January, 2010

Hi I’m Christian Beauclair, Senior Developer Advisor at Microsoft Canada. Talking with developers across Canada, we heard clearly that in today’s ever-changing economic climate as a developer, you are tasked with finding new ways to increase productivity, reduce costs, and help your organization move forward. We’ve also heard loud and clear it is a challenge keeping up with technology, flexibility...

Here’s the fourth in my series of notes taken from keynotes at CUSEC 2010 , the 2010 edition of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. These are from Bits of Evidence: What we actually know about software development and why we believe it's true , a keynote given by my friend Greg Wilson , the computer science prof we all wish we had. He’s also the guy who gave me my shot at my first...

Here’s the third in my series of notes taken from keynotes at CUSEC 2010 , the 2010 edition of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. These are from Beautiful Failure , a keynote given by my friend Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite , who’s forgotten more about combinators than I will ever learn. My notes from his keynote appear below; Reg has also published his slides online . I gave a...

Here’s the second in my series of notes taken from keynotes at CUSEC 2010 , the 2010 edition of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. These are from NSFW , a keynote given by my friend Pete Forde , partner at Unspace and one of the bright lights of Toronto’s tech scene. My notes appear below. Pete’s posted his slides, notes and URLs online ; be sure to check them out. Introduction...

This is the first of a series of notes that I took while attending CUSEC , the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, which took place last week in Montreal. CUSEC is the biggest conference held by and for university students interested in software development. True to the Canadian techies punching well above their weight class (a great tradition started by Alexander Graham Bell), CUSEC...

   What is the purpose of this alert?   This alert is to provide you with an overview of the new security bulletin being released (out-of-band) on January 21, 2010.   New Security Bulletin Microsoft is releasing one new security bulletin (out-of-band) for newly discovered vulnerabilities:   Bulletin ID Bulletin Title Maximum Severity Rating Vulnerability Impact Restart Requirement...

Photo by Tom Purves. I’m boarding a Porter flight bound for Montreal , where I’ll be attending CUSEC (Canadian University Software Engineering Conference). I’ll be there from today through Saturday afternoon, watching technical presentation, flying the Microsoft banner, hosting DemoCamp and having a beer (or twelve) with my fellow conference-goers. I’ll be posting notes and photos from the presentations...

Microsoft was a sponsor of CUSEC last year – that’s Canadian University Software Engineering Conference , the premier conference on building software aimed specifically at students. One of the perks of sponsorship was a “corporate speaker” slot, and it was decided that the presentation should be given it to the then-new guy…namely, me. At the time I got slotted in as the speaker, I’d barely been a...

In case you hadn't read my article from Friday , I’m conducting a little experiment this week – I’m seeing what it’s like to use a “netbook“ computer (a Dell Latitude 2100 , to be specific) as my primary machine for the whole week. I’m trying this out as a response to Jeff “ Coding Horror ” Atwood’s article , in which he rebuts my argument that the computers we typically classify as “netbooks”, occupy...

For the latter half of this week, I’ll be at CUSEC – the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference – the annual Montreal-based conference by and for Canadian university students interested in topics on software development and engineering. For a conference that’s aimed at students, it punches above its weight class, having hosted some big name speakers including: Richard M. Stallman (last...

In case you hadn't heard the news last week, the newest version of the jQuery JavaScript library, version 1.4, has been released! Even with the new features, it’s still tiny: the uncompressed development version is 156KB and the minified production version is a svelte 23KB when gzipped. To celebrate this release, the jQuery folks have created a site called The 14 Days of jQuery , where they’ll post...

“The Horror! The Horror!” “d00d,” began the capitalization- and punctuation-free email I received on Sunday, “coding horror atwood is totaly [sic] waling on ur azz”. Curious to see exactly how Jeff was “waling on my azz”, I pointed my browser at his blog, Coding Horror , one of the “800-pound gorillas” of the tech blog scene and found his latest article, titled A Democracy of Netbooks . In A Democracy...

With the news of Qixing leaving to work on Windows 8, I have an opening on my team and I’m looking for Canada’s next Top Tech Evangelist! As a start you can check out the job posting here .  But, I wanted to take the time to share what I’m looking for with you.  The role will be based in the Toronto area and it is all about passion and a commitment to supporting others!   I’m looking...

Ottawa-based developer Colin Melia has been a big help to me with TechDays . He presented at TechDays Ottawa, helped organize Demo Night in Canada, and posted a simple Windows Azure deployment exercise that I’ve found quite helpful and useful. I’d like to return the favour by promoting the three sessions – that’s right, three – that he submitted to MIX10 in their open call for content . They are: Everything...

Two days remain for you to cast your vote for sessions at the MIX10 conference , which I wrote about in the previous article . A number of people who submitted proposals for sessions are wooing voters, and one of the best promotions is that of Jason Alderman , who put together this comic explaining why you should vote for his session, titled Guerilla User Research – Carrying Out Missions Behind Enemy...

I’m going to be at Microsoft’s MIX10 conference , which takes place from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, where I’ll be catching sessions and posting photos and reports. If you can spare a couple of days off work to attend Mix10, you should too – and soon, because the early bird discount is going to evaporate very soon! What is MIX? The email...

It’s another “local guy makes good” story: Mesh Conference co-founder, Globe and Mail writer and editor for the better part of two decades, all-round respected Canadian voice in tech journalism and fixture of the Toronto tech scene, Mathew Ingram is leaving the Globe to join GigaOM as one of its full-time reporters . This is great news all ‘round: for GigaOM , who are getting a great writer to join...

If you’re in the Kitchener-Waterloo area and want to know more about Visual Studio 2010 , you should check out the Visual Studio 2010 presentation by ObjectSharp and Microsoft on the morning of Thursday, January 21st . Dave Lloyd of ObjectSharp will walk you through the goodies in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 and how they can help you and your team with all those things you do in your day-to-day...

My philosophy is that Microsoft should focus less on “compete” and more on delighting the users. Or, as I’ve said before, “the best tech advocacy is to make tech that helps people rock.” One important path to building tech that helps people rock is interoperability . In today’s networked, heterogeneous world, no tech is an island (my apologies to John Donne ). It’s best for Microsoft – and everyone...

If you had to give a name to the sort of programming I’m going to be concentrating on in 2010, I’d suggest Cloudy with a Chance of Mobile . I’m using this phrase as a catch-all that comprises the following: Windows Azure as a platform for web applications ASP.NET MVC as my web framework Silverlight as my rich internet application platform jQuery as my JavaScript framework A number of programming languages...

If you’ve taken a psychology course or have leafed through a user experience book, you’ve probably come across a diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs : Dan Zambonini of the web development shop Box UK took some inspiration from it and wrote an article titled Web App Business Models: User Needs and What People Pay For . In it, he writes: As customers, we have a finite number of needs that we’re willing...

Good Luck, Qixing! We may be losing a User Experience Evangelist, but I think we’ll get a great Windows 8 in return. Qixing Zheng, who’s been with Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team for the past three years, is leaving to join the Windows UX Team as a Program Manager. While I saw firsthand that she enjoyed her work as a UX Evangelist, talking to developers and designers about...