January, 2009

If you’re a developer who’s either into building games or has been meaning to try out game development, you’re in luck this weekend. From Friday, January 30th through Sunday, February 1st, the Global Game Jam will be held in various cities all over the world, giving people a chance to collaborate on the design, building and presentation of a videogame in a single weekend. The participating Canadian...

From looking at Microsoft’s surveys of Canadian developers and plain old talking to people (something I love to do), it seems that many people who call themselves “developers” wear many hats, one of which is “manager”. If this is the case, I’ll bet that the title of this article has piqued your curiosity. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. According to the Harvard Business blog, the interview...

Like some of you, I have taken the plunge and installed Windows 7 on my primary machine. A bold move? Perhaps. But I have to say that I really like what I've experienced these past few days since I - as we like to say - "made the move to 7". And like some of you, I've been interested in what this new platform has in store for me as a developer. New platforms - it seems - are akin to episode cliffhangers...

Once again, it's time for another Developer Lunch in Toronto! This will be the ninth in the series of lunches organized by developer and creator of the Byte Club video series on local software companies, Kristan "Krispy" Uccello . It’ll be held at the usual location, Sky Dragon restaurant , located on the 5th floor of Dragon City mall at the corner of Spadina and Dundas ). These lunches give...

Last week in Vancouver marked the conclusion of Microsoft TechDays Canada . Starting last October, our team visited six cities across Canada delivering five separate tracks covering a wide spectrum of technologies. Microsoft TechDays Canada was an event focused on supporting the skills you need to be successful with today’s technology. To that end, our developer tracks focused on technologies...

From tonight until Sunday morning, I’ll be in Montreal for CUSEC , the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. If you want to catch up with me, I’ll be at tonight’s CUSEC Pub Night, which takes place at Benelux ( 245 Sherbrooke Street West ) starting at 9 p.m.. See you there!

There has been some confusion around the submission process for the Ignite IT Awards . In the submission form you’ll see that one of the field is “Project title”. Because of that many people are not submitting en entry for themselves or their team because either they are between projects or the one they are working on is not finished. Let me explain in my own term what we are looking for. We are looking...

I’m in Vancouver (at TechDays) for one more night before flying off to Montreal to speak at CUSEC . I’m meeting up with Boris Mann and the Vancouver Bloggers tonight at 6:00 p.m. at The End Cafe ( 2360 Commercial Drive ). See you there!

Although we’re already into the start of 2009’s third full week, TechDays Canada 2008 has one more stop to make: Vancouver Convention Centre, in the city I like to refer to as “Vangroovy”, on Wednesday, January 21st and Thursday, January 22nd. This is the final leg of our cross-country tour in which people from Microsoft as well as developers and IT pros who build using Microsoft technologies share...

CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference , takes place next week in Montreal, from Thursday, January 22nd through Saturday, January 24th. It’s the only software development conference I’m aware of that’s specifically aimed at students, and like the best conferences I’ve attended, it’s put together by computer science and software engineering students who are passionate about software...

Next week’s a travel week for me and a fair number of the Developer & Platform Evangelism team. On Wednesday, January 21st and Thursday, January 22nd, we’ll be at TechDays Canada Vancouver , the last leg of our cross-Canada tour where we show Microsoft developers how to best make use of today’s Microsoft tech and development tools. I myself will be do the Deep Dive into ASP.NET AJAX presentation...

Comments on “The Device/Desktop” Opportunity The Device/Desktop Opportunity got a number of comments, both in the “Comments” section of Global Nerdy (where the article also appeared)   and sent directly to me via email. First, I’d like to say “please keep those comments coming!” One of my intentions was to start some discussion. I got a number of comments whose essence was “Why don’t the users...

it’s been a great day and I’m really excited…if you can’t already tell by my twitter stream….I’ve been playing with Win7.  It’s been a while since I’ve played this much with a beta OS and it’s been more then worth it so far.  My dell 1330 and Toshiba M7 install have been without problems.   There still isn’t windows upgrade so I did have to go get some drivers but other then that...

I admit it: I’m addicted to podcasts. Why? Because they allow me to multitask. For example, I can take Hugo (my dog) for a long walk while listening to some of my favourite podcasts on software development. It’s the best of both worlds; I get to exercise my brain and my body at the same time. If you’re an on-the-go developer looking for a better way to maximize your time, I would recommend listening...

Why isn’t Brookstone in Canada yet? For those of you who aren’t familiar with Brookstone, a good way to describe it is “lifestyle gadget store”. A good portion of their catalog is devoted to “lifestyle electronics”: things like alarm clocks for travel that also play soothing noises to help you sleep , key fobs that emit a sound so all you have to do is press a button to find them , record players with...

It’s easy to point to books on understanding and improving the inner workings of your code, the software and hardware platforms on which it runs and even the processes used in developing it. It’s much harder to find one on understanding and improving the programmer , or more specifically the programmer’s “wetware” – that is, the brain and mind. A few books aimed at programmers give a little space to...

One thing I like to do at the start of a new year is tackle some tasks that have been sitting in my "do someday soon" list for far too long. One of these tasks is "Start posting articles on Canadian Developer Connection ." So here I am! First, an introduction: I'm Joey deVilla , the new Developer Advisor at Microsoft Canada. I come from the world of startups and small consultancies, the sort of...

You guys all know how big fans we are of DevTeach/SQL Teach . We have an amazing relationship with Jean-Rene and he considers us friends of the show. As such we have the opportunity to offer you a very limited time offer rebate code that you can use to get 50% off your registration for DevTeach Vancouver. It is limited to 30 people and expires February 10th so make sure you go now. Here’s the secret...

  Donald Belcham is a senior consultant at igloocoder.com Consulting Inc. who is based out of Edmonton, Alberta. His experience varies in industry from Agriculture and Forestry to Insurance and Government. Donald also speaks at a number of different varied sized conferences around the world. The specialty areas that Donald focuses on include agile practices and fundamental object oriented programming...