August, 2009

Today is your last chance to register for TechDays Canada 2009’s Vancouver (September 14 – 15) and Toronto (September 29 – 30) conferences at the early bird price of CDN$299. Tomorrow, the price doubles to CDN$599 – that’s the price for procrastination! I’ve written a lot about TechDays Canada 2009 lately , so I think I’ll close with this video shot by the folks at TechVibes on the last leg of the...

The early bird registration price for TechDays Vancouver (September 14th – 15th) and TechDays Toronto (September 29th – 30th) will disappear after Monday, August 31st. If you want to catch TechDays at the ultra-cheap rate, you should register now ! Here’s a quick graphic recap of what TechDays Canada 2009 is all about: Rather than asking Canadian developers and IT pros to fly far away to a conference...

If you want to attend TechDays Vancouver (September 14 – 15) or TechDays Toronto (September 29 – 30) at the early bird rate, you’ve got 3 days left! After Monday, August 31st, you’ll have to pay the full $599. Register now and save!

The Early Bird Price is Going Away Soon The $299 early bird pricing for TechDays Canada 2009’s Vancouver and Toronto stops will vanish after Monday, August 31st. From September 1st onward, if you want to catch TechDays in Vancouver (Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th) and Toronto (Tuesday, September 29th – Wednesday, September 30th), you’ll have to pay the full price of $599 . Why pay...

Last month, I posted a video announcing the launch of the Race to Market Challenge , a competition that challenges you to add some Windows Phone applications to our up-and-coming Marketplace and compete for one of four grand prizes: developer editions of a Surface table. There’s a new video out, and I’m posting it as a little reminder for you would-be mobile developers, Windows Phone is a great...

Chances are, as a reader of this blog, people ask you to explain Twitter to them. If that’s the case you might find this video in which Ben Stiller explains Twitter to Mickey Rooney amusing: ( This article also appears in my personal technical blog, Global Nerdy . )

Here's a cute trick: Bing’s ip: operator lets you find out which domains are on a given IP address. For example, let’s consider the IP address of the Coffee and Code blog, whose URL is coffeeandcode.org . A quick check using a utility like whois or host2ip or reveals that its IP address is 207.58.137.226. Take that IP address and type it into Bing preceded by the ip: operator like so: …and Bing will...

Last week, in a special edition of the MSDN Flash , I wrote about how you can get Windows 7 before the General Availability date by registering for TechDays 2009 before August 19th .  If you do so, or have already registered, we will activate your TechNet Plus Direct subscription within a couple of weeks.  This means that you will not only be registered to attend Microsoft Canada’s premier...

“This book is about finding fulfillment and happiness in your career” is the first line of the introduction to The Passionate Programmer , Chad Fowler’s book for software developers. If that goal wasn’t bold enough, the first line of the following paragraph is “The book is also about cultivating the desire to live a remarkable life.” The Passionate Programmer is actually the second edition of a book...

Yesterday, after a long day of preparing resources for Microsoft TechDays Canada , I grabbed my iPod and I took my dog, Hugo for a walk. During times like these, I like to unwind by listening to some of my favourite podcasts . As I've stated many times in the past, podcasts provide a great way to keep your mind and body busy at the same time; they allow you to multitask during your brain's "off-peak...

Craftsmanship and Ethics is a great keynote given in the fall of 2007 at the JAOO conference by Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin , guru of object-oriented design, agile development and just plain writing good code. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve just started programming or have been at it for twenty years – if you want to call yourself a professional developer, this one’s a must-watch. It’s just over...

Are you ready for Windows 7 ? It is a common question now that Windows 7 is released to manufacturing. This 2-hour, 4-part session will cover all the key aspects, guidance, tools and resources to help prepare you and company for Windows 7 . For anyone looking how to Discover, Explore, Pilot, Deploy or Manage Windows 7 , this is the seminar for you. This session will answer questions like "Why and...

Today’s Toronto Coffee and Code – and by “today”, I mean “Friday, August 14th” – will take place at The Roastery ( 401 Richmond West , just east of Spadina) from noon until 6 p.m.. Come on down, shoot the breeze, ask questions, get help with Microsoft developer tools and tech, hang out!

Until now, taking advantage of the UI improvements in Windows 7 (and even some features in Vista) took a fair bit of work – there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t available through the .NET Framework. You’d have to either switch to C++ or resort to hacks in order to access these goodies. That’s all changed with the newly-released Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework. Written in C# – with...

Last week, John Oxley announced the addition of a new track to TechDays Vancouver and TechDays Toronto: the Developer Foundations track, whose sessions are devoted to the practices and principles of good coding. While the other tracks will be about Microsoft tools and technologies, Developer Foundations will be about answering a single question: How do I write good code? How Developer Foundations Came...

The TechDays09 sessions have been announced and it’s only a little over a month till the first city Vancouver. We see many folks are coming back to this year’s conference and bringing their friends and colleagues. To help you spread the word about TechDays and let people know which track you are attending, I have created a new set of Techdays e-badges for this year. Whether you are a TechDays attendee...

SharePoint has always been a tricky thing to describe, but the opening paragraphs from a recent article in the New York Times, Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession , does a pretty decent job: Hang around at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters for five or ten minutes and someone dressed in khaki pants and a blue shirt is bound to tell you about the wonders of SharePoint — one of the...

The Incident I live in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood , which puts me at that magical distance where biking downtown takes a half-hour, about as long as public transit. If weather isn’t downright terrible and I don’t have too much to carry – say, laptop, change of clothes and even an accordion -- I tend to take my bike. Cycling is much easier with a pair of properly-inflated tires, so I often make...

Hi Everyone! It’s Friday, I trust you’re all enjoying the summer or if you’re in Ontario perhaps looking at building an ark :-) Well, it has been wet in Toronto, yet it’s not damped our efforts or enthusiasm. Lot’s has been happening with my team over the last few weeks and I wanted to take a moment to provide you with an update on Microsoft TechDays Canada and share with you some exciting news...

Earlier today, the Internet nearly melted as news spread that Windows 7 RTM had been made available to MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers. Now that the download frenzy has subsided a little, I suspect that many developers are asking themselves an important question: How can I start building applications on this OS? Fortunately, folks on the Windows team have made available a ton of technical resources...

If you have a TechNet subscription, you’re in luck – you can download the official ISO files for the RTM version of Windows 7, both 32- and 64-bit! You can grab it right now at: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/subscriptions/securedownloads/default.aspx My co-worker Rick Claus, Senior IT Pro Evangelist with Microsoft Canada reports that he’s got it up and running on a couple of his boxes and he...

Over at my Coffee and Code blog, I write about a topic close to home for me: cafe owners in New York, fed up with laptops users lingering but not buying anything, are shooing them away.

In my capacity as a developer evangelist for Microsoft, I’ve posted mostly C# code. I find that languages like Python and Ruby are very good not just as languages for production code, but also as great prototyping or “sketching out an idea” languages, and since Microsoft makes IronPython and IronRuby , it makes sense for me to post code in those languages here as well. Steve Yegge may have been exaggerating...

The trouble with a lot of example code covering exceptions is that the examples are often cases in which you shouldn’t be using an exception in the first place. Consider the classic known as “Someone’s trying to divide by zero” – here’s the C# version: // C# try { result = dividend / divisor; } catch (DivideByZeroException ex) { Console.WriteLine("Idiot."); } and here's the...

No matter what name you prefer to call it… Civic Holiday (generic name, also the official name in Manitoba, Northwest Territories and Nunavut) British Columbia Day (guess where it’s called that) Heritage Day (Alberta) Saskatchewan Day (once again, you’ll have to guess) New Brunswick Day (by now, your powers of deductive reasoning should guide you to the right answer) Natal Day (Nova Scotia and Prince...