April, 2009

If you’re in Quebec City, we’ll be hosting a Coffee and Code tomorrow! IT Pro Advisor Pierre Roman provides the details below: Salut tout le monde, Rick Claus, Joël Quimper et moi-même serons au Cosmos sur Grande Allée à Québec demain matin de 9:00am a 11 :30am pour un « Coffee & Code ». Le concept du « Coffee & Code » est de promouvoir les connections avec la communauté des professionnels...

When I got into web development, I considered myself a latecomer to the game, and that was in 1999. In the five years I’d been working professionally as a developer, my apps were strictly desktop – multimedia CD-ROM stuff done in Director (then a product of Macromedia) and business productivity apps written in pre-.NET VB and Java-a-la-JBuilder. The company with whom I’d landed a contract had a contrarian...

If you’re near Toronto’s downtown Chinatown area, drop by Sky Dragon restaurant (top floor of Dragon City mall on the southwest corner of Spadina and Dundas) for Developer Lunch today! Kristan “Krispy” Uccelo has been organizing this series of lunches for the past year as a way for local developers to get together and make connections over a tasty dim sum lunch. I’ll be there, along with the other...

Creative Commons photo by 416style. If you’re in the Ottawa area and want to sharpen your .NET development skills and meet other .NET developers, you’ll want to come to the Ottawa Code Camp taking this place this Saturday at Algonquin College . The Code Camp will feature three tracks, spanning twelve sessions in the agenda : Advanced C# “Birds of a Feather” Session Building Applications Faster by Using...

If you’ve been meaning to get into building rich internet applications using Silverlight, you might want to check out The Silverlight Tour . Billed as “a worldwide three-day course on Silverlight”, the Tour mixes lectures, demonstrations and hands on labs, covering Silverlight development from three angles: Design Development Server-Side Code The Silverlight Tour people have been keeping up with the...

On the tail end of the Energize IT tour, where we talked about Azure, comes a series of How to videos that are worth checking out. These will help you get started quickly. Check them out here.

Yes, I’m holding a Coffee and Code today – Friday, April 24th from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. – at the Dark Horse Cafe at  215 Spadina Avenue (at Sullivan Street). C’mon down!

I just got an email from the folks at O’Reilly telling me about a webcast they’re hosting this Friday, April 24th at 10 a.m. Pacific (1 p.m. Eastern) : What’s New in Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory . Here’s the abstract: Bring your Active Directory questions and come learn what's new in Active Directory for Windows Server 2008 R2. Active Directory MVPs and authors Brian Desmond (Active Directory...

There’s a lot of geek activity going on in Toronto and the surrounding area over the next couple of days, so I thought I’d point some of it out to you. And yes, there’s a reason there’s a picture of chaps in this article… Toronto Coffee and Code, Friday I’ll be holding another Coffee and Code event at the Dark Horse Cafe ( 215 Spadina Avenue , between Dundas and Queen) this Friday, April 24th from...

This afternoon, I’m going to be at what I consider to be one of Toronto’s best toy stores: Function 13 ( 156 Augusta Avenue ), a place in Kensington Market that is part tech store, part art shop and part gallery. I’ll be there for It’s Alive! , an open house featuring the work of Sheridan College’s Interactive Multimedia program . The event is open to all, and judging from some of the stuff I’ve seen...

I’m reading a couple of tech books right now, and I plan to publish more in-depth reviews of them in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I thought I’d give you some quick reviews to give you a taste. Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Steve Sanderson (Apress) The first book is Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework , published by Apress and written by Steven Sanderson. It’s been available in “beta” form as a PDF...

Today, as part of our EnergizeIT cross-Canada tour, Christian Beauclair, Rick Claus and Pierre Roman are heading out to Halifax. As part of their visit, they’ll be hosting a Coffee and Code event today from 1:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Just Us Cafe at 1678 Barrington Street . Coffee and Code is your chance to have a nice up-close-and-personal get-together with people from Microsoft, ask questions...

For the past few weeks, our team has been on the road across Canada talking to developers - among many things - about Windows 7 as part of EnergizeIT . The feedback we've received has been outstanding; there's a lot of interest around Windows 7 and the capabilities that it brings to the table. We've also been asked a number of questions about application compatibility. There's been a great deal of...

Wait a Minute…Microsoft and PHP ? You probably wouldn’t be surprised that Microsoft is holding a development contest that pits professional developers against student developers. You might be surprised that Microsoft is holding a development contest where the challenge is to build a PHP application. You read that right: PHP. Microsoft’s web server, IIS (Internet Information Services) can run PHP as...

We’re Coming to Halifax! As part of Microsoft’s EnergizeIT cross-Canada tour, we’re holding a Coffee and Code event in Halifax at the Just Us Cafe at 1678 Barrington Street on Monday, April 20th from 1:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.. Hosting the event will be Developer Advisor Christian Beauclair and IT Pro Advisors Pierre Roman and gool ol’ east coast boy Rick Claus . Whether you’re a developer, IT pro or tech...

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another Coffee and Code here in Accordion City ! Today’s Coffee and Code is happening at the new branch of the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina, at Sullivan, which is south of Dundas and north of Queen) between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.. What is Coffee and Code, Anyway? It goes back to 1998, when I first tried out “cafe coding”. I shared a consultancy with my friend Adam...

If you’d been meaning to try out developing for Windows Mobile 6 but haven’t gotten around to it, I’ve got a quick intro to Windows Mobile 6 development on my personal tech blog, Global Nerdy . If you’re familiar with building WinForms desktop apps, you’ll find this walkthrough pretty easy.

Last night, EnergizeIT – that’s the cross-Canada tour where we talk to developers, IT Pros, students and faculty about Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Software+Services, cloud computing, architecture and a whole raft of other things that are coming soon from Microsoft – hit downtown Toronto with the “Future of the Platform” presentation aimed at IT Pros and systems administration types. IT Pro Evangelist...

I did developer evangelism work for a number of years prior to my joining Microsoft, and during that time, I dealt mostly with people who’d already graduated from school and were, as they say, “working in the real world”. Working with the Empire has given me the opportunity to connect with students at various events, from my speaking engagement at CUSEC 2009 (when I had my Richard Stallman moment ...

This week is Windows Mobile Incubation Week , a “jam session” taking place at The Empire’s Silicon Valley branch, where startups are invited to learn about Windows Mobile from Microsoft’s gurus and pick up some tricks from mobile industry gurus and venture capitalists. They’re also challenged to build Windows Mobile apps during the week, with prizes being awarded to winning participants. Admission...

Click the photo to see it at full size. (And yes, he’s using the word “pants” in the British English sense, as in “underpants”.) On Thursday evening, I caught Colin Bowern’s presentation, Authentication Alternatives for ASP.NET at the monthly gathering of the Metro Toronto .NET User Group . Here’s the abstract: Asking someone to create another username and password is presents risk. Most people use...

I caught the afternoon sessions of MeshU , the day of workshops that precedes the Mesh Conference . MeshU had three tracks – Design, Development and Management – and I chose to attend the sessions in the Development track. Leigh Honeywell on Writing Secure Software First up was HackLabTO cofounder Leigh Honeywell , (pictured on the right) whose presentation was titled Break It to Make It: Writing ...

Whether you’re an old hand at developing for Microsoft’s platforms or completely new to The Ways of The Empire, you’ll find the upcoming Toronto Code Camp to be a great way to get some deep information on .NET development as well as a way to meet some of the most active and engaged members of the local Microsoft developer community. It takes place at the Manulife Building ( 200 Bloor Street East ,...

Yesterday we sent out our newly designed MSDN Developer Newsletter. Many of you have already sent your feedback on the new design. Thank you! As you probably noticed, the newsletter is in Beta format now, so we’ll review all your feedback and continue improving the newsletter design and content. This is a significant milestone of our journey to provide you a great online experience. We want to help...