October, 2009

Your mind probably went someplace saucy as soon as you saw the phrase “One-Handed Computing”, but in this case, I’m talking about what Jason Kottke is talking about -- those times when you use mobile technology while your other hand isn’t free because you’re: Eating Drinking Carrying or feeding a baby Walking the dog Carrying groceries “Straphanging” on a train or bus Getting by with a broken arm In...

TechDays , Microsoft's cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros took a break in October, but returns in November to complete its tour of the five remaining cities, starting in Halifax! I, along with the rest of the TechDays team will be in Halifax and places nearby starting this weekend and for most of next week: We’ll be around on the weekend doing setup and rehearsals for the TechDays conference...

From the Microsoft MVP Award Program blog earlier this week: Canadian MVPs Contribute to Free Developer eBook! Nine MVPs recently contributed to the Developers, Developers, Developers, IT eBook. The eBook was created by Canadian MVP Derek Hatchard and Dirk Primbs. It contains 17 articles by developers for developers and is available as a free download from Microsoft. Sections within...

WinMoDevCamp , the worldwide series of development workshops for Windows-based mobile phones, is coming to Toronto on Wednesday, November 11th! If you want to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone (the mobile operating system formerly known as Windows Mobile), this full-day workshop will give you the opportunity to get some hands-on training and experience. We’ll have all kinds of people...

Archetype have put together a cute little Hallowe’en pumpkin-carving application built with Silverlight and hosted on Azure. It lets you “carve” a pumpkin, complete with backlit glow from the candle, and send the resulting image to a friend. Give it a try! To get started with Silverlight, visit the Silverlight site’ “Get Started” page . To get started with Azure, visit Windows Azure’s “Get Started...

Interesting news from Gartner last week. According to the research firm, cloud computing now leads the list of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. That may come as a surprise to some, but it’s consistent with what industry observers have been saying recently. It was Gartner that earlier this year predicted that cloud services revenue will surpass $54.3 billion (U.S.) in 2009, while IDC said...

There, I Fixed It is a hilarious photoblog that catalogs kludges , jury rigs and hastily-improvised duct-tape repairs and modifications to everyday objects. The photos below are a sample of some of the quick fixes shown on the site, each one somewhere on the spectrum spanning “clever and thrifty” to “cheap, shoddy and frightening”: (Regarding the photo in the right column, second one from the bottom...

On Friday, the Stack Overflow DevDays travelling conference, which covers ten cities in North America and Europe in a month, took place in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. The sold-out conference was packed enthusiastic developers from both the Toronto area as well as cities within driving distance as well as a large number of volunteers (in fact, there were too many; the conference typically...

If you’ve got customers wondering if they should upgrade from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7 and are looking for testimonials, go to Gizmodo’s article, 27 Takes on Windows 7 . It features quotes from 27 reviews of Windows 7, which include the following seven: CNET "Windows 7 presents a stable platform that can compete comfortably with OS X, while reassuring the world that Microsoft can still...

You can learn about learn about SharePoint 2010 – the upcoming version of Microsoft’s enterprise information portal platform -- at the inaugural meeting of the Mississauga SharePoint User Group taking place this Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Microsoft’s Mississauga office. Rob Windsor from ObjectSharp will lead a session covering SharePoint 2010 with a particular focus on what’s new for developers. You’ll...

Here’s Linux creator Linus Torvalds, taking a break from the Japan Linux Symposium to pose at a store where Windows 7 was on sale: [Thanks to Stefan Arentz for pointing me to the picture!] [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy . ]

To celebrate the release of Windows 7 , Japanese Burger King franchises are offering a Windows 7 Whopper with 7 patties , selling for 777 Yen (CAD$8.92 as of this writing), available only for the next 7 days. I have no idea why they’re not doing this on this side of the Pacific; I’m sure it would be a big hit: According to Julie from ObjectSharp , the Japanese text after “13cm” says “American-size...

Fo’shizzle my Ballizle: on tonight’s episode of CBC’s news show The Hour , “Strombo”’s interviewing an unlikely pair: the CEO of the company for whom I work, Steve Ballmer , and Snoop Dogg . Alas, they’re taping the segments separately, so there’s no chance of Ballmer and Snoop doing a rap duet called Win and Juice. The Hour airs on CBC tonight at 11 p.m. Eastern. [ This article also appears in Global...

I’ll be updating this post regularly through the morning, so keep an eye on this article! Here’s Steve Ballmer doing his keynote: Photo by Tom Purves . Click to see the original. Here’s my view from the event’s Twitter Lounge, where I’ll be doing demos and answering questions: Photo by Yours Truly. [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy . ]

The official launch of Windows 7 doesn’t happen until tomorrow, but we’re having a big launch event with Steve Ballmer today in Toronto! I’ll be blogging and tweeting all day from the launch venue – Toronto’s Harbour Castle Westin Convention Centre. For the full skinny on the event, follow the #cdnwin7 (short for “Canadian Windows 7”) hashtag on Twitter. [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy...

Ryan McMinn – co-founder of the Toronto-based development shops Unspace and M7 Database Services turned Sith Lord with The Empire’s Access Team – co-hosts the newest show on Microsoft’s Channel 9 : The Access Show. Ryan hosts The Access Show with Clint Covington and in the first episode, he and Clint talk about Access Services , a part of SharePoint 2010, which you can use to create new databases with...

The Beta: Available Now! The newest beta, Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 is out! MSDN subscribers can download it right away , while everyone else can get their hands on it on Wednesday, October 21st (and don’t worry, I’ll remind you if you on Wednesday if you have to wait until then). This new beta features a number of performance improvements and is your last chance to evaluate...

On Wednesday, November 11th, we’ll be hosting the Toronto-area WinMoDevCamp at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters! It’ll be the fifth in a series of worldwide “Camp” style workshops focusing on developing applications for Windows Mobile (including the upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 ). WinMoDevCamp – short for Windows Mobile Developer Camp – was inspired by events like BarCamp , SuperHappyDevHouse and the...

Kathy Sierra , who co-created O’Reilly’s “Head First” series of books and who used to write the very inspirational Creative Passionate Users blog, is awesome at helping users become awesome. I use her lessons as guidelines in my evangelism work and even borrowed from her to create a catchphrase that I used when interviewing for my job at Microsoft: “My goal is to help developers go from zero to awesome...

TechRadar UK is publishing a series of “Windows 7 Week” articles, some of which take a look back at the history of Windows. One of the articles presents a timeline of Windows packaging, from version 1.0 to 7 : …and another is a chronology of Windows’ boot screens : [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy . ]

Came across an interesting item the other day from David Senf of IDC Canada. He’s posted a TweetPhoto of a tag cloud from a recent IDC cloud computing study. Beside the two most predictable words (“internet” and “virtual”), it’s interesting to see how high “security, scalable” and “unfamiliar” ranked. I often hear these words when speaking about our Software + Services vision, which is hardly surprising...

I’m going to be “booth-bunnying” today and tomorrow at the Microsoft area of the Explore Design fair, which bills itself as “North America’s first design education fair for youth”. It’s an event where young people can find out about the creative, technical and career possibilities offered by the field of design. There’s a wide range of design disciplines represented at Explore Design, including: Video...

Alexander McCabe wanted to know the adoption rates of the various .NET runtimes, from .NET 1.0 up to the current .NET 3.5. He took the data from the logs for the website for his quiz-building software, Question Writer , augmented it by including figures published in Joel Spolsky’s Business of Software forum in March 2008 , and turned it into the chart below (click on it to see it at full size): According...

My name is Simran Chaudhry and I am the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Lead for Developer & IT Pro MVP's in Canada. Along with Sasha Krsmanovic and Ljupco Grmaskoski , we run the Microsoft MVP Award Program in Canada. I thought it would be a good idea to let you know who MVP’s are, what they do, and let you know a bit more about how you can submit a nomination for yourself or someone...

It’s the second Monday in October, which means it’s Canadian Thanksgiving (or in French, Jour de l'Action de grâce) ! From all us of us at Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team, we’d like to wish you a safe and happy holiday.