March, 2009

Earlier today, Rodney Buike, Qixing Zheng, and I visited SAIT Polytechnic and the user group community in Calgary as part of EnergizeIT . The academic event at SAIT Polytechnic was attended by students and faculty wanting to hear about the ICT industry and learn a little about technologies like Windows 7 and Windows Azure . We had a lot of great questions and we able to share some information...

(This is part 3 of a 4 part series, you can read the first post here ) Here is the second part of my discussion with Shane Schick on the Myths & Realities of the IT Skills & Talent landscape in Canada.  This part is titled “Myth 3 – I have to leave to stay employed” .  Check it out, let me know what you think.  

I had the pleasure of being a speaker at Waterloo University as part of an event put together by the Innovation Center. It was a gathering of over 190 future entrepreneurs looking at XNA to help them build their next great game title. Check out this video summary of the event.

(Cross-Post.  This is part 2 of a 4 part series, you can read the first post here ) Here is the second part of my discussion with Shane Schick on the Myths & Realities of the IT Skills & Talent landscape in Canada.  This part is titled “Myth 2 - There aren’t enough Skilled IT people in Canada” .  Check it out, let me know what your thoughts on the topic are.

Later this week, the folks who run the site, msfttechdays.com will host a 24-hour virtual event, featuring 95 live sessions (!) available both live or on-demand. Earlier today, I checked out the list of available sessions and was impressed by the developer-specific sessions that are being covered. The event sessions are broken down into one of five tracks: Windows Development and Frameworks...

(Cross Posted With Mark Relph’s Blog ) Working in today’s IT industry comes with a variety of challenges, especially in these tough economic times.  Jobs are becoming more complex, employers expectations are high and employees need more than just technical skills to grow their careers.  I had a chance to sit down with Shane Schick from itWorldCanada to discuss the state of the IT Profession...

Erik Renaud is an agile coach and co-founder of nVentive, a new concept where software development teams leverage coaching and guidance packages to build better software. His current mandates concentrate on large financial institutions creating new teams that directly support their primary activities. Erik has over 10 years of software development experience, coaching teams to architect, model and...

I’m going to be at the FIRST Robotics Greater Toronto Regional Competition tomorrow, where I’ll be watching robots built by high school students compete in “high intensity robo-sports”. The robots are six feet tall, weigh 120 pounds and were all built from scratch by the students in only six weeks. I’ll take notes and photos and post my report next week. The competition started yesterday and runs through...

This week Rod, Joey and I kicked off the EnergizeIT tour on the west coast. Joey showed you the Road Warrior Office we had in London. Here, let me show you some pictures from our  User Group, Student Connection, and EnergizeIT events. Below Left - Rod is getting ready to start the Future of the Platform user group connection in Kitchener. Below right – user group members are sitting around the...

I’m currently in London, Ontario at the Delta Armouries London hotel , where my coworkers Rodney Buike and Qixing Zheng will be doing a presentation for EnergizeIT later tonight. We’re spending the day polishing our presentations and getting the usual administrivial stuff done. We didn’t want to spend our day cooped up in our hotel rooms, so we asked one of the hotel staff where the business center...

I had the pleasure of visiting Montréal (my birth place) last week to deliver a series of events under the Energize IT banner, and what an adventure it was. This is an account of this adventure that I shared with Pierre Roman and Rick Claus (IT Pro extraordinaire). First and foremost, I’d like to thank all the people who took time from their work or away from their family to attend. This commitment...

There are a lot of applications out there today that were built using Visual Basic 6, Microsoft’s last version of Visual Basic before we released the .NET framework.  In fact, there are several companies that still use VB6 as a development platform for their solutions.  While there are many good reasons why people are developing solutions in VB6, the VB6 platform no longer has wide reaching...

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis. Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year.  By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background includes stuff...

This Week’s Webcast How to Become a Great Leader is the topic of this week’s Ignite Your Career , Microsoft Canada’s and CIPS’ webcast series aimed at helping you further develop your career with opinions and advice from experts in Canada’s tech industry. Here’s the abstract for the webcast: Being a great manager does not by default also mean you are a great leader. For some people, being a leader...

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis. Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year. By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background...

There are lots of exciting announcements coming out of MIX in Vegas this week. Today we shipped Internet Explorer 8 . However,  there’s also plenty to celebrate back home around Silverlight and IE8. Check them out! Watching your favorite TV shows online in HD with Silverlight   CTV Globemedia CTV Globemedia (Canada’s largest online media company) announced the immediate availability of The...

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis. Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year.  By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background includes stuff...

Silverlight 3 Beta Today at the MIX ‘09 conference , we rolled out the beta for Silverlight 3 , the next iteration of our rich internet application platform. Version 3 adds a lot of new features including: Out of Browser Capabilities. Silverlight 3 applications aren’t just confined to the browser. Users can install and run them from their desktops – either Windows or Mac OS – and without having to...

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis. Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year.  By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background includes stuff...

EnergizeIT Our cross-Canada tour where we showcase some up-and-coming-really-soon stuff like Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 starts today in Montreal! The events for the next couple of days are… Tuesday, March 17 User Group Connection: Future of the Platform Wednesday, March 18 (afternoon) Architecting Flexibility Wednesday, March 18 (evening) EnergizeIT: From the Client to the Cloud Thursday...

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis. Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year.  By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background includes stuff...

This Week’s Topic This week’s topic for Ignite Your Career – our webcast series featuring experts from the Canadian tech industry and aimed at supporting your career development – is one that’s on a lot of people’s minds: How to Establish and Maintain a Healthy Work/Life Balance . Here’s the abstract: With mobile technologies and our always-on culture, it's imperative to establish and maintain a balance...

This is a big premiere. As you know Joey De Villa has started a movement that is spreading across Canada. Today he ran the 4th Coffee and Code in Toronto and John Bristowe was hosting his first one in Calgary. Well, I could not be left behind. Next Monday from 1PM to 4PM, I’ll be at the Café Dépôt located at 550 Sherbrooke St .. with Pierre Roman, one of my IT Pro buddies. If you have dev questions...

Next week marks the beginning of EnergizeIT , Microsoft’s cross-Canada tour where we’ll be talking about some of the new tools and technologies that are coming soon. We’ll be hosting all kinds of things, including: User Group Connection: The Future of the Platform: We’ll show you the upcoming versions of our operating systems, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, some of their features, all with this...

Montréal get ready. The EnergizeIT storm is coming your way. Starting next Monday and for 5 days, our team will be in town delivering some really cool events. It includes a student connection event at John Abbott college on Tuesday (btw if you are a college interested in our presence send me an email ), a user group event on Tuesday night, a faculty roundtable on Wednesday, an event on Client to Cloud...