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Resident Bloggers
Joey deVillaDeveloper Evangelist
John BristoweSenior Developer Evangelist
Paul LabergeWeb Platform Advisor
Last night, we held a night to showcase some cool Windows Phone 7 apps being written by developers in and around the Toronto area. We invited some local tech and mobile industry bloggers and developers to see these apps in action and try out a late beta version of Windows Phone 7 on the hard-to-come-by advance devices and check out the look and feel of our new mobile operating system on some actual mobile hardware.
King Street East, looking west from George Street (just east of Jarvis).
Rather than hold it in some bland “multi-purpose room” at the office, we chose to hold the event at Kultura, a nice little tapas restaurant on King Street, a short walk east of Toronto’s financial district, yet worlds away at the same time.
The front room of Kultura’s second floor.
We held the event in the back room of Kultura’s second floor, a lounge area with enough space to do a big presentation followed by a number of small hands-on sessions with the apps:
The back room of Kultura’s second floor.
Sure, seeing Steve Ballmer run around shouting “Developers, developers, developers, developers” is funny, but it’s also the truth. We’re a software platform company, and we know that a software platform ain’t nuthin’ without developers building apps for it. Windows Phone 7 is our newest software platform (coming soon!) and we want developers to build for it, so we decided to inspire people by showcasing local developers building apps for our phone and making them rock stars.
A well-run show requires a practice run. We asked the developers to come early and do a practice run through their presentations, and while they did that, I snapped some photos:
Alexey Adamsky shows off his 3-D Sudoku app while Barranger Ridler waits his turn. This looks like an album cover.
Barranger Ridler demonstrates his “Where’s Timmy?” app, which guides you to the Tim Hortons locations closest to you.
Shawn Konopinksy shows us his social music app, “Songbuzz”.
Mark Arteaga shows us his open data app, VanGuide.
Mike Kasprzak demos his match-the-objects-to-eliminate-them game, “Smiles”.
With the practice run done, I had a little time to grab a drink and chat with some of the guests as they arrived:
Steve Syfuhs, Todd Lamothe and Colin Melia.
And soon after, it was time to start the presentations. I did the “opening monologue”, a quick three-minute overview of Windows Phone and what it means to both users and developers:
“…and the Twitter hashtag for this event is #WP7dev…”
“It’s like having an Xbox in your pocket.”
“I’m never without my Windows Phone and my Microsoft Office ironic hipster trucker cap.”
“Ever since Alexander Graham Bell, Canadian techies have always punched above their weight class.”
The audience sat in rapt attention, bedazzled by my scintillating oratory:
Must…hang onto…every word…
And then came the developers, showing off their Windows Phone 7 wares running on the emulator, which made it easy to show apps on the phone to an audience.
First up was Alexey Adamsky, who with Alex Yakobovich, built Sudoku 3D, which literally adds an extra dimension to the popular puzzle game.:
Alexey Adamsky and Sudoku 3D.
Alexey and Alex work out of Ryerson University’s Digital Media Zone, an incubator where Ryerson students and alumni with a technical bent and entrepreneurial ambition can work on their projects, start companies and take their ideas to market. Sudoku 3D started off life as a game for the Xbox 360 written using the XNA framework, but when they heard that Windows Phone 7 was going to be XNA-powered, they knew their project could be turned into a mobile game.
Sudoku 3D, running as both a phone app (in the WP7 emulator) and a Windows application.
XNA lets Alexey and Alex target Windows, Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7. Alexey says that most of the code is the same across all three platforms and that porting Sudoku 3D from the original Xbox version to the phone was very easy.
After Alexey finished, it was Barranger’s turn:
Alexey Adamsky, Barranger Ridler and Shawn Konopinsky.
Barranger Ridler is an indie developer who’s done some work for utility companies, and this work sometimes took him to small towns. One of the questions he often asked when arriving in a small town was “Where’s the nearest Tim Hortons?” His app, “Where’s Timmy?”, answers that question:
Barranger Ridler demos Where’s Timmy?
Luckily for Barranger, Tim Hortons publishes their store location data as a static file saved in a number of formats. He took this data and put it into a database on a server that Where’s Timmy? can access. Where’s Timmy? uses this data, the user’s location (determined via the phone’s GPS) and Bing Maps to tell the user where the nearest ten Tim Hortons branches are and even provide step-by-step directions:
Where’s Timmy? shows us the way to the nearest Tim Hortons.
Next up was long-time Windows Mobile developer and MVP Mark Arteaga, who showed us a couple of his apps, including VanGuide. Mark is one of my “go-to guys” for Windows Phone, and he’ll be sharing his knowledge in two Windows Phone sessions at the TechDays conference, which will take place in eight cities across Canada.
Mark Arteaga shows the crowd his apps.
After Mark came Shawn Konopinsky of Nascent Digital, a Toronto-based company specializing in building applications based on touch technologies:
Shawn Konopinsky and Songbuzz.
Shawn demoed Songbuzz, a social music app that allows users to share what they’re listening to, find out what their friends are listening to and discover new music:
Songbuzz, close up.
The audience, still captivated.
Closing the demos was Mike Kasprzak, creator of the puzzle game Smiles:
Mike Kasprzak shows us Smiles.
The Jedi Mind Trick doesn’t work on games.
It’s a really cute game with gorgeous graphics and great animations featuring several modes, from a full-on arcade mode to a more relaxed “zen mode”:
A close-up of Smiles in action.
Everyone to the bar!
With the demos done, it was time for mingling and socializing. The audience could talk to the developers and get personal demos of their Windows Phone apps, grab a drink and some tapas, and work the room.
Everyone to the bar….again!
I got to chat with a number of guests, including Valerie Fox, Director of Ryerson’s Digital Media Zone, Emil Protalinski, who write for Ars Technica’s column One Microsoft Way and Nitin Bharti of DZone.
Mandatory arty shot.
I had my hands full chatting up guests, doing video interviews and answering technical (and some non-technical) questions, so I’m glad that my fellow evangelist Ruth Morton took most of these pictures. Also present was another evangelist on my team, Barnaby Jeans, who held court at a banquette as people came to him to find out more about Windows Azure:
Barnaby Jeans and Michelle Michalak.
Barnaby Jeans and Todd Lamothe.
It was a full and lively room…
Everybody to the tapas!
…with some of the brightest lights in our local tech scene…
Sandy Kemsley, Leigh Honeywell and Valerie Fox.
…and these guys, too! (I kid because I love, gentlemen!)
Colin Melia, Steve Syfuhs, Jean-Rene Roy, Mark Arteaga and a guy I can’t identify.
I’d like to thank:
For the developers who showcased their apps, this is only the beginning. They’re going to continue polishing them, and soon the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is open up and they’ll submit them for approval. For them, the next few weeks look something like this:
Register at the marketplace today.
Finish their application or game using the Beta tools.
Download the final Windows Phone Developer Tools when they are released on September 16th.
Recompile their app or game using the final tools.
Have their XAP ready for ingestion into the marketplace in early October when it opens.
For the Developer and Platform Evangelism Team at Microsoft Canada, this is only the beginning. We’ve got a cross-Canada conference starting next week, and Windows Phone 7 is going to be one of the big topics. It offers the most bang for the tech conference buck; if you haven’t registered for it yet, do it now!
We’re also looking for more Windows Phone 7 developers and their apps, and we want to showcase them! Do you have a Windows Phone 7 app that you’re working on? Drop me a line and tell me about it!
For you, this can be the beginning. The mobile platform is still new ground, and Windows Phone 7 is a great mobile platform for both developers and users. Download the developer tools today, check out some tutorials and make your mark!
This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Technologies for the first-ever SharePoint Saturday Vancouver, to be held on Saturday September 25th, 2010 at the BCIT Downtown Campus.
SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint. It will be an educational, informative and lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals and MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics.
Some well-known speakers scheduled to present include Cathy Dew, Sean McDonough and Todd Klindt just to name a few.
Come join the fun! There’ll be lots to learn, lots of people to mingle with, and they’ll have give-aways at the end of the day.
Thanks to the sponsors, breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided. They’re also planning to have a post-event gathering for a pint or three! Stay tuned for more details.
Visit the SharePoint Saturday Vancouver site for more information.
The Fredericton .NET User Group’s site is live (and looking good, too!). If you live in or around Fredericton and are a .NET developer, be sure to bookmark both their site and Twitter account. They’ve got announcements about upcoming meetings as well as developer job listings for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
(And don’t forget to register for TechDays Halifax, taking place November 2 – 3, while the early bird rate of CAD$349.99 still applies!)
On Wednesday, September 22nd, the Fredericton .NET User Group’s meeting topic will be on OData and present by Andrew Trevors of SwiftRadius, an IT consulting company and Microsoft Certified Partner in Fredericton. OData, short for the Open Data Protocol, and it’s a web protocol for querying and updating data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. It applies and builds upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores.
The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.
OData is consistent with the way the Web works - it makes a deep commitment to URIs for resource identification and commits to an HTTP-based, uniform interface for interacting with those resources (just like the Web). This commitment to core Web principles allows OData to enable a new level of data integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.
OData is released under the Open Specification Promise to allow anyone to freely interoperate with OData implementations.
If you’re in Montreal on September 25th and want to learn about developing BI applications – that’s BI as in “Business Intelligence” -- La Communauté .NET Montreal’s Samedi.NET event, Introduction au BI, is exactly what you need.
Here’s what the event site says:
La Communauté .NET vous propose une journée de formation complète sur le B.I. Le but de la journée est de de faire un tour d'horizon des bases et des techonogies de B.I. Le public cible est un développeur .NET ou un DBA n'ayant jamais fait de B.I. Le format de la journée est "hands-on" avec une série de démos ayant une suite logique.
And here’s my best shot at translation, courtesy of my high school French classes and youthful dalliances with a Quebecoise or two:
Montreal’s .NET Community will be presenting a day’s worth of information on BI. Its goal is to give you an overview of BI basics and technologies. The intended audience is a .NET developer or a DBA who’s never done BI before. It’ll be a hands-on event featuring a series of demos to illustrate the concepts.
Here’s the schedule – note that it’s subject to change:
The sessions will be presented in a classroom-style amphitheatre to make it easier to take notes. They recommend bringing paper and your favourite writing implement; while you can bring a computer to take notes, they can’t guarantee that electrical outlets will be nearby (bring an extension cord). Note that the event will not have internet access.
To attend the event, you have to be a member of La Communauté .NET Montreal, which you can join via their site. The registration fee for the event is $5 plus service charges, and as the event site says, “$5 c'est pas tellement cher”. (Loosely translated, that means “five bucks ain’t gonna hurt your wallet.”)
Want to find out more? Visit the event site for Introduction au BI.
Pre-manufacturing Windows Phone 7 devices are incredibly hard to come by, but we’re working on ways for you to test your WP7 apps on the real thing. One way we’re doing this is by holding “Deployment Clinics” all over Canada.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Francophone, Anglophone or allophone: we want you to come see and deploy to Windows Phone!
A Microsoft Canada event: Windows Phone 7 Night in Montreal (featuring a developer device!) 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. at the Microsoft Montreal office (2000 Ave McGill College, Suite 450, Montreal)
Join Christian Beauclair from Microsoft Canada, along with Colin Melia from DreamDigital, for an evening about Windows Phone 7 in the flesh. That’s right, they’ll be there in person, oh and so will a real developer device!
In October, Microsoft will start accepting application submissions on the mobile marketplace for Windows Phone 7 applications, with devices being available at retail shortly thereafter.
Will you be one of the first developers selling a cool application? Are you an IT Pro that wants to figure out how these devices fit into your organization? To get to grips with this new mobile platform and build on your existing .NET and infrastructure knowledge, you'll need to know the features of the new phone platform.
Visual Studio 2010 together with the WP7 tools make building applications a delightful experience. During this evening event, you’ll have the opportunity to see the phone in action, learn about the tools and understand how the phone integrates into your enterprise.
You absolutely must be registered to attend.
Register for this event
Deployment clinic at the Microsoft Montreal office (2000 Ave McGill College, Suite 450, Montreal)
That’s right: the last touches have been put on the Windows Phone 7 OS and it’s now in “RTM”, Release to Manufacturing. Here’s what Terry Myerson wrote on the Windows Phone Blog:
Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released. We had nearly ten thousand devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes. We’ve had thousands of independent software vendors and early adopters testing our software and giving us great feedback. We are ready.
We’ve had over 300,000 downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools in their CTP (Community Technology Preview) and Beta states, and we’re racing towards RTM. The final version of the tools will be available on Thursday, September 16th, and yes, they’ll be available free of charge.
In the meantime, download the tools and start working on those apps!
Windows Phone Marketplace is where users will buy your apps, which means that once you’ve written and tested your apps, it’s time to submit it for certification. The requirements for getting an app certified for Marketplace, including what’s allowed and not allowed in an app, are clearly specified in the Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements [PDF, 513K]. Download it and get familiar with the Marketplace policies.
I’ll close with the words of Brandon Watson, Director, Developer Experience and one of the guys on the WP7 team:
Register at the marketplace today Finish your application or game using the Beta tools Download the final Windows Phone Developer Tools when they are released on September 16th Recompile your app or game using the final tools Have your XAP ready for ingestion into the marketplace in early October when it opens The final tools will likely have some minor breaking changes from the Beta tools, so developers may have to fix some bugs that arise. The final tools will also include several highly requested Silverlight controls which will make it even easier for developers to deliver high quality Windows Phone 7 experiences. Also in the September 16th final release, the panorama, pivot and Bing maps controls will all be available to drop into applications.
Register at the marketplace today
Finish your application or game using the Beta tools
Download the final Windows Phone Developer Tools when they are released on September 16th
Recompile your app or game using the final tools
Have your XAP ready for ingestion into the marketplace in early October when it opens
The final tools will likely have some minor breaking changes from the Beta tools, so developers may have to fix some bugs that arise. The final tools will also include several highly requested Silverlight controls which will make it even easier for developers to deliver high quality Windows Phone 7 experiences. Also in the September 16th final release, the panorama, pivot and Bing maps controls will all be available to drop into applications.
An homage to the late Jan Gabriel:
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Friday! Friday! Friday! Hold on to your hats and prepare to feel “mobilized” as the Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code visits the Kawa Espresso Bar in downtown Calgary! Prepare to be blown away by the epic-ly awesome developer tools, including crowd favourite, Visual Studio 2010! (Echo: “Visual Studio 2010!”) Come for the caffeine, stay for the device! It will be a thrill spectacular! We'll offer you a seat, but you'll only need the eddddddge.
I’ll be at Kawa Espresso Bar on Friday, September 3rd, 9 AM to 12 PM with a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) device waiting to test out your apps. I’ll be there to chat about Windows Phone 7, our tools, and the overall experience from a developer’s perspective. If you have an app that you’d like to test out on a real device, this is a great opportunity for you to do it!
Windows Phone 7 Coffee & Code – Friday, September 3, 2010 at Kawa Espresso Bar
If you don’t live in or around Calgary, please don’t worry! Our team is working on ways to conduct Windows Phone Deployment Clinics in as many places across Canada, as often as our schedules and pool of phones will allow. In the meantime, I strongly encourage you to download and install the free developer tools from developer.windowsphone.com (this should be your browser’s homepage) and join the WP7 discussion on the Windows Phone Canada LinkedIn group!
See you on Friday!
I was a teenager in the 1980s, which meant that along with watching Knight Rider, going to Depeche Mode concerts and playing blocky games on an Atari 2600, I had a Rubik’s cube. These puzzle toys were such a big craze at the time that toy and game stores couldn’t keep them on the shelves. I’m told that even decades later, it’s still considered to be the number one-selling toy of all time.
It’s nice to see that Ottawa-based developer Magmic, who specialize in mobile casual gaming, are bringing Rubik’s cube – the real officially-licensed thing – to Windows Phone 7. Naturally, you can try solving the classic 3 * 3 * 3 cube that we all know and love…
…but the game lets you go beyond the classic with:
Update: Please note the changes to the Toronto-area deployment clinic locations!
If you’re not a member of LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, you should join it now! It’s a great place to keep in touch with your network of working peers, post and maintain your resume, find people in your industry and be found yourself, and take part in professional discussions in LinkedIn groups.
Once you’re a member of LinkedIn, you should join the Windows Phone Canada group. It’ll have links to the latest Windows Phone articles, host discussions about all aspects of Windows Phone development, from coming up with ideas for apps to writing them to selling them in Marketplace. You’ll also get to network with Windows Phone developers across Canada, and as I’ll tell you over and over, that’s where opportunities are born.
Join the WP7 discussion – join the Windows Phone Canada LinkedIn group!
Pictured above: some of the phones we’ll be using in our deployment clinics.
Anyone who’s built apps and tried them out on an emulator and then deployed to the real thing will know what Jan van de Snepscheut was talking about when he said “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
To support you in your WP7 development and help you make the leap from theory to practice, we’re starting our deployment clinics this week! It’s your chance to deploy your app to a real WP7 phone and see how it works. This week’s are being held in:
There are also some events being planned for next week:
(I’m working on Toronto dates for next week…watch this blog!)
We’re working on ways to hold deployment clinics in as many places across Canada, as often as our schedules and pool of phones will allow. For those of you out west, we’re working on getting clinics out your way – watch this space!
DevTeach’s Windows Phone 7 Bootcamp – a four-city, two-day, hands-on intensive training course taught by Colin Melia – started off quite nicely last week in Montreal (pictured left).
This week, the Bootcamp comes to Vancouver on Monday and Tuesday (August 30 – 31) and Ottawa on Thursday and Friday (September 2 – 3).
Next week, Yours Truly sits in on the Toronto Bootcamp, which happens next Tuesday and Wednesday (September 7 – 8).
Want to sign up for the Bootcamp? Register here, and save $100 when you use the discount code WP7BOOTCAMP.
TechDays, our cross-Canada conference on how to make the most of Microsoft’s tools and technologies, is just over two weeks away, starting with TechDays Vancouver on September 14th and 15th. We’ve got two 65-minute breakout sessions on Windows Phone app development being presented by Windows Phone MVP Mark Arteaga and a half-hour “Turbo Talk” by Windows Phone MVP Anthony Bartolo on distributing your apps through the Marketplace. To find out more about TechDays, visit the TechDays site.
We’ll be running deployment clinics in the TechDays cities when we’re there (those cities, in order: Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Halifax, Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary), in the TechDays lounge, as well as outside the conference. Watch this blog for details!
Just as TechDays is a cross-Canada tour for working developers and IT pros, Go DevMENTAL is a cross-Canada tour for post-secondary students who’d like to learn more about the coolest apps and platforms, get connected with people in the software industry and get help in pursing a career. To find out more about Go DevMENTAL, check out the Go DevMENTAL site.
One of Go DevMENTAL’s tracks is dedicated to creating Windows Phone apps. It’ll have two sessions: one on building Silverlight apps for WP7; the other on building XNA-based games for WP7.
We’ll be at WordCamp Montreal this Saturday! (In fact, for the second year in a row, Microsoft is a gold sponsor for the event.) WordCamp Montreal takes place this Saturday and Sunday, August 28th and 29th in the Agora Hydro-Quebec in the UQAM Coeur-des-Sciences complex (200 Sherbrooke West).
My fellow Developer Evangelist Christian Beauclair will be presenting Microsoft’s new web development environment, WebMatrix, this Saturday at 11:00 a.m.
(At this point, feel free to put on a dark suit and sunglasses, sit back in a comfortable chair, and in your best Laurence Fishburne voice ask: What is WebMatrix?)
WebMatrix is a development environment that gives you:
Christian will walk you through the whole experience from start to finish, demonstrate how easy it is to deploy a Wordpress blog using WebMatrix.
Want to get your hands on WebMatrix so you can get a head start or follow along with Christian’s demonstration? Download the installer for the WebMatrix beta and get started right away!