November, 2010

AzureFest is an Azure activation community event put on by ObjectSharp featuring ObjectSharp’s Barry Gervin – a great company and a great guy who’ve been a tremendous help to us folks at Microsoft Canada – and it’s taking place on Saturday, December 11th at Microsoft Canada’s HQ in Mississauga ( 1950 Meadowvale Boulevard , just north of Highway 401 and Mississauga Road). At AzureFest, you’ll get walked...

A little while back, we put out some job postings for a couple of developer evangelism positions that had opened up at Microsoft Canada. You might remember my post talking about our search for a developer evangelist based in or around Toronto , and as of this writing, we’re still interviewing people for the position. We were also looking for a French-speaking developer evangelist based in either the...

Coffee and Code Montreal takes place tomorrow (Thursday, November 25th) at the Second Cup at 2020 University . It starts at run 11:00 a.m. and runs until about 5:00 p.m. Coffee and Code is a way for you to get in touch with us in an informal setting. Rather than work out of an office, at Coffee and Code, we work out of a cafe, where we can easily be found, enjoy some nice caffeinated beverages and...

Tonight's the night of the Building Awesome Apps for Windows 7 simulcast featuring super-smart super-talented developer Kate Gregory talking about how to build applications that make the most of Windows 7. Kate will be presenting two sessions: Session #1: A Lap Around the Windows API Code Pack The Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework is a managed library for building applications that light...

Microsoft Canada is working with Yorkville Media Centre (YMC) , a downtown Toronto learning facility where where you can learn the skills you need to work in digital media. Typically, YMC covers building websites with open source technologies like PHP, MySQL and Wordpress, but this time, they’re doing so with a slight twist: they’ll still be building a site on open source technologies, but they’ll...

I'm in London, Ontario with Academic Developer Evangelist Associate Will Hoang to attend, exhibit and speak on a discussion panel at the DIG – that’s Digital Interactive Gaming – conference , which takes place on Thursday, November 18th and Friday, November 19th. DIG is all about encouraging growth in the videogame industry by bringing together game developers, tech companies, publishers and other...

Even though Windows Phone 7 is a new platform, there a lot of ground to cover. There are not one, but two programming frameworks, the touchscreen, GPS and other sensor input, the constraints of a smaller screen, battery life and on-the-go uses cases, and selling your apps or making them available for free through Marketplace. It’s a lot to absorb, and while I’m sure you’re all clever people, you might...

Over the next little while, you’re going to see us Microsoft types doing a fair bit of talking about cloud computing in various forms. One of the ways we’ll be talking about the cloud is in the form of ads, including this clever ad about Windows 7 and Windows Live based on a palindrome poem (a.k.a. mirror poem) about technology and how it helps or hinders us . The poem takes on different meanings,...

This post has been long overdue. Seriously – after finishing off Vancouver TechDays a couple of MONTHS ago, Edmonton is in the rear view mirror – heck even OTTAWA is over with now. I think it’s about time to talk a bit about Experience in general. I’ll be updating this post with even more up to date information if anything changes for TECHDAYS 2010 CANADA. What do I mean? I’m talking about the stuff...

Gamercamp takes place today and tomorrow in Toronto! Billed as “two days of living, breathing and playing video games”, it’s a conference for people who make – or aspire to make – videogames, love to think and talk about them, and of course, play them. I’ll be there today, catching the keynotes, and tomorrow, demoing XNA, Xboxes with Kinect and Windows Phone (yup, Microsoft’s a sponsor). Gamercamp...

Just a few more pictures from TechDays Ottawa, starting with Louis-Philippe Pinsonneault from RunAtServer : Here’s Wes MacDonald doing the presentation on SharePoint development for ASP.NET developers: Meanwhile, in the “Local Flavours” track, Colin Melia did a session in which he built a Windows Phone 7 application from “File-> New”, right in front the audience, in a session titled “From Zero to...

And now, more pictures from TechDays Ottawa , the fifth in our series of eight cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros building on the Microsoft platform. Here’s an overhead view of the Rogers booth, where they were running a handy phone recharging service, talking about their Catalyst API for mobile developers and showing off the very lovely Samsung Focus running Windows Phone 7. I’m looking...

Earlier this week, I made my way to TechDays Ottawa by train. With the conference wrapped up, I’ve joined my coworker Damir Bersinic in a rented Ford Escape Limited on the trip back to Toronto. As I write this, we’re in Brockville (a.k.a. “Brock Vegas”), fresh from a classic diner dinner (pictured above), and acquiring some much-needed caffeine at a Starbucks drive-thru. Going on the road’s a little...

Gamercamp , the gathering for people who love to eat, sleep, breathe and make videogames, takes place in Toronto this weekend: Saturday, November 13th at Toronto Underground Cinema ( 186 Spadina , a little bit north of Queen) Sunday, November 14th at George Brown College School of Design (230 Richmond Street East) I wrote about Gamercamp a couple of days ago, and if you’d like the full skinny on it...

We’re holding an Ottawa Coffee and Code today – Thursday, November 11th – from 11 a.m. to about 4 p.m. at the Bridgehead Coffee in Byward Market ( 224 Dalhousie )! Drop by and talk Windows Phone 7 and other Microsoft tech with us! This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

Nearly eight weeks ago, we released Internet Explorer 9 Beta . Then, in late October, we shipped Platform Preview 6 . Clearly, it’s been a busy time for us! And, of course, for you (dear reader) it’s certainly not easy to keep up-to-speed on everything that’s been happening in this space. There’s a lot to cover and it seems as though there’s never enough time to cover...

Click the photo to see it at full size. The “Ask the Experts” (or in French, “Demander aux experts”) area of TechDays Ottawa sports whiteboards that were looking a little too blank for this recovering cartoonist’s tastes. Taking matters into my own hands, I started working on a whiteboard “tapestry”, adding to it during lulls that happened in the conference centre as sessions took place. By 2:45 p...

The day started with Rick Claus’s introductory announcements in the breakfast/lunch room… As attendees lined up to register and get their bags o’ swag: “And don’t forget to get a look at the new Windows Phone,” said Rick, “except for that one phone I broke.” “You’ve got ten minutes of breakfast left, and then the session start. Go get those muffins!” Down the hall, Rob Burke of Infusion locks and loads...

When developers target a new platform, they often face the challenge of targeting the “what’s new” or “what’s different” when building applications. The reason for this is simple: things change. Often, features are added or improved and – in some cases – certain features removed entirely. It is the way platforms evolve over time and it’s up to us...

Gamercamp: Toronto, Saturday November 13 and Sunday, November 14 Gamercamp is the creation of Jaime Woo and Mark Rabo and it’s Toronto’s celebration of videogames and all that they bring with them – not just the fun of gameplay, but also the creativity and art expressed within them, and the people games bring together. Last year brought us Gamercamp 1.0, featuring talks by great game designers and...

Speaker Idol takes place tomorrow night at the TechDays Ottawa venue – that’s the Hampton Inn Conference Centre on 100 Coventry Road . It’s a competition where new speakers – that’s right, these are people who aren’t “the usual suspects” who you’d expect to see speak in front of Ottawa’s tech community – get to test themselves against their peers. At stake: Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and an MSDN Ultimate...

Since TechDays – Microsoft Canada’s cross-country developer and IT pro conference visiting 8 cities across Canada this fall – is a two-day event, we’ve got the venues for the entire 48-hour period, including evenings. Rather than have the session rooms (which are already set up for an audience, complete with A/V and seating) lie fallow, we decided to put them to good use and hold free community events...

Creative Commons Photo by Numan Q. TechDays , Microsoft’s cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros, offers its space to tech communities to hold events free of charge when TechDays itself isn’t happening. Last year it was a series of “Camp” style events along the lines of DemoCamp abd FailCamp, and this year, CloudCamp is holding events in all eight TechDays cities on the evening before Day...

I’m on VIA Rail train 42, bound for Ottawa as I write this. As a student at Crazy Go Nuts University (some of you may know it by its other name, Queen’s ) with friends and family in the Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal triangle, riding on VIA was a ritual in which I partook at least a half-dozen times a year. If I were to go solely by outward appearances, my student self – I was a student from 1987 to 1994...

Are you building applications for Windows 7? And, more importantly, are they awesome ? If you’re looking to improve your Windows 7 application development skills or you’re looking to get the latest information on building applications for Windows 7 in managed code then I would strongly urge you to REGISTER NOW FOR THE BUILDING AWESOME APPS FOR WINDOWS 7 SIMULCAST taking place on November 24th at 6...