July, 2009

The Interview Over at the IT Manager Connection blog, there’s an interview with Barbara Liskov , who is: The Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department An Institute Professor at MIT The first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in computer science An ACM Turing Award Recipient for both 2008 and 2009 An IEEE John von Neumann Medial Recipient...

Developer Sessions at TechDays The sessions for TechDays 2009 , Microsoft’s cross-Canada conference taking place in seven cities this fall, have been posted on the TechDays site. You can go there to see the full set of sessions , or you can check the table below to look at the sessions for the tracks related to software development. I’m the lead for the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform...

C. Titus Brown delivering his presentation. Here’s the first of my notes from the Science 2.0 conference , a conference for scientists who want to know how software and the web is changing the way they work. It was held on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 29th at the MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto and attended by 102 people. It was a little different from most of the conferences I attend, where the...

If it’s Friday, it must be time for another Toronto Coffee and Code! This one will take place at the usual location – the Dark Horse Cafe , 215 Spadina – and will run from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. . Coffee and Code is my Friday afternoon ritual (a phrase that my classmates at Crazy Go Nuts University will find hauntingly familiar) in which I work out of a cafe and announce that I’ll be there. I’m making myself...

The Race to Market Challenge Here’s a quick little video that explains what the just-announced Race to Market challenge is all about: If you’ve been thinking about developing for Windows Mobile, now’s the time! We’re now accepting submissions of applications for Windows Marketplace for Mobile , the on-phone store where people with Windows Mobile phones can buy and install mobile applications easily...

Hello, my name is Mohammad Akif and I am the National Security and Privacy Lead at Microsoft Canada. I wanted to give you advanced notice of two critical security bulletins that were recently released. Microsoft has issued an Advance Notification Service (ANS) for two out-of-band security bulletins to be released Tuesday, July 28. Microsoft intends to release both security updates through systems...

It's gonna be a busy week for me -- there's a lot going on! Monday: Damian Conway and The Missing Link On Monday evening, I’ll be catching Damian Conway’s presentation, The Missing Link . There’s nothing quite like a Damian Conway presentation – they’re equal parts computer science, mathematical digression, history lesson, physics lecture, pop-culture observation, Perl module code walkthrough and stand...

Here’s a thought experiment: the fact that Windows pretty much owns the sub-$1000 computer market is in fact an opportunity . Discuss. ( This article appears with slightly different wording – to try things from a different perspective -- on my personal tech blog, Global Nerdy . )

The Open Letter Justice Gray is concerned about TechDays , Microsoft Canada’s touring conference that will hit seven cities this fall. So he wrote an open letter, in which he stated : I'm a big "fundamentals" guy, and TechDays hasn't traditionally focused on any sort of development fundamentals. It's been more focused on specific Microsoft technology demos. He’s right – one of the key goals...

Hot off the presses! Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 have hit the RTM Milestone! From the Windows 7 team blog: I am pleased to announce that Windows 7 has RTM’d! As I mentioned previously, RTM officially happens only after sign-off occurs. What happens is a build gets designated as a RTM contender after going through significant testing and meeting our quality bar for RTM. Then, it goes though all the...

Jon Udell – the developer, information architect, author who wrote about social software before we started calling it that, blogger and Senior Tech Evangelist at Microsoft – will be in Toronto next week and he’ll be at a couple of events that I’m attending. DemoCamp Toronto 21 On Tuesday, John will be at the 21st edition of DemoCamp, the show-and-tell event for people in the Toronto tech community...

One quick announcement: I’m going to be at a couple of Coffee and Code events this week: I’ll be at tomorrow’s (Tuesday, July 21st) Guelph Coffee and Code, which takes place at the Albion Hotel … and at the Toronto Coffee and Code on Friday, July 24th at the Dark Horse Cafe on Spadina . Be there!

If you’re a developer looking for a job – or if you already have a job and are looking for a better one – you’ll want to check out Microsoft’s new Thrive for Developers , which describes itself as a one-stop community hub for advancing your career, enhancing your skills and connecting with your community. Having stuff like this has always been important, but it’s even more so in the middle of what...

Over at my personal technical blog, Global Nerdy , I’ve got a few posts covering some presentations and goings-on at a few open source programming conferences and gatherings that you might want to check out.: Fighting the Imperial Californian Ideology: A presentation by Jesse Hirsh at the recent FutureRuby conference, in which he suggests that Silicon Valley is just the latest manifestation of the...

Following up on the previous article about the SOLID principles for object-oriented design , Steve Bohlen pointed me to a series of screencasts on DimeCasts.net covering each SOLID principle: S – Single Responsibility Principle O – Open-Closed Principle L – Liskov Substitution Principle I – Interface Segregation Principle D – Dependency Inversion Principle Refactoring Dependency Inversion to use StructureMap...

SOLID Seems to be Everywhere These Days Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin first gathered the object-oriented design principles that would eventually go under the acronym SOLID almost fifteen years ago, but the SOLID principles have been making the rounds lately. Before I talk about the SOLID principles, let me show you where the concept has been popping up in the past few months… SOLID at Conferences At...

Today is a landmark launch day for anyone building Rich Internet Applications (also known as RIAs), particularly those that build compelling web-enabled experiences on the Microsoft platform. We launched 2 new product versions today and it’s something all of us at Microsoft are very excited about:  Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3. Silverlight 3 represents a big change in how you can build...

You may have noticed that within tool windows like Solution Explorer, you cannot reach the toolbar by hitting tab or arrowing to it. The keyboard shortcut to reach a Tool Window's toolbar is Shift+Alt . Note that Alt+Shift will not work. Reposted from Did you know... How to access a toolbar within a tool window? - #007 by Sara Ford , author of Microsoft Visual Studio Tips Microsoft TechDays...

When a tool window is not docked... Press the Alt key once Press the Spacebar once. You will get the standard window system menu with Move and Size. Select Size Now, just arrow towards the window edge you wish to resize, and resize from there. Press Enter to commit the resize, or press Esc to cancel resize changes. Note: Using the Move command from this menu will prevent the docking...

Don’t forget that Silverlight on the Silver Screen , ObjectSharp’s free seminar on Silverlight 3 , Expression and SketchFlow takes place in Toronto this Thursday at the Scotiabank Theatre. If you’d like to learn more about the rich-UI applications that you can build with Silverlight 3 and Expression and how quickly you can design and prototype user interfaces and interactions using SketchFlow, you...

July marks the start of the year for a lot of organizations, and Microsoft is one of them. We may still have six months of 2009 left, but as far as Microsoft is concerned, it’s already 2010 – Fiscal Year 2010, that is. A new year is the time for doing some looking back at the previous year and planning for the one to come, and that’s what we’re doing right now. The Developer and Platform Evangelism...

With the desired tool window selected, press Alt+Minus to bring up the tool window menu. Press Down Arrow to select the Move command and hit Enter . Now, you can control the tool window with the arrow keys. To dock, simply use the arrow keys to the desired dock target and hit Enter . Reposted from Did you know... How to drag a tool window around using the keyboard? - #005 by Sara Ford , author...

There are two ways to split the current window: From the Menu Bar, go to Window - Split Using the mouse, grab the splitter control found directly above the document scrollbar But the split command only works horizontally. If you need to split vertically (see Program.cs:2 in the above picture), try using the Window.NewWindow command found on the Menu Bar at Window - New Window...

Manning Publications have a great variety of books on .NET development. There’s the stuff you’d expect, such as books on C#, ASP.NET and SharePoint, but they’ve also produced books on IronPython and IronRuby (not many books on these languages), functional programming is both F# and C# and doing brownfield development and building DSLs using .NET. Many of their books have helped me get up to speed with...

SharePoint Saturdays are free events where you can learn about SharePoint from architects, developers, and other professionals who work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (a.k.a. MOSS). Filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & Microsoft MVPs, they’re day-long events covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics. On Saturday, July 11th, Toronto will have its...