February, 2009

Aside from EnergizeIT , we also have an exciting webcast series coming up in March called Ignite Your Career Webcast Series . They are non-technical webcasts, designed to support Canadian technical professionals in their career development. The webcasts are intended to be very interactive to connect you to the industry experts across Canada.  My colleague Rick who has worked on the past two Ignite...

One of our Gold Partners and special VSTS Inner Circle partners , ObjectSharp Consulting , have just released their spring line-up of training courses covering topics from SharePoint, .NET 3.5 technologies (WPF, WCF, WF, LINQ) and Visual Studio Team System for developers and QA testers just to name a few. Check out the full line up here . In addition, ObjectSharp is offering a great service to help...

This article was originally posted on the Coffee and Code blog. Here’s a picture of where this week’s Coffee and Code will take place: On Tuesday, February 24th, from about 1:30 p.m to 5:30 p.m., I’ll be at   Le Gourmand , which is located at 152 Spadina (on the west side, south of Queen and north of Richmond). If you’ve ever gone walking around Paris looking for a quick bite to eat, it’ll give...

This article originally appeared on the Coffee and Code blog. Yesterday, I held the first Coffee and Code day at Toronto’s Urbana Coffee , at the corner of Bay and St. Joseph Streets . The Coffee and Code plan is a simple one: about one day a week, instead of working at the home office or Microsoft’s Toronto or Mississauga offices, I set myself up in a wifi-equipped cafe somewhere in Toronto. As a...

  Hi! My name is Rini Gahir. I’m the Senior Product Manager for Developer Tools here at Microsoft Canada. It’s an honour to be granted a regular blog spot on the Canadian Developer Connection blogosphere . I will attempt to provide a product management perspective on the business of software development. My counterparts do a great job in explaining the technology aspects of our platform and connecting...

Pictured on the right is a photo I took in New York City almost nine years ago to the day. While taking an elevator in the hotel where I was staying, I noticed a little indicator above the rows of buttons for floors – a circular bit of plastic with the words HELP IS ON THE WAY inscribed. Presumably, if there was some kind of failure and passengers were trapped in the elevator, someone in a control...

Coffee and Code is an idea I’ve been meaning to try out for some time. Every so often – perhaps once a week – I plan to work somewhere other than my home office or Microsoft’s offices but instead spend the day working in one of Toronto’s wifi-equipped cafe. The idea is to make myself available to you, to answer your questions and talk about Microsoft, programming, the tech job market, games, accordions...

I’m announcing the start of Coffee and Code , a regular event where I’ll spend the day working at a wifi-equipped cafe somewhere in Toronto. It’s not just an excuse to get out of the home office, but a way of making myself available to you, to answer your questions about Microsoft, our tools and technology, development and tech in general – or anything else. If you’re in the neighbourhood, I invite...

Last weekend during Interaction'09 conference , I noticed there were quite a few developers in the heavily concentrated interaction designers conference. I was curious to find out what were their experience at the conference and why they chose this conference. Is it like a designer attending a developer conference such as PDC? I met Calvin Chan who's a System and Database Developer working at the University...

We live in interesting times from the perspective of the ICT industry as a whole. I have to admit that I'm pretty freakin' excited. Technology has never been more of an enabler than it is now. As a developer, I have the power to build applications cheaper and faster than ever before. With advancements in the .NET Framework 4.0 and supportive tooling like Visual Studio 2010 at my disposal, I feel empowered...

Infragistics , one of the top UI controls vendors, has recently launched Quince – a UX Patterns Explorer in Silverlight. You can explore various UX Patterns by User Tasks, Tag Relations, and Wireframe (i.e. arranged by their UI positions). Of course you can also search for a UX Pattern. Once you find the pattern you like, you can digg it, add to you Del.icio.us bookmarks, etc. Quince is a great example...

His first foray into computers began at age ten with the eight-bit Amstrad CPC 464; twenty four years later, he's still at it although we've gained a few bits in computer horsepower since then. His flirtation with internet technologies began in the mid-nineties, when he designed and built Ireland's first large-scale e-Commerce system using Microsoft Merchant Server 1.0 for Allied Irish Banks (AIB)...

Rini Gahir is our Product manager for tools marketing at MS Canada and I’ve been all over him about putting an offer out to you.  I heard a lot of comments during TechDays that it’s hard to find any discounts, opportunities or as I found out….we just don’t share this information broadly.  So, with a little nudge, he has come through in spades.  Here’s his offer and I’m jazzed to share...

I mentioned in the past the importance of finding the right resources for getting people ramped up or to keep current on technologies. Microsoft created RampUp a while back to give a path to follow based on your current skills. I am happy to let you know the site has been revamped, a new Sharepoint track has been added and the URL is even simpler ( www.myrampup.com ). Now, get Ramped Up :-) Christian

With some time to catchup today I found this on Tim's Blog..... I thought it was pretty interesting. check it out: The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets It’s great to see Windows 7 Beta finally released to the world! We're very proud of what has been accomplished over the last months; in many ways, it sets a new quality bar for a beta operating system release. Building on top of the Windows...

Starting tonight (Pacific Coast Time), John Bristowe, I, and a few other folks from Microsoft Canada’s De veloper & Platform Evangelism team, will be in Seattle all next week to attend Microsoft’s 8th TechReady conference. TechReady is a Microsoft internal conference where ‘Softies from all over the world gather to get briefed on upcoming releases. The coming months promise a bumper crop of Microsoft...