March, 2010

Hi Everyone, I’ve been looking forward to this post for a long time and while I wish it would have been earlier, it was paramount to us to take the time to review your feedback and insights before we thought about moving ahead for 2010. Techdays 2009 was very successful with over 87% of the guests surveyed being very satisfied with the overall event and over 90% also indicated their intention to...

Every job has its tedious part, but my job has an unusually high number of moments of pure awesomeness, such as those pictured below. I’ll explain more about the project later, but for now, enjoy the photos! [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy . ]

To be a Windows Phone 7 rock star, you could use your favourite rock and roll instrument to promote it like I did… …or, if you’re a student, you can build a Windows Phone 7 application and submit it as an entry for Imagine Cup 2010. They’ve just announced a new award – the Rockstar award – for winning apps written for Windows Phone 7, using either Silverlight or XNA. What Sort of App Submission are...

“FTW” has been known to stand for many things, but in the case of the FTW! Coding Competition , it means “For The Web” (as well as “For The Win”). The FTW Coding Competition is part of our Make Web Not War event taking place on Thursday, May 27th in Montreal. What is the FTW! Coding Competition? The FTW! Coding Competition is your chance to show off your web development skills and compete for some...

It’s Thursday, which means that it’s time for another live Ignite Your Coding webcast! Today’s guest is David Laribee , who coaches the product development team at VersionOne , has over a dozen years’ experience building enterprise software and coaching lean/agile teams in many industries. He recently wrote about technical debt in MSDN Magazine , and that’s just one of the topics he’ll cover in our...

Last week, John Bristowe and I interviewed Jeremy Miller -- “the Shade Tree Developer” – in a live Ignite Your Coding webcast. Jeremy holds the title of Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, Austin’s coolest ISV, and we talked about open source in the .NET world, StoryTeller, dependency injection and many other topics. In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It...

A couple of weeks ago, my coworker and Ignite Your Coding co-host John Bristowe and I did a live webcast interviewing Glenn Block , a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism , Unity , MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talked about building composite applications...

David Laribee on Technical Debt “Debt” is a term so unpleasant that we don’t even pronounce one of its letters. Technical debt is equally unpleasant in its own way; like the financial kind of debt, it holds you back and haunts you. It’s the hard-to-change, error-prone parts of your code that bog down your project and its maintenance. Ward Cunningham – the guy behind the wiki and contributor to the...

Me and Bill Buxton at the MIX10 Attendee Party last Tuesday night. There’s one reason I’m particularly excited about Windows Phone 7 Series. The radically reworked look and feel is the surest sign that the company is really beginning to understand design and is willing to start from scratch (a risky and pricey proposition) to get it right. It would appear from Microsoft’s Principal Researcher Bill...

It's time to share some good news! Working with our friends at DevTeach , we are helping to organize the DevTeach Community Tour on SharePoint 2010 . Come join Rob Windsor , Shereen Qumsieh , Wesley MacDonald , and Jason Kaczor for an action-packed session on SharePoint 2010! With stops in Vancouver , Calgary , Edmonton , Toronto , Ottawa and Montreal , this session will show you how to increase...

My coworker Christian Beauclair, Senior Developer Evangelist, did an interview with IT in Canada about Azure , its parts and some development patterns for Azure that fit many business scenarios. For those of you not familiar with Azure, it’s Microsoft’s cloud computing platform made up of three parts: Windows Azure , the operating system in the cloud where your applications run SQL Azure , the database...

Click the photo to see it at full size. “Flintstones/Jetsons” is a term that Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo uses to describe technology solutions that are a combination of low- and high-tech. It’s probably an apt term for what the driver of the Renault in the photo above is doing to foil licence plate cameras. If the “Jetsons” part – the SQL injection attack comprising the text on the banner on the bumper...

The Videos are Up! It’s only been a couple of days since MIX10 wrapped up, but as promised, we recorded videos of all the sessions and they’re now available online . It doesn’t matter if you missed a session or missed the entire conference, you can now catch (or re-catch) them all. The videos are all “two-shots”; that is, they feature two views: one of the speaker, shown in a window on the left, and...

Here’s the keynote from Day 2 of the MIX10 conference, featuring: Dean Hachamovitch talking about IE9 , its support for HTML5 and Chakra, its new JavaScript engine, Scott Guthrie talking about Microsoft’s support for jQuery , with special guest jQuery creator John Resig , Doug Purdy on OData, a.k.a. the Open Data Protocol , and Bill Buxton on thinking about natural user interfaces. Don’t have Silverlight...

Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he’s had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour...

Pictured above: The scene at MIX10 after the Day 2 Keynote. Whether you’ve just come back home from SxSWi , are heading back home from MIX10 or expect to go to a conference sometime soon, you want to make sure that it was worth the ducats you or your company spent sending you there. It’s one thing to come back from a conference, all inspired to try out the ideas you picked up, test drive the new technologies...

It’s back!  Last years popular Hack and Defend workshops are back!  Step inside the mind of a hacker at Microsoft’s Hack and Defend Workshop. Discover the tactics used to penetrate your PC, become aware of the most threatening viruses online, and most importantly, learn how to help protect yourself. Hands-on presentations by industry-leading professionals and Microsoft experts in security...

In case you missed it or weren’t able to attend, here’s the recording of the MIX10 Day 1 keynote featuring Scott Guthrie talking Silverlight and Joe Belfiore talking Windows Phone 7: (You can also download the video in high-quality WMV format. ) [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy . ]

Ever since joining The Empire a year and a half ago, I’ve been asking all over within its ranks to anyone who’d listen: “ When are we going to put out a better browser? IE8 is a step in the right direction, but it’s just a step.” The good news is that Internet Explorer 9 is in the works, and it’s several more steps in the right direction. Among those right steps: New JavaScript engine! Uses modern...

This week's Ignite Your Coding podcast features Jeremy Miller , Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. In our one-hour webcast, my co-host John Bristowe and I will discuss a wide range of topics, from newer OSS efforts in the .NET developer community and how they’re trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension...

Actually, from left to right, it’s me, Ward Bell of IdeaBlade and Microsoft’s Glenn Block , whom John Bristowe and I interviewed in the most recent Ignite Your Coding webcast . Ward and Glenn have forgotten more about building composite apps than I will ever learn . If you attended the “Building Composite Applications with WPF and Silverlight” session in my track at TechDays Canada 2009, you saw what...

In a couple of weeks, Microsoft’s Technical Evangelism Team will embark on the EnergizeIT 2010 Tour, a cross-country set of presentation showing what’s possible with Microsoft tools and technology. If you want to know how Visual Studio 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and other Microsoft tools and tech can cut your costs and help your business and organization, you should catch an EnergizeIT event...

Here’s the keynote room, about 15 minutes before the start of Scott Guthrie’s keynote. Watch this blog as well as my Twitter stream – I’m @AccordionGuy and I’m tagging my posts with #CanMIX (for Canadian MIX) – for updates! [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy . ]

I’m in Las Vegas to attend the MIX10 conference , Microsoft’s conference for both developers and designers. This year’s MIX conference, which runs from Monday March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th, is a hotly-anticipated one, thanks the fact that Microsoft will be making announcements about Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7 Series. As the Canadian Developer Evangelist charged with the responsibility...

I’m in Las Vegas to catch Microsoft’s MIX10 conference , where a lot of big announcements are being made. The combination of having just come from the Confoo conference in Montreal, flying to Vegas by way of Vancouver, and “springing forward” to daylight saving time has left me feeling like the bear pictured above. More posts from Vegas and MIX10 to follow! [ This article also appears in Global Nerdy...