November, 2008

I had the opportunity to present at the Metro Toronto .NET User Group last Wednesday. Even it was the first snow of the winter in GTA, but there were still more than 40 people showed up to listen to my talk on "Building for People: 5 Practical Tips for Creating Great User Experience." I was very excited about the presentation because it was my first time to conduct a pure UX talk to a developer audience...

Hi Everyone, In the sprit of being transparent and building connections, I thought I would share my teams mandate and goals with you.  My team is responsible for one key goal in Canada and that is to build your trust and support you in a manner in which to earn your satisfaction with Microsoft.   We don’t  focus on revenue and we don’t have any utilization targets...twice a year...

Note:  This is the third post in a three post series on succeeding as a professional in IT during a recession. Without a doubt, most of us are experiencing the most serious economic recession in our lifetimes.  There's an awful lot of uncertainty that goes with that; everything from our retirement savings, disposable income and job security.  IT as an industry is certainly not immune...

Note:  This is the second post in a three post series on succeeding as a professional in IT during a recession. Without a doubt, most of us are experiencing the most serious economic recession in our lifetimes.  There's an awful lot of uncertainty that goes with that; everything from our retirement savings, disposable income and job security.  IT as an industry is certainly not immune...

Without a doubt, most of us are experiencing the most serious economic recession in our lifetimes. There's an awful lot of uncertainty that goes with that; everything from our retirement savings, disposable income and job security. IT as an industry is certainly not immune to these worries and as professionals in this space, I'm sure the concerns I have are similar to those that you are facing....

Thanks for everyone who came out to the Toronto and Montreal TechDays. The three Silverlight sessions in both cities are extremely popular with long line-up of people wanting to ask questions about after the presentations. Robert Burke (Silverlight Samurai Skills presenter in Toronto), Laurent Duveau (Silverlight Samurai Skills presenter in Montreal), and I (presented Silverlight Control Framework...

Earlier today at Microsoft Tech·Ed EMEA 2008 - Developer in Barcelona, we announced the launch of the SDL Optimization Model , SDL Pro Network and the Microsoft SDL Threat Modeling Tool 3.1 Beta ! You can read more about this announcement here or you can read more at the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Blog . To better understand why the Microsoft SDL Threat Modeling Tool 3.1 Beta...

I love Stack Overflow . If you haven't visited this site, you really owe it to yourself to fire up a browser window and check it out. So, what is Stack Overflow and why should you care? Well, Joey deVilla and I bumped into Jeff Atwood at Microsoft PDC and asked him exactly that question. Download(s): WMV My apologies for the short interview. Jeff didn't have a lot of free time on his...

MSDN Ramp Up is a free, online, community-based program that can help you save time in learning Microsoft technologies like SharePoint and Visual Studio . Additionally, it helps Java or VB 6.0 developers get up-to-date quickly on the .NET Framework . Recently, the folks who own MSDN Ramp Up updated the content and added a new track; SharePoint for Developers (Part 1) . Here, you will find a number...

My fellow Developer Advisors and I are huge fans of XNA . It's one of the coolest technologies out there. At Microsoft PDC , I dropped by the XNA booth and chatted with Michael Klucher (AKA, MechaDragon ) about this amazing technology: Download(s): WMV FWIW, my GamerTag is TropicOfCanada . Looking for an easy kill? I'm your man.

David Woods is the President of Solidhouse , A software consulting and website hosting company in Edmonton , Alberta . Dave has been programming since he was a kid on his Apple II and currently works on developing enterprise applications. Dave has been a security enthusiast for many years. In former jobs he was responsible for the performing network security audits and server security before he took...

At Microsoft PDC , Joey deVilla and I ran into Chris Slemp , Program Manager for the Server and Tools Online group at Microsoft. His group owns a really cool feature that has been recently introduced to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) ; social bookmarking. In this interview, Chris talks a little about the social bookmarking capabilities that can be found at Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) : ...

Jamie Wakeam interviews Giorgio Sardo about Silverlight 2 running on Windows Mobile devices. In this case, Giorgio shows a Silverlight application running on a Samsung Omnia . Check it out: Download(s): WMV If you'd like to find out more information about Silverlight running on Windows Mobile devices, you can check out Giorgio's presentation from Microsoft PDC here .

  Bonjour Montréal ! C'est Philippe Riel, Directeur des communications stratégiques, marchés francophones.   L’équipe de Microsoft est en ville cette semaine pour la conférence TechDays, tenue au Palais des Congrès. C’est l’événement de l’année pour la communauté des développeurs québécois et tous les professionnels des TI de la province. Au programme, d’excellents ateliers animés par nos...

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft released Silverlight 2 as a Release to Web (RTW) product.  For us at Microsoft, this was exciting news because it represented a major milestone in presenting to you as solution developers a platform for building rich, immersive experiences on the web. I'm not going to go through each of the features in Silverlight 2 that you have probably heard already from various...

Many of you know that I'm a huge fan of DevTeach . I think it's one of the best developer conferences in Canada. Jean-René Roy is the tireless champion behind DevTeach ; he's been organizing this conference for the developer community in Montréal for the past six years and has recently expanded its reach to the cities of Toronto and Vancouver. To get a better sense of the history behind DevTeach...

PlanetEye is hosting a GeoSocial next week (Nov. 6) at the Charlotte Room (6:30 p.m.) in Toronto, to bring together people involved in the development of location-based mobile applications, mashups, maps, producing geodata, writing about their cities/neighborhood, or just have an interest in what has been called Where 2.0. http://blog.planeteye.com/2008/10/14/announcing-geosocial/ You can find more...

Ever wondered how you might be able to write applications that control devices without having to learn C++ and/or assembly? The .NET Micro Framework is a tiny subset of the .NET Framework that allows you to do exactly that... and, do it in C#. Joey deVilla chatted with one of the folks from the .NET Micro Framework team to find out more: Download(s): WMV As it turns out, the .NET Micro...