November, 2009

Avril Lavigne’s Hometown While on the road, we sent out a tweet asking anyone who was near the route we were taking to Montreal if they’d like to catch up with us. We got a message back from our friend Todd Lamothe (who’ll be presenting at TechDays Ottawa next week), who works in Avril Lavigne’s hometown, Napanee , so we decided to catch up with him at the nearby Tim Hortons . What Canadian roadtrip...

Some more photos from the Big Apple! Here’s their pie menu: The Big Apple is an apple-shaped three-storey building with an observation deck on the roof. Here’s a shot of Damir beside the Big Apple: Here’s a close-up: Inside the building is an apple museum. We were all rarin’ to go inside and take photos of the various displays inside the museum, but… Closed! Look at the disappointment on Damir’s face...

When people in Toronto and area refer to “The Big Apple”, we’re usually not talking about New York, but the Big Apple in Coburg, Ontario . It’s one of the must-visit stops on that stretch of Highway 401 that spans the Toronto-Montreal corridor: roadside rest stop, mini-amusement park, apple pie facvory, apple museum and giant apple-shaped building with a balcony on top giving a commanding view of the...

Here’s the blogging setup I’m using from within the Ford Flex as we drive to Montreal: my laptop with a Rogers stick and carte blanche to use as much bandwidth as I need to continually post from the road. Damir’s at the wheel, I’ve got my seat moved all the way back, my own set of climate controls and Raw Dog Comedy on the satellite radio. It’s a surprisingly decent work setup; I could get a fair bit...

Damir at the wheel, looking for an opening on the Don Valley Parkway. I’m blogging and tweeting from the road today! My coworker Damir Bersinic (IT Pro Evangelist) and I have been loaned a Ford Flex equipped with Microsoft’s Sync and I’ve got my laptop hooked up to a Rogers internet stick. The photo above was taken just before noon, when we were on the Don Valley Parkway, right around Richmond Street...

The words “deviant” and “deviance” , which refer to someone or something that departs from the norm, carries such negative baggage that it was necessary to coin the term “positive deviance” . Many social and cultural norms are the result of experience, some of which dates back thousands of years; they’re considered to be “best practices”. However, there are times when deviating from the norm has positive...

One of the great things about being a web developer today is the large amount of tools available to help troubleshoot and optimize applications. Over the past number of years, my team and I have shared information about these tools through the Canadian Developer Connection blog and events like the realDEVELOPMENT_07 tour. Some examples include Firebug , YSlow , YUI Compressor , the Internet Explorer...

Mark Wednesday, December 9th on your calendars: that’s when Ottawa’s having it’s next DemoCamp! This one’s a special edition, with the space provided by Microsoft (it’s the venue for the Techdays Ottawa conference, which isn’t being used in the evening) and the presentations gathered by both Ottawa IT Community.ca and Startup Ottawa . This DemoCamp will take place at the Hampton Inn and Conference...

TechDays Canada , Microsoft’s cross-country conference covering how developers and IT pros can best make use of current Microsoft tools and technologies, hits Montreal next week. As with TechDays Halifax, which took place earlier this month, Techdays Montreal is completely sold out – there aren’t any tickets left to be had for love or money. TechDays Montreal will feature some interesting Quebec twists...

Sooner or later, unless you’re going to hide in a monastery or settle for entry-level jobs for the rest of your life, you will have to speak in front of a crowd of people. It may happen in front of a small circle of peers, a boardroom meeting, online or in front of an auditorium with thousands of people. Whether you're like me -- I enjoy public speaking; it's one way I get my jollies -- or whether...

Editor’s Note: If you’re an introvert and going to be attending TechDays Montreal, Ottawa or Winnipeg, Career Demo Camp in Montreal or the upcoming DemoCamp Ottawa, or any other tech event, this article’s for you! My friend Sacha Chua is not someone who you’d think of as an introvert, but she is. Hang out in Toronto’s tech scene and sooner or later, you’ll catch one of her presentations, which she...

Here’s a salmagundi of information and links covering the just-released Beta of the up-and-coming Silverlight 4 . (In case you were wondering, I’m using the term salmagundi to refer to a mishmash of little things. A salmagundi is an salad dish dating back to England in the 1600s made of meat, seafood, vegetables, fruit, leaves, nuts and flowers.) What’s New in Silverlight 4 Beta? The short answer is...

That’s a wrap for the PDC. I spent a fair amount of time meeting partners and visiting the expo so I attended only one more session on XAML 2009. There are many changes coming in the runtime to streamline it and improve the performance across all platforms (WPF, WF and SL4). I did catch the fact that there was a quiet announcement on the new release of Biztalk Server 2009 R2 in the Future roadmap which...

Here we are with Day 2 at PDC 09. Keynote duties were handled by Steven Sinofsky, Scott Gutrie and Kirk DelBene. The list of announcements was fantastic again. Steven kicked it off with an overview of the Windows 7 developement and some of the telemetry used. Do you realized that 46,447,784 Aero snap and shake happened during the beta? He also showed some User testing videos which were really funny...

If you’re a techie in Montreal, you want to attend Career Demo Camp on Wednesday, December 2nd at 6:30 p.m. in the Mont-Royal Centre ! It’s part tech career guidance conference, part DemoCamp -style event, and an opportunity for developers and start-ups to get together and learn about the job market, see projects that Montreal-area techies are working on and get to know and network with your local...

I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom: I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages! As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee...

Wow! What a first day. This year the PDC is again at Los Angeles Convention Center. Opening Keynote was by Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia and they made lots of announcements around Azure and the services provided plus a whole bunch of new ones as well that will come out later in 2010. The big first news was that Wordpress has been ported and now runs in Azure. Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress made the...

In this episode of Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) , John Bristowe ( @jbristowe ) and Joey deVilla ( @AccordionGuy ) chat with Joel Semeniuk ( @joel_semeniuk ) about a number of topics including Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS) . Download MP3 Audio - Joel Semeniuk on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (24.59 MB - 53 minutes, 58 seconds) Show Links Imaginet Resources...

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and it’ll be going live very soon – expect to hear a number of announcements about it from next week’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) . I’ll be posting articles showing you how to get into developing on Azure, but if you want to get a head start in the meantime, a good place to go is MSDev , Microsoft’s site that’s packed to the rafters...

The next stop on the TechDays Canada cross-country conference tour is Calgary! We’ll be there for most of the week, and the conference itself takes place on Tuesday, November 17th and Wednesday, November 18th at the Calgary Stampede Roundup Centre. After that, we’ve got the following dates in December: Montreal (Sold out!) – December 2nd and 3rd Ottawa – December 9th and 10th Winnipeg – December 15th...

The Empire’s been fine-tuning ASP.NET , SQL Server and the .NET runtime from the get-go, so ASP.NET is a pretty snappy platform. Even so, the fastest of platforms will still run like molasses in January if you don’t do things right. With any platform, there’s a body of best practices for getting the best performances, and with far too many platforms, these best practices haven’t been gathered into...

WinMoDevCamp Toronto , the Toronto edition of the workshop for developing applications for Windows Phone, takes place today at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters. If you can’r make it to WinMoDevCamp in person, you can attend virtually by watching the streaming video feed. Here’s the agenda (all times are Eastern): 12:30 pm – 1:00 pm Light Snacks and Event Registration 1:00 pm – 1:15 pm Opening Remarks...

Facebook has announced official support for the just-released 3.0 version of Microsoft’s Facebook SDK (also known as the Facebook Developer Toolkit) . The kit was written with one goal in mind: to make it easier for .NET developers to write applications that integrate with Facebook. I’ll leave it to the Facebook SDK Overview to do the talking: The main entry point is the API (Facebook.Rest.Api) class...

"Extreme JavaScript Performance" (from JSConf.eu, November 7) Take a look at the slides from Extreme JavaScript Performance , a presentation by Thomas Fuchs , creator of the script.aculo.us JavaScript library, collaborator on the book Agile Web Development with Rails and one of the people behind FailCamp . He gave the presentation last week at JSConf.eu in Berlin. In the presentation, Thomas...

WinMoDevCamp Toronto, the free workshop where you can learn about Windows Phone Development, takes place this Wednesday at Microsoft Canada’s offices in Mississauga. Come learn about Windows Phone by participating in a development project, and come meet some of the faces (including me) at the local branch of The Empire! (And yes, we’ll serve snacks and dinner.) WinMoDevCamp is free of charge and takes...