July, 2010

If you’re planning on TechDays Vancouver, your window for the early bird price of CDN$349.99 plus tax expires on Tuesday, August 3rd. After that, the price jumps up to almost twice that. Save yourself some money by not procrastinating – register for TechDays Vancouver now! Remember the TechDays formula: Want to know more about the sessions at this year’s TechDays? Take a look at our sessions page....

I’m going to throw you a curve ball right now: if you want to develop apps for Windows Phone 7, one of the must-read books is one written for iPhone developers and designers. It’s Tapworthy , written by Josh Clark and published by O’Reilly. While Tapworthy was written with people building apps for The Esteemed Competition’s phone in mind, much of it is applicable to WP7 developers and designers. That...

Update: I added links to official Windows Phone 7 documentation. And now, a quick wrap-up of what’s happening with Windows Phone 7. (What you see above is my phone in my hand, as seen from my point of view at Café Novo , one of my “remote offices” in Toronto.) In this article, I cover: General in-person reactions by people trying out Windows Phone 7 The developer tools The upcoming Windows Phone 7...

I’ve been spending summer playing a couple of Xbox 360 games situated in dark nightmare worlds. One is Microsoft Studios’ and Remedy’s Alan Wake , which could be described as an homage to Stephen King (so much so that they name-drop him in the opening credits); the other is Limbo , an Xbox Live Arcade game:   Calling Limbo a “2-D side-scroller game” does it as much injustice as referring to Red...

…and regular posting will resume shortly. (No, this photo isn’t mine, nor is it representative of the food I had, but I thought it was a good “geek vacation” photo. I ate better and met some interesting people . You can click the photo to see it at full size in its junk food, video game nerdy glory.) This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

Great news! Earlier today, we announced Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 , a process template built from the ground up specifically for Scrum teams. From MSDN : Your team can practice Scrum more easily by using the artifacts in Visual Studio Scrum 1.0. Each artifact serves a specific function and provides opportunities to refine your processes over time. These artifacts include work items, reports...

Over the last few weeks I have been getting more and more emails from individuals wondering when the abstracts for the 50+ sessions available at TechDays 2010 will be posted. The wait is over! You can view all of the sessions and their abstracts at techdays.ca/sessions - remember to click on each track to see the sessions that are available in that track. I am really excited about this year's content...

Blog postings are going to be light until Monday, July 26th, because I’m taking a real, honest-to-goodness, shut-off-the-computer, get-away-from-home vacation! If you’re looking for reading material, may I suggest: Channel 9 The Windows Phone Developer Blog Techmeme Hacker News Reddit’s “Programming” subreddit Smashing Magazine

Bob Caswell from Microsoft’s Learning division told me about some free online training that’s available for developers wanting to get a head-start on Windows Phone 7 Development. Here’s the skinny from the Born to Learn blog: Get Trained for FREE – Windows Phone 7 Jump Start Windows Phone 7 Jump Start is a FREE virtual live class for developers interested in developing applications and games for Windows...

The Hot Dog That Got Away Back in September, while we were setting up for TechDays Toronto 2009 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, John Bristowe and I noticed two of these machines: Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, and no, it’s not Photoshoppery – it’s an actual hot dog vending machine. Better still, it doesn’t make just one kind of hot dog, but as you can see in the close-up below, it makes three...

You’ve seen the announcement and perhaps you’ve downloaded the beta of the Windows Phone 7 dev tools (if you haven’t, do it now!) Now that you’ve got the tools, what’s next? Will they just lie there, dormant on your hard drive, or are you going to use them and be a trailblazer on a brand new mobile platform? If you’re looking for intense training with personal attention by a highly-rated presenter...

The announcement went out earlier today : the Windows Phone Developer Tools have moved from the CTP ("Community Technical Preview”) phase to Beta (“Almost There!”). As Brandon Watson wrote in the Windows Phone Developer Blog , “This Beta release represents the near final version of the tools for building applications and games for Windows Phone 7.” Go ahead, go and download it ! Click the big...

One of the bits of advice that Scott Hanselman gave in our interview with him on Ignite Your Coding   was that a good way to stay on top of all the things happening in the tech world is “follow the aggregators” – the people who take the time to comb through all the tech news and collect it into a single place. I hope that you consider this blog one of your aggregators. Even aggregators rely on...

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in iPod , MP3 , WMA , WMV , WMV (High) or Zune formats. Another week, another This Week on Channel 9 (TWC9), Microsoft’s regular webcast showing the past week’s highlight on Channel 9 , where Microsofties talk about what they’re working on or what they’re thinking, unfiltered by the marketing or PR departments. Regular...

And now, a left turn into Theoryland! Don’t worry, it’s good for your brain, and might even change the way you look at your day-to-day programming. Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in iPod , MP3 , WMA , WMV , WMV (High) or Zune formats. Here’s the latest in Channel 9’s “Expert to Expert” series of videos – a “whiteboard jam” between two big brains...

Are you a web developer and want to sharpen your jQuery skills? Would you like to attend a conference featuring some of the brightest lights in jQuery programming? Are you too short on time and travel expenses to hit such a conference? For a mere US$150 and no travel at all, you can attend the jQuery Online Conference. It’s a live, over-the-‘net conference taking place on Monday, July 12th starting...

Are you a developer looking to launch your new web application? Or perhaps you’re an IT Pro or IT Architect trying to understand what all the fuss about “The Cloud” is. Or maybe you need for some compute time to run calculations. No matter who you are, or why you’re thinking about the cloud, Microsoft is making it easy for you try out our cloud offerings: Windows Azure (which runs your apps the in...

I’ve heard the back-and-forth debate about whether you should write your phone app as a native app or as a web app more times that I care to recall, but it’s never been done as well as Jason Alderman and Matthias Shapiro do it…rap battle style! Here’s the pre-recorded version: and in true 8 Mile style, here they are doing it live at the last Ignite Salt Lake : By the bye, if you’re building stuff for...

What is WebMatrix? By now, you’ve probably seen the tech news reports as well as Scott Guthrie’s announcement about WebMatrix , Microsoft’s lightweight web development web development system that packages a web development tool with a number of new web technologies: IIS Developer Express: a lightweight, free-as-in-beer web server with simple setup, runs on all versions of Windows and is compatible...

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in MP4 , MP3 , WMA , WMV , WMV (High) or Zune formats. If you took computer science in university, you might remember a course or two with a title like “Algorithms and Data Structures”. Perhaps – and this is more likely – you might not. It’s understandable: as a student, you were...

What’s the number one reason why developers choose a mobile platform? According to Mobile Developer Economics 2010 Report , which is produced by VisionMobile (and which I’ll call MDE 2010 from now on), it’s market penetration: Do mobile developers stick to one platform, or do they develop for multiple platforms? MDE 2010 says that the latter is true: Most developers work on multiple platforms, on average...

“It's not true that life is one damn thing after another,” wrote the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, “it is one damn thing over and over.” Her statement is simply a newer version of the French expression “ Plus ça change, c’est la meme chose ” , which is approximated in the English “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. In turn, that French expression echoes a sentiment that...

What you see above is a slide from Jason Putorti’s slide deck titled 10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design . Don’t let the title throw you off: everything in the presentation is even more important for developers because we actually make the things our customers use. If you decide to commit only one of these ten things to memory, commit this one: Design is more than pretty pictures . It’s about...

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in MP4 , MP3 , WMA , WMV , WMV (High) or Zune formats. Once again, it’s time for another installment of This Week on Channel 9 (or TWC9 for short), Microsoft’s regular video webcast featuring Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller , who provide entertaining and informative coverage of the news of the week for the .NET developer...