May, 2009

Yes, Toronto Coffee and Code returns today! It’s a day when I make myself (and by extension, Microsoft) very accessible by working out of a cafe and answering your questions, getting your opinions and sharing ideas. Once again, it’ll take place at the Dark Horse Cafe at 215 Spadina , near the lights between Dundas and Queen. I’ve got some stuff to do at Microsoft Canada HQ in the morning, so I’m declaring...

When I was a teenager – and I hate to say it, but that’s a long time ago – this was the design on my favourite T-shirt, because I could relate to it: A shade over two decades later, I still have an affinity for wacky ideas. I recently posted some of these ideas on my personal tech blog, Global Nerdy , and invite you to come take a look: Evangelist, Immigrant and Shaman: in which I think about the roles...

If you’re going to be in the area of downtown Toronto next Thursday, May 28th, you might want to check out my presentation, Canada’s Next Top Model View Controller at the next Metro Toronto .NET User Group meeting. I’ll be talking about the ASP.NET MVC Framework, Microsoft’s answer to MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails , Django , CakePHP and Catalyst . As is my stock in trade with presentations, this...

Whether you call it “Victoria Day” , “May Two-Four” or anything else, we here at Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team would like to wish you a safe and happy holiday today! Have a good one!

I’m a bit swamped with work and other things, so the Toronto Coffee and Code events are taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks. Worry not, it’s a temporary thing, and in a couple of Fridays – May 29th, to be precise, Coffee and Code will make a triumphant return, all phoenix-like, to the Dark Horse Cafe at 215 Spadina on Friday, May 29th from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. .

The 2009 edition of the RSA Conference , the biggest and best-known cryptography and information security conference, took place last month in San Francisco. Each year, the conference has a theme based on or relevant to crypto or infosec, and this year’s theme was Edgar Allen Poe (previous themes include the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, the secrets of the Mayans , Mary Queen of Scots and Alan...

I have to admit that the end of March and all of April was a pretty busy time for the team. Considering that EnergizeIT 2009 included events in 16 cities from Victoria to St. John's in a short six week period - it was a bit of a whirlwind... and a really exciting time! We were able to connect with you and share the Future of the Microsoft Windows-based Platform, show you how you can extend your...

I’m doing a lot of running around today. First, I’m off to the University of Waterloo to talk to students about PHP on Windows and the PHP FTW! contest . Then, it’s back to Toronto, where I’m headed downtown to catch up with Garrett Serack from Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab to talk about The Empire, Open Source (which includes PHP, of course) and how they fit together. If this sounds like a...

This isn’t strictly an article about programming or managing developers, but it covers an aspect of the job that will affect you sooner or later. I’m talking about making presentations and specifically about the slide decks that accompany them. If you’re striving to become better at the art and science of making software (and that’s why you read this blog, right?), chances are you will get better at...

Last year, we announced the Ignite IT Awards . Its purpose is to recognize and reward the efforts of Canadian IT professionals and software developers. Today, we are happy to announce that we have selected the winners of this year’s awards: 2009 Winner of the Ignite IT Award for IT Professionals The Community Caregiver Portal Solution by Navantis - Social Networking in Action 2009 Winner...

This week, I’m going to have my hands full on Friday with WordCamp Toronto , so I’m moving my Coffee and Code session from Friday to this Thursday, May 7th, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Dark Horse Cafe ( 215 Spadina ). This particular Coffee and Code has a theme: developing and deploying PHP applications on Windows. I’ll be talking about and answering questions about PHP on Windows, the Web Platform...

F# (pronounced “eff sharp”) is multi-paradigm .NET programming language that supports both imperative object-oriented and functional programming styles. It’s a dialect of the ML programming language and very close to OCaml . Used as a functional programming language, F# gives you expressive power that’s tricky to duplicate in your run-of-the-mill imperative programming languages. As a .NET programming...

Yesterday, I showed you how to install MySQL Server 5.1 (Community Edition) onto your Windows-based development machine. The reason I wrote the article was to help you prep your machine for installing PHP and PHP-based applications using Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer . What is Web Platform Installer? Web Platform Installer is, as the website puts it, “a free tool that makes it simple to download...

You’ve probably heard of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer , a free-as-in-beer tool that makes it a snap to install a variety of Microsoft and Open Source web applications and development tools, ranging from “The Usual Suspects”, such as Visual Web Developer, IIS and SQL Server 2008 Express to stuff you might not expect, such as PHP and Wordpress. It makes installing these goodies a simple of matter...

Just in case there’s nothing good on TV and you’re having a “lazy Sunday”, here’s a video of Joel Spolsky’s recent presentation at Google, Learning from StackOverflow.com , in which he talks about the design decisions that went into and the lessons learned from the Stack Overflow site. It runs for about 52 minutes, so you might want to get yourself a nice beverage before you watch it:

    On my personal tech blog, Global Nerdy , I’ve posted a new article titled Upwardly Mobile, Part 3: Exploring Windows Mobile 6’s Built-In UI Controls . In it, I show a steak-and-cocktail-themed example app whose purpose is to get you familiar with some of the controls built into Windows Mobile 6.