August, 2008

If you build software solutions for a living, manage professional development teams or lead a software development company, there are a number of things that you are probably thinking about consistently on a day to day basis. Two of these items likely include: Productivity; either your own or your team’s Driving Innovation; finding new and compelling ways to reach your customers If you...

It's Friday and raining in Gatineau. There is a little bit of electricity in the house because my daughters are getting ready for a brand new school semester starting next Tuesday. My son on the other hand just started college for the first time last week. These are always major stress time for parents. Getting the books ready is one thing but offering advice, helping with the stress of a new school...

For the past 12 years, I've been building websites and working with different Web technologies. I'd have to say that one of the most frustrating experiences (and the most time consuming) has been to get content to render correctly in all browsers. As a result, I'm a really strong advocate of Web standards. For example, during the RealDevelopment tour , we demonstrated how to validate your code using...

It's official! One of the coolest new platform on Live is now available in Canada for testing and there is no more wait list. You can now take it for a spin. This open platform allows you to create a mesh between different devices (PC and mobile) so they can be aware of each other and share files. You can find a great description here. Head over to the official announcement by Amit Mital right here...

Yesterday, I interviewed Tony Targonski about the state of computer science in Canada and CompSci.ca : If you haven't had an opportunity to check out CompSci.ca , it's a site dedicated to students and faculty who wish to discuss matters relating to computer science. Tony is one of its contributors and maintains a blog where he writes about his own experiences as a student at the University of...

For those of you who missed the announcement, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 have been released. You can find the details right here.

Two senior engineering managers on the Windows 7 product are going to blog about the process of building it and allow the community to share with them through the comments. This is a great opportunity for developers to follow on the journey. Head over there and make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed. Enjoy the reading.

This is a great day for developers. A major part of many applications written today depend on a strong database back-end and SQL Server 2008 has much to offer in that department. I could spell out all the nice features and links but one of my IT pro colleague, Damir, already did a great post on the IT Pro Connection blog. So head over there and find out some of the details.

One of our great partners out of Quebec, RunAtServer Consulting , has just created a great, three-day course on Silverlight 2 and they will be conducting it in various cities in Quebec. The details of the course can be found here and here , but it is a very in-depth course for those of you interested in building really solid and compelling RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) with Silverlight 2. The...