, game loops work by calling a function repeatedly, but with a delay between each call. You can use setTimeout to do something like this:
function gameLoop() { // Update stuff… // Draw stuff… setTimeout(gameLoop, 1000/60); // Target 60 frames per second }
But there’s some trouble in setTimeout/setInterval paradise.
They work by setting a fixed amount of time between loops, but what if the system isn’t ready to draw an updated frame? Any drawing code executed is wasted because nobody will see the update.
There’s now a more efficient way - requestAnimationFrame. Instead of specifying how long until the next iteration, requestAnimationFrame asks the browser to call back when it’s ready to display the next frame. For a demonstration, see the requestAnimationFrame example (and the Windows SDK sample):
Important: to benefit from requestAnimationFrame, you should separate your state-updating code from your visual rendering/drawing code. Update can continue use setTimeout to run consistently to keep the game going - process input, update state, communicate, etc. - but rendering will run only when necessary via requestAnimationFrame.
Like setTimeout, requestAnimationFrame needs to be used once per callback. With a separate render loop, you might have something like this:
function renderLoop() { requestAnimationFrame(gameLoop); // Draw stuff… }
[Here, I’m using a tip from Martin Wells’ Sprite Animation article that putting requestAnimationFrame before drawing code can improve consistency.]
Note that if you’re creating a browser-based (vs. Windows Store) game, you’ll want to check for vendor-specific prefixed requestAnimationFrame implementations (e.g. window.msRequestAnimationFrame).
That’s a basic introduction, but there’s more to game loops that you should look into: loop coordination techniques, integrating event-driven updates, and different ways to compute how much to change in each iteration of the game loop.
One way to create HTML games that generally work well across browsers and without plugins, is to use a bunch of DOM elements (<div>, <img>, etc.) and move them around. Through some combination of JavaScript and CSS, you could animate and move things around the browser.
Let’s take a look at how this applies to a Windows Store game.
Start Visual Studio 2012 and under JavaScript Windows Store templates, create a game with the “Blank App” template. Add any image to the game’s images folder, then and add it via an <img> tag to default.html:
<body> <img id="smile" src="images/Smile.png" /> </body>
Set some starting CSS in /css/default.css:
#smile { position:absolute; background:#ffd800; border:4px solid #000; border-radius:20px; }
Now we can write some basic animation in /js/default.js. First add the highlighted to the existing args.setPromise line:
args.setPromise(WinJS.UI.processAll().then(init()));
Now, add a variable, init function to start things, and gameLoop to animate things:
Give it a run, and prepare to be amazed!
DOM element animation is time-tested and still a perfectly viable option for many situations. However, more options have emerged since then, so, onward!
The latest features in CSS3 (aka “CSS Module Level 3”) offer 2D and 3D ways to change and animate presentation styles defined for DOM elements. These approaches can be both concise and easy to maintain.
Transforms (both 2D and now in CSS3, 3D) can change appearance of an item – Transforms to rotate, scale, move (called “translate”), and skew (think stretch or italics and you won’t be far off), but they simply change from one state to another.
Transitions can help you animate the presentation changes from state A to B, simply using CSS. See the Hands On: transitions sample:
Our above DOM element example could be modified to apply a style with a transition over 4 seconds. Something like this:
left: 500px; top: 500px; transition:4s linear;
Transitions are very useful, but support only a single timing function. Animations introduce keyframes, which allow multiple timing functions to control animations. Also, Animations are explicitly called (vs. Transitions, which trigger implicitly.)
See the Hands On: animations sample:
See Also:
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) support using markup and/or code to define shapes that retain clarity/definition as they are scaled. SVG can even utilize styles defined in CSS, making them even more flexible.
Because the individual components of an SVG composition are themselves DOM elements, this is technically a special case of the DOM elements approach, so many of the same techniques apply.
Some examples (don’t forget, View Source is your friend): SVG-oids, SVG Dice, and SVG Helicopter.
SVG is a powerful option, but when should you use it, and how does it compare with using canvas? See How To Choose Between SVG and Canvas.
See also:
Support for <canvas> across many browsers has made it a great option games. Though you can add a canvas via HTML (or dynamically with JavaScript), canvas is driven entirely by JavaScript, so creating animations is a matter of knowing what you’re drawing and where, and modifying over time with JavaScript.
New to canvas? Try the ”drawing to a canvas” Quickstart.
Let’s use canvas in a new example. Create a new Blank App project and add a <canvas> element to default.html:
<body> <canvas id="gameCanvas" height="800" width="800"></canvas> </body>
Because JavaScript is the only way to “talk” to the canvas, we’ll focus on /js/default.js for the rest. Add a pointer to init() like above, then the function:
Because canvas uses immediate mode graphics, it’s not as simple as creating an object and moving by setting location properties (like you can with DOM and SVG animation.) So, canvas-based games will typically create JavaScript classes for things to be tracked and displayed, then update logic simply sets properties (x, y, etc.) on those instances, which the render loop dutifully draws to the canvas.
Here’s what you should see when you run the “game”:
Of course, there’s a lot more to canvas and canvas animation than that. Canvas can work with images, video, animations, gradients and much more. For details, see the Quickstart and ”How to animate canvas graphics", and for demos see Canvas Pad and Canvas Pinball:
Also, there are a number of libraries available to make working with canvas easier, for example EaselJS, which we’ll get to a little later.
The Windows Library for JavaScript (WinJS) contains helpful namespaces and classes to create animations in an efficient and reliable way.
For example, you can use WinJS.UI.executeTransition to activate one or more CSS transitions. Our earlier DOM element example could become:
Even more useful, there’s a full library of animations available in WinJS.UI.Animation, including animations for:
These are most frequently helpful with Windows Store apps, but games can benefit as well. To see some in action, try the HTML animation library sample from the Windows SDK:
See Animating your UI to learn more.
Just as we saw with JavaScript physics engines in an earlier post, there are many frameworks out there that can make many of common scenarios easier. Anything that can save time and effort is worth some research.
There are many out there, but here are a couple to get you thinking.
jQuery is an JavaScript library that helps make common tasks easier (and reliably cross-browser).
Among the many things you’ll find in jQuery, the jQuery .animate() method has many features that can apply to game animation.
With jQuery.animate, our “smile” example could be written as:
$('#smile').animate({ left: '+=500', top: '+=500', }, 4000);
A jQuery selector is used to find the smile element, then the animate method will adjust the left and top CSS properties, increasing each by 500 pixels over 4 seconds.
For some interesting examples/tutorials, see "13 Excellent jQuery Animation Techniques" on WDL.
CreateJS is a family of JavaScript libraries and tools to help make things from canvas, sound, loading, to animations easier.
I introduced using CreateJS for Windows Store Games in an earlier post. If you’re new to CreateJS, have a look. As the post details, EaselJS can make using canvas for games much easier. It also supports features like SpriteSheet, which uses multiple pictures of the same object to create animations, such as a character running:
However, another CreateJS library, TweenJS, is especially relevant to any discussion of animations.
You can use TweenJS to animate objects’ values and CSS properties. It also offers a chained syntax, where you can specify animations as steps with delays and other connections to relate them.
Like CSS Transitions and Animations, TweenJS also supports easing functions to control the rate of change of each animation.
Not only are there more animation frameworks out there, but there are game-related frameworks as well. I’ll probably dedicate a post to this later, but some examples are Crafty, melonJS, Akihabara and more.
A great directory of what’s out there is the Game Engines list on GitHub.
Also see Bob Familiar’s “Windows 8 Game Development for the Win” list of various game tools and frameworks (free and commercial) that can lead to Windows Store games.
Ready to dive in? Here are a few more references to get you started.
Enjoy, and good luck!
Driven by opportunity and visions of success in the Windows Store, you set to work, turning your gaming idea into code.
Maybe you wanted to move something across the screen. Maybe check if it hit a target. Oh, and there’s wind, and friction, and maybe things should bounce when they collide…
The specter of forgotten math begins to loom.
Thankfully, there are physics engines. Simply put, they take care of some of the math and work involved in games and simulations. Of course they don’t eliminate math and complexity, but they can make many scenarios easier:
Why write such things yourself when others have taken the time to create great libraries?
That said, you may not need a physics engine at all. For the simplest games, it’s pretty easy to roll your own logic for basic bounding-box collision checking and basic motion. However, games become complex quickly, so even if you don’t imagine you’ll need one, the up-front investment in learning & using physics engines can pay off sooner than you’d think.
Here’s a list of some key JavaScript-based physics engines that you might consider in your Windows Store game or simulation.
Home - http://code.google.com/p/box2dweb/ Download - http://code.google.com/p/box2dweb/downloads/list
A JavaScript port of Box2DFlash (aka Box2DFlashAS3), itself a port of the Box2D engine, box2dweb offers a single-file implementation, which makes it easy to add to your app.
The box2dweb site has an interactive demo and directs you to Box2DFlash for documentation (since it’s a direct port). According to the box2dweb download site, it was last updated in June, 2011.
Home - http://box2d-js.sourceforge.net/ Download - http://sourceforge.net/projects/box2d-js/
Like box2dweb, Box2DJS is also port of Box2DFlash/Box2DFlashAS3. It’s somewhat older (at least at time of writing) and does require more files to be added to your project than box2dweb.
The Box2DJS home page has instructions, sample code, and demos. Here are a few of them:
According to the Box2DJS download page, the last update was in April, 2010.
Home - http://box2d.thinkpixellab.com/ Download - https://github.com/thinkpixellab/box2d
This version of Box2d by Pixel Lab is a clone of Box2DJS, updated to have better compression and to resolve bugs in the original version.
The Pixel Lab Box2d-JS site has some live demos, mirroring the ones featured on the Box2DJS site. Interestingly, this engine was used in the Agent 8 Ball game:
According to the download page on Github, the compiled version was last updated in April, 2012.
Home - https://github.com/kripken/ammo.js Download - https://github.com/kripken/ammo.js
Ammo.js is a 3D physics engine, and an automated port of the Bullet Physics Library (written in C++). Like box2dweb, it is built into a single file (“ammo.js”), making it simple to import.
The lastest version of Ammo.js (built as “/builds/ammo.js”) was updated in September, 2012. Again, with this post being primarily an index, see the last section for links to more detailed analysis of Ammo.js.
Home - http://brokstuk.com/jiglibjs2/ Download - https://github.com/bartdeboer/JigLibJS2
JigLibJS2 is an automated port of the JigLibFlash physics engine. It’s a 3D physics engine, and on the JibLibJS2 home (and in the download source) there’s an interesting canvas demo (using three.js for 3D rendering) with multiple objects, including a car you can drive:
The download page on Github shows the latest updates in September, 2012.
Home - http://schteppe.github.com/cannon.js/ Download - https://github.com/schteppe/cannon.js
Cannon.js is a 3D physics engine, based on… well, nothing. Unlike many physics engines, cannon.js is “100% open source JavaScript, written from scratch”. Cannon.js cites inspiration from three.js and ammo.js, yet claims to be lighter and smaller than ported engines such as ammo.js and JigLibJS.
Though the home page samples use WebGL, Chandler Prall’s Javascript Physics Engine Comparison has a nice example of using cannon.js with the three.js CanvasRenderer.
According to the cannon.js download page, the latest updates were made in September, 2012.
Another interesting option for Windows Store apps is to use Windows Runtime Components, components written in other languages such as C++, C#, and VB, and call them from your JavaScript-based game.
For example, the Farseer Physics Engine is based on .NET, but could be wrapped and exposed to a JavaScript-based Windows Store app.
Keep in mind that while this can work, it also adds new levels of complexity to your app. For example, which side “owns” the various pieces of game state? But, if you’re already familiar with another non-JavaScript physics engine, this may be worth considering.
Here are some other helpful articles to get you started:
As I mentioned, this post lists only a subset of what’s out there. If you know of other helpful engines, please post in the comments!
So, you’re making a Windows Store game using JavaScript and HTML5? Excellent!
The good news is many others have created games with web-based technologies and, with many common features that games need, some great libraries have emerged to make things easier.
CreateJS is a set of JavaScript libraries and tools for games and other kinds of apps:
I’ve used CreateJS in my “Catapult Wars” WinJS tutorial series and, certainly far more impressively, the Atari arcade game experience was developed using CreateJS as well (and there are many other examples.)
We’ll focus on EaselJS for now, but more on the other parts of CreateJS at the end of the article.
First, you’ll need a Windows Store game into which you’ll plug CreateJS. In Visual Studio 2012, create a new project and choose JavaScript –> Windows Store –> Blank App:
If this is your first look at JavaScript Windows Store apps, read Getting started with Windows Store apps and Part 1: Create a "Hello, world" app for a good background. Also, read “JavaScript templates for Windows Store apps” to learn about the moving parts in the “Blank App” template.
The key places to put your own content are default.html, /js/default.js, and /css/default.css.
Go ahead and run it (just press F5). Now, aren’t you glad you did? We’ll make things less boring more game-like soon.
Let’s get started. We’ll focus on EaselJS here, but every part of CreateJS can be added the same way.
EaselJS is ready to use, but our game still doesn’t “know” about it. Open default.html and simply drag the EaselJS file you added right into the source. Visual Studio will wire up the reference for you:
Okay, let’s play!
EaselJS focuses on making it easier to work with the HTML5 canvas element. A few of the key classes:
There’s more of course (see the online EaselJS docs, and examples like the API Demo for more), but these will get things started. Speaking of which…
First, we’ll need a canvas to draw on, so in default.html, replace the default <p> element with a new <canvas>:
<body> <canvas id="gameCanvas" width="800" height="600"></canvas> </body>
(For simplicity, the canvas is fixed size, but a real game would use JavaScript to scale it automatically based on screen size.)
Now, some JavaScript to get things started. We’ll add an init() function and have it called when everything is ready. In default.js, find the app.onactivated handler. Change this line:
args.setPromise(WinJS.UI.processAll());
to this:
args.setPromise(WinJS.UI.processAll().then(init));
Then, just add the init() function after. Something like this:
Init needs to:
Let’s add that to init(), along with a few variables:
[Note that with recent versions of EaselJS, classes are namespaced so you’ll need “createjs.” before any uses. Keep this in mind if you’re looking at older examples.]
Run the game and you’ll have something like this:
Yes, it’s your game equivalent of “Hello, world”, but at least there’s something game-like on the screen!
We won’t create the full game here, but here’s a taste of how to add a game loop with some basic motion.
Add the following to the end of init() and a new gameLoop() function:
We’re asking the Ticker class to start the game’s heartbeat. 30 frames per second, it will call the gameLoop() function, where you would place code to read input, move things about, check for collisions, end the game, etc. [Note you need the stage.update() call to have EaselJS refresh the canvas based on what you’ve changed.]
For now, the ball simply moves slowly, sadly fated to move in one direction… forever. Now’s your chance to step in to move the paddles, bounce the ball, score points, etc.
For deeper use of EaselJS, including input, collisions, and scoring, see my Catapult Wars tutorial series. There are also some helpful demos on the CreateJS site, and more as part of the EaselJS download.
Congratulations! You’re ready to put EaselJS to good use in your game, saving you time and trouble. The other libraries in the CreateJS family can save you time as well, so a quick introduction is in order.
Sound can be very tricky in JavaScript-based games, and SoundJS handles detecting playback capabilities, and give you ways to play, pause, loop, and overlap sounds that would take a bunch of manual code to get working consistently.
You can get an idea of the supported features in this test suite:
Tweening is about adjusting values from a start to an end. It could be animating the position of a ball, the size or rotation of a paddle, or even other attributes like something’s color. TweenJS supports tweening, including chained calls and delays. Here’s an example:
TweenJS also offers a set of easing functions. Easing is a function that controls the rate of change.
For example, you could simply move from A to B at constant rate, but for a more polished effect, you could start motion from A slowly, move quickly across the screen, then slow down to settle into position B. (This is called ease in/out.) Here’s an example that shows various easing functions:
PreloadJS can be useful to load and instantiate your graphics, sounds, and other assets so they’re ready to go in your game.
You can load individual files, or specify a manifest of multiple assets to load and indicate how you’d like to process them.
I hope you find this guide and these libraries useful. Good luck with your Windows Store game!
The upcoming release of Windows 8 offers developers a huge opportunity. How huge? The Windows Store Blog sums it up well:
With more than 630 million licenses sold to date, across 200+ countries and regions around the world, Windows has an unrivaled global reach. Combined with the flexibility of monetization options that the Store provides, Windows 8 represents the single biggest developer opportunity for any platform.
So, how can you join in?
Many thousands of developers will recognize this opportunity, but you can gain an advantage and stand out from the crowd through the programs we’re offering:
These Application Excellence Labs (or “AE Labs”) are a great way for developers to get guidance and feedback on ways to make their apps shine. In a moment, you’ll see how the labs and the related survey can help you as you develop your apps.
First, some essential resources to get you started:
Another immensely useful resource is the Application Profile Survey, available via http://aka.ms/apps. The survey is part of the AE Lab review and is available to you beforehand as a checklist of things to consider as you develop your app.
To access the survey, simply create an account and add an Application Profile for your app or app idea. Once you’ve done that, a “Survey” link will appear with your Application Profile, bringing you to a helpful checklist of guidance:
You can expand each item to reveal guidance and related resources.
The Application Profile Survey just mentioned is a great resource, used as part of the AE Labs to meet with developers to review their apps, covering everything from design and features to user experience and performance.
To help you benefit from the experiences in those reviews, the list below is based on the more frequently-encountered scenarios as reported by the Premier Field Engineers conducting those reviews.
So grab a cup of coffee and settle in – taking the time to ensure you’ve considered each for your app will definitely help you get ready for the Windows 8 opportunity!
Your app can be run on a wide variety of devices, with different screen sizes and resolutions.
What would your app do if it suddenly had much more room to run in? Instead of just showing an undersized rectangle of content in the upper left corner, does the new space let you do something new (adaptive layout) or should things stay put and scale in place relatively (fixed layout)?
Understand your options for creating flexible layouts, and make sure you’ve tested your app for multiple screen sizes, pixel densities, as well as in portrait and landscape orientations.
The Simulator that’s part of Visual Studio 2012 can make these much easier to test. See Running Windows apps in the simulator for more.
For more on this, see:
Effectively applying modern design is critical for the usability and familiarity of your app, so take the time to understand the main concepts and apply them well. The overall guidance you’ll need is on Designing UX for apps and in the App Profile Survey, but based on AE Lab reviews, here are a few areas in particular that can help:
Basing your app on Visual Studio’s Grid or Split project templates, which are themselves already based on much of this guidance, can help you easily get started on the right track.
Also, there’s a full set of excellent UX training (as recorded sessions) available at http://windowsuserexperiencetraining.com.
For more, see:
Users will expect to be able to put your app into snapped view, so make sure you’ve tested your app for snapped, filled, and full views, including the effect on the flow of your content and behavior of your AppBar.
Though you may decide that some features and content should be limited in snapped view (focus on what will remain clear and relevant), make sure your app remains functional.
By the way, if you are developing a game or another app that won’t support play while Snapped, one simple option is to create a branded page with text. For example, a pause screen that pauses gameplay, music, etc., and invites the user to continue by returning to full screen view.
Apps don’t always run continuously. If the user switches away to do something else, your app may be suspended and perhaps terminated if resources are running low. Take the time to ensure that your application supports saving and restoring so the user won’t lose data or have to retrace steps when they resume.
Also, to ensure good user experience, your app needs to load quickly. Try running your app with the Windows App Certification Kit (or WACK), which will help you test for this and other scenarios.
Does your app rely on internet connectivity? Your app needs to provide a good experience when offline and with limited internet connectivity. Be sure to test for these scenarios, because if you don’t, chances are your app will fail when this is tested during review.
Use the Windows.Networking APIs to detect connectivity, alerting the user about connectivity status, and reconnecting automatically if connectivity is restored. Also, disable areas that require network connectivity, displaying an inline error.
How can you improve user experience? Consider bundling a minimum set of resources in the app’s package to use in these scenarios and caching resources when the app is online for later offline use.
If your app downloads large amounts of data (e.g. large images), make sure you respect the cost the user will incur if they have a metered network connection. Use the Windows.Networking.Connectivity APIs to determine if the user is on a metered network connection so you can adjust the app’s behavior.
You might be used to using dialogs to display common errors, but many scenarios should be handled instead with inline text or an error and warning bar.
The error guidelines (also here) make the best practices clear, including some helpful Do’s and Don’ts.
If your app requires login, make sure you offer a good user experience before the user logs in rather than simply displaying a blank screen with login. In other words, offer as much functionality as you can as a default experience before the user has to log in.
If that’s not possible, then you can show the SettingsFlyout automatically when the app launches. Also, your custom login and logout controls should be in the SettingsFlyout and nowhere else.
For more, see Guidelines for the Microsoft account sign-in experience (and especially “Things to avoid”).
Using the Search and Share contracts is a simple way to make a big difference in how users view the usefulness of your app. For example, supporting Share can add new scenarios for connecting your app to other apps in ways that you may not have imagined.
However, avoid including duplicated Search and Share functionality (e.g. custom search fields) directly in your app, outside of the Charms functionality. Also, make sure you test to ensure your app launches correctly when it is invoked by Search and/or Share.
You may have an existing web application or site that you’d like your app to leverage, but to ensure a good experience and fewer context switches for the user, you need to resist the urge to host entire web pages (e.g. via the WebView control) as your app’s primary workflow.
See these samples for examples and guidance for using web content and services in your app:
Consider choosing to make your application fully accessible by following the guidelines and declaring your app as accessible. Doing so can help you reach more customers, and you’ll be providing a service to users for whom accessibility makes all the difference!
Using Visual Studio’s Grid or Split project templates will help you get off to a good start with accessibility.
While declaring your app as accessible is optional, in either case you should review how your app displays when High Contrast mode is on. You might be surprised by some of the formatting or color issues that can be uncovered.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. By learning from these scenarios, you’re in a great position to create amazing apps!
Be sure to take full advantage of the 30 To Launch and App Excellence Lab programs as well as the Application Profile Survey mentioned earlier. You’ll be in very good company, amongst those who recognize the advantage of getting advice, training, and guidance.
Looking forward to your fantastic apps and success with Windows 8!
Two new resources have just been published to help you learn about Windows 8.
[Update 10/1/2012 – Camp in a Box RTM version]
Recently updated for Windows 8 Release Preview, the Windows 8 “Camp in a Box” includes a variety of content from the Windows 8 Developer Camp event series that’s now underway:
After installing, you’ll find a “Default.htm” link on your desktop. Open it to get launch a content directory:
Of course you can also open the directory where you installed the Camp in a Box, but the HTML interface is a friendly way to begin exploring.
[Update 7/23/2012 – JavaScript labs now available!]
The “Camp in a Box” is great for downloading labs to work on your own machine, but there’s now another option as well...
The Windows 8 Virtual Labs let you dive in and learn about Windows 8 development without having to install everything on your own machine. It uses an ActiveX control to let you connect to a remote server where everything is configured and ready for you.
You can work (in 90-minute segments – and yes, you can get more as you need) on this set of C# labs, all updated for Release Preview:
There are now 8 JavaScript labs available as well:
Enjoy! -Chris
Here’s the latest roundup of tech- and developer-focused events here in the northeastern US. Most are free, but the exceptions are noted with [$].
Also, I’ve listed some online events at the end.
[Last updated 7/9/2012]
July 9 Hartford Area Build Guild – Farmington, CT “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
July 11 Connecticut Access Users Group – Farmington, CT
August 18 DrupalCampCT 2012 – New Haven, CT
September 12 Fairfield County SharePoint User Group – Fairfield, CT
Schedule TBA Agile Connecticut - Farmington, CT Connecticut .NET Developers Group – Farmington, CT Connecticut DotNetNuke User Group - Bethany, CT Connecticut SharePoint User Group – Farmington, CT Connecticut Web Innovators – Hartford, CT Fairfield/Westchester .NET User Group – Stamford, CT Fairfield/Westchester SQL Server UG - Stamford, CT Hartford Tech Meetup – Hartford, CT
July 12 Maine Bytes User Group - Portland, ME “Your Asynchronous Future” – Bill Wagner
July 24 Bangor Area .Net Developers (BAND) - Bangor, ME
August 28 Bangor Area .Net Developers (BAND) - Bangor, ME
September 25 Bangor Area .Net Developers (BAND) - Bangor, ME Windows 8 – Chris Bowen
July 5 New England Visual Basic Professionals - Waltham, MA “An Introduction to Modern Web Technologies” – Doug Domeny
July 5 (first of 4 classes) [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”JavaScript / jQuery”
July 10 Drinks on Tap – Cambridge, MA ”Demos, drinks and discussions about mobile development'”
July 10 Boston Software Engineering Meetup – Boston, MA “Other People’s Code”
July 10 (first of 2 classes) [$] Web Start Women Boston – Cambridge, MA ”Photoshop: Designing for the Web”
July 10 Boston Accessibility Roundtable – Cambridge, MA
July 10 Build Guild Salem – Salem, MA “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
July 11 Boston Area SharePoint Users Group – Cambridge, MA ”SharePoint Maturity and User Adoption”
July 11 Game Dev Night – Boston, MA
July 12 Build Guild Cape Cod - Sandwich, MA “Web People + Adult Beverages + High Fives”
July 12 Boston Python User Group – Cambridge, MA ”July Project Night: Julython!”
July 14 [$] Boston WordPress – Boston, MA WordCamp Boston 2012
July 14 & 15 [$] No Show Conference – Cambridge, MA
July 14 & 15 [$] Design for Drupal 4 – Cambridge, MA
July 17 [$] Tech Cocktail’s Boston Summer Mixer & Startup Showcase – Cambridge, MA
July 17 Boston New Technology Meetup – Cambridge, MA Tech products and startup community
July 18 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA
July 18 Boston Orchard CMS User Group – Cambridge, MA “Deploying Orchard to Windows Azure”
July 24 Boston Web Performance Group – Boston, MA “Abusing JavaScript to Measure Web Performance” – Philip Tellis
July 24 Boston Predictive Analytics – Cambridge, MA ”Linear and Logistic Regression Using R”
July 25 Boston XNA Developers Group - Waltham, MA
July 25 Agile Boston User Group - Waltham, MA “Moving Beyond Icebreakers”
July 25 HPC & GPU Supercomputing Group of Boston – Cambridge, MA
July 25 Boston Tech Meetup - Cambridge, MA “Unsupervised Learning with Big Data”
July 26 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA
July 26 Emerging Business Tech – Cambridge, MA “NewSQL: SQL Technologies Keeping NoSQL Promises”
July 26 Worcester Web Technology – Worcester, MA “Build a Ptyhon/Django/jQuery Web App within a Hour”
August 7 Boston Accessibility Roundtable – Cambridge, MA
August 11-12 [$] Boston PHP Meetup – Cambridge, MA Boston PHP Northeast Conference
August 14 New England Artificial Intelligence – Cambridge, MA “AI, Pizza, & Beer”
August 15 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA
August 17 & 18 Windows 8 Developer Camp & Hackathon – Boston, MA A free, two-day event for developers to learn about Windows 8. Day one features sessions followed by an Installfest, and day two is a chance to work on Windows 8 development in the Hackathon, with experts on hand to help.
August 21 [$] Tech Cocktail Sessions Boston – Cambridge, MA
August 23 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA
August 29 HPC & GPU Supercomputing Group of Boston – Cambridge, MA
August 30 Lean Startup Circle Meetup – Cambridge, MA
September 11 Boston Accessibility Roundtable – Cambridge, MA
September 13 New England SQL Server User Group – Cambridge, MA “2012/2013 Season Opener at Our New Cambridge Location”
September 19 HTML5 Game Development Meetup – Boston, MA
September 27 Lean Startup Circle Meetup – Cambridge, MA
September 27 Boston Azure Cloud User Group – Cambridge, MA
Schedule TBA Beantown ALT.NET Group – Cambridge, MA Boston .NET Architecture Study Group - Waltham, MA Boston Arduino Users Group – Cambridge, MA Boston Artists + Coders – Boston, MA Boston BizSpark Meetup – Cambridge, MA Boston Business Intelligence – Waltham, MA Boston Cloud Services – Waltham, MA Boston Front End Developers – Cambridge, MA Boston JavaScript Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Node.js Meetup – Boston, MA Boston Software Craftsmanship – Cambridge, MA Boston Web Design Meetup – Cambridge, MA Boston WebsiteSpark Group – Cambridge, MA Cloudy Mondays – Cambridge, MA DotNetNuke Boston Meetup – Cambridge, MA Hacks / Hackers Boston – Boston, MA HTML5 Boston – Boston, MA jQuery Boston Meetup – Boston, MA Kinect Boston Users Group – Cambridge, MA Microsoft DevBoston – Cambridge, MA Mobile Monday Boston – Boston, MA New England F# User Group – Cambridge, MA New England Mobile .NET Developers’ Group – Cambridge, MA New England Windows Phone User and Developer Group - Waltham, MA North Shore .NET User Group - Ipswich, MA North Shore Web Geeks – Newburyport, MA OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Waltham, MA Refresh Boston – Cambridge, MA UX Book Club, Boston – Cambridge, MA Western Mass Developers’ Group – Hadley, MA Western Mass Microsoft Technology Users Group - Agawam, MA
July 12 Granite State SharePoint User Group – Nashua, NH “SharePoint Maturity” – Sadalit Van Buren
July 17 Web Dev Meetup – Portsmouth, NH “Hoopla Party”
August 9 Granite State SharePoint User Group – Nashua, NH
September 13 Granite State SharePoint User Group – Nashua, NH
September 19 NH .NET User Group, Nashua – Nashua, NH
Schedule TBA eBrew – Portsmouth, NH Joomla NH User Group – Durham, NH Nashua Scrum Club – Nashua, NH NH .NET User Group, Concord – Concord, NH NH .NET User Group, Seacoast – Portsmouth, NH NH Database Meetup – Manchester, NH Portsmouth Startup Meetup – Portsmouth, NH Seacoast SQL Server Users Group – Portsmouth, NH Systems Engineering and Administration Technical User Group – Portsmouth, NH
July 11 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
July 27 & 28 Windows 8 Developer Camp & Hackathon – Rochester, NY A free, two-day event for developers to learn about Windows 8. Day one features sessions followed by an Installfest, and day two is a chance to work on Windows 8 development in the Hackathon, with experts on hand to help.
August 1 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
September 5 Rochester JavaScript Meetup (Coworking Rochester) – Rochester, NY
September 20 Techapalooza 2012 – TBD (Albany area)
Schedule TBA AppRochester – Rochester, NY Build Guild – Troy, NY Capital Area SQL Server Users Group – Albany, NY Central New York .NET Developer Group - East Syracuse, NY Microsoft Developers of Western NY – Buffalo, NY OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) – Rochester, NY Refresh Rochester – Rochester, NY Rochester SharePoint User Group – Rochester, NY Tech Valley .NET Users Group – Albany, NY Upstate NY PowerShell Users Group – Rochester, NY VDUNY - Visual Developers of Upstate NY - Rochester, NY Western New York Back Office Technology User Group – Blasdell, NY Western NY SQL Server PASS – Amherst, NY
July 11 Providence Geeks – Providence, RI
July 12 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI
July 17 WordPress Providence Meetup – Providence, RI
July 24 Providence UX Meetup – Providence, RI ”Designers with Drinks”
July 25 MoDevRI (Mobile Developers & Entrepreneurs) – Providence, RI ”Interfacing Mobile to the Real World” - Brian Jepson
August 1 *NEW GROUP* Rhode Island SharePoint User Group – Providence, RI ”Inaugural Meeting!” – Talbott Crowell
August 9 *NEW GROUP* Prov.JS – Providence, RI ”Starting a Project with ExtJS 4”
August 9 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI
August 14 WordPress Providence Meetup – Providence, RI
August 28 Providence UX Meetup – Providence, RI ”Designers with Drinks”
September 5 Rhode Island SharePoint User Group – Providence, RI Marc Anderson
September 13 Providence Web Development Lunch Hour – Providence, RI
September 15 SQL Saturday Providence – East Greenwich, RI
September 25 Providence UX Meetup – Providence, RI ”Designers with Drinks”
Schedule TBA Rhode Island .NET User Group - Bristol, RI Southern New England SQL Server Users Group – East Greenwich, RI
July 16 Vermont .NET User Group – S. Burlington, VT Ward Bell
July 28 & 29 [$] Burlington Ruby Conference – Burlington, VT
July 10 Imaginet ”A View into Microsoft’s New ALM Features and Tools”
July 18 LIDNUG & Wintellect “Windows 8: A Tale of Two Stacks” - Jeremy Likness
July 18 MSDN Webcast ”Creating Chart- and Grid-Based HTML5 Applications (Level 200)” – Jason Beres
July 18 InCycle Software ”Visual Studio 2012 RC : The ultimate testing tools” – Sahas Subramanian
July 24 LIDNUG & Wintellect ”Putting the Cloud in Your Pocket, Part 1” - John Garland
August 1 LIDNUG & Wintellect ”Lock-Free Thread Synchronization” – Jeffrey Richter
August 14 Imaginet ”A Day in the Life: Developer Enhancements with Visual Studio 2012”
August 16 Northwest Cadence ”Refactoring without Fear: Architecture in Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate”
August 23 LIDNUG & Wintellect “Putting the Cloud in Your Pocket, Part 2” – John Garland
August 28 Imaginet ”A Day in the Life: Developer Enhancements with Visual Studio 2012”
September 18 LIDNUG & Wintellect “Take a Drive with HTML5” – Jeff Prosise
September 18 Northwest Cadence ”Unit Testing without Fear”
I’m happy to pass along word that a new series of Windows 8 developer events are coming soon! These are special two-day events, with a DevCamp on day one featuring a full day of sessions plus an InstallFest, followed on day two by a Hackathon with Lightning Talks where you can bring app ideas to life with Microsoft and community experts on hand to help.
Windows 8 changes everything. Combining the broad reach of Windows, best-in-class developer tools, a re‑imagined user experience, support for new chipsets, and a built-in store with industry-leading business terms, Windows 8 is the largest developer opportunity – ever.
Join us for free events with new sessions and hands-on opportunities designed to help you start building Metro-style applications for Windows 8 – today. We'll show you how to use Visual Studio to code fast, fluid, immersive, and beautiful Metro-style applications in HTML5/JavaScript, XAML/C# and C/C++. Your existing investments in these languages carry forward, making Windows a no-compromise platform for developers. Attend just one day or join us for two full days of learning. It's your choice.
DevCamp - Day 1 Events run from 9:00AM – 8:00PM
Our DevCamp covers Windows 8 Release Preview from top to bottom, featuring sessions that run from introductory to intermediate as the day unfolds. These sessions will be followed by an InstallFest to prepare your system for hands-on app development.
Hackathon - Day 2 Events run from 9:00AM – 9:00PM
Our Hackathon is an open Windows 8 code fest, where you'll put what you've learned into practice. Code to your heart's content, with Windows 8 experts available to guide you through every step of the process. It's the perfect opportunity to get your dream application underway, or to finish that app you've already started.
This full-day event will be filled with coding, sharing, plenty of food, and the occasional Lightning Talk on topics determined by your apps and questions. Bring your own laptop installed with Windows 8 Release Preview, your apps and your cool ideas and get ready to create!
Cities and Dates Separate registration for DevCamps and Hackathons is required
The choice is yours to join us for either or both days, but please register for each separately.
Seating is limited, so click the date links below (or call 1-877-MSEVENT) to reserve your seat today!
Register today and join us for these fantastic (and free) developer opportunities.
This week offers several excellent opportunities for Windows 8 and Windows Phone developers here in New England.
As mentioned earlier, the Metro Accelerator Labs are coming to our Waltham offices on Wednesday through Friday (June 6-8). It is a 3-day event focused on helping you create Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps with experts on hand to help you, whether you’re just starting or adding the finishing touches.
We’ll have a brief dev/design session each morning (agenda here), but the focus is squarely on your apps and coding. Bring your PCs, apps or app ideas, and get ready to develop!
You can join us for as little or as much of the 3-day event as you wish. Register here
On Thursday (June 7th), the special Ready.Set(){Code} Challenge by Nokia Developer will also be running in the Waltham office. Part of a 13-city tour, this is a great opportunity to create Windows Phone apps by yourself or by forming a team.
At the end of the day, you’ll have a chance to show your app and the best (in a number of categories) will be awarded prizes!
Separate registration is required. Note we’ll have two rooms this day, so both the Metro Accelerator Lab and Ready.Set(){Code} Challenge will be running concurrently. Join in either as you wish!
It’s a big day for releases as a number of new Release Previews and Release Candidates have just been made available:
[Last updated – 7/13/2012]
Enjoy downloading and exploring!
I previously mentioned the series of Windows Developer Camps - free, full-day events to help you learn about building Metro-style apps for Windows 8. They feature a mix of developer sessions plus a series of hands-on labs to help reinforce what you’ve learned.
Well, it turns out they’re popular. So popular, in fact, that all of the Camps I listed earlier are full.
However, more are on the way! Coming soon to these cities:
Register soon, bring a PC with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta installed, and enjoy Camp!
The Windows Developer Camps are a great first step toward developing for Windows 8, but whether you’re just starting or are well on your way with your own app, check out the Metro Accelerator Labs.
While the Windows Developer Camps focus on education via sessions and hands-on labs, the Metro Accelerator Labs are focused on your apps, featuring an environment to let you code with experts on hand to help you with any questions (and plenty of food, too.)
Then, as you ready your app for prime time, look toward the Application Excellence Labs. These are your chance have your app reviewed and potentially earn a token to allow you to submit it early to the Windows Store – an opportunity you really shouldn’t miss!
Happy Windows 8 coding!