January, 2011

ISV developers, come experience Windows Azure in a lab experience like no other! Join your fellow developers and explore how you can leverage your existing .NET development expertise to develop applications and services for the Cloud . Two tracks have been designed to ensure that you get the information that is most relevant to you: Business Value Track Recommended for product managers...

Don’t forget to schedule some learning time into your probably already packed schedule!  Here are some events happening in February: 2/2/2011: SharePoint Ecosystem: Integrating SharePoint with Office 2010 (Level 200) 2/4/2011: Extend Team Foundation Server to Improve Your Software Development Lifecycle (Level 300) 2/7/2011: MSDN Radio: Technology Past, Present and Future with John Bristowe (Level...

I’ve talked about Smashing Magazine’s Smashing HTML5 and Introducing HTML 5 , and now I’m going to talk about a couple of easy reads that should be part of your library: HTML5 for Web Designers and CSS3 for Web Designers, two books published by A Book Apart , the book-publishing wing of the must-read site A List Apart (and seriously, if you build websites and it’s not one of your regular reads, bookmark...

MIX11 is just like the Kinect – you are the controller! MIX, Microsoft’s conference on web and mobile technologies and its most right-brained, designer-friendly gathering, takes place in Las Vegas from April 12th through 14th. They opened the door to session submissions a little while back, and now it’s time to vote for which sessions should take place. As expected, a number of Canadian developers...

GPS drives a lot a mobile applications, and we’re only just beginning to work out all the possible uses for it. On Windows Phone, you access location information with classes and interfaces provided in the System.Device.Location namespace . Here’s a quick look at its classes: Class Description CivicAddress Represents a civic address. A civic address can include fields such as street address, postal...

As you know, the Windows Azure platform has many moving parts – one of which is AppFabric. In a nutshell, AppFabric is a middleware platform for developing, deploying, and managing applications on the Windows Azure platform . It breaks down into these key areas: Middleware Services: Access Control , Service Bus , Caching , and soon to be Integration, and Composite Application Composite Application...

The folks at R eadWriteMobile have written up a summary of Forrester Research’s report on what they see as the big 10 mobile trends for 2011 . As with any set of predictions (and especially with tech industry predictions) you should take them with a grain of salt. Still, I found them interesting and thought-provoking enough to do my own summary of these predicted trends and what they mean from a mobile...

If you’re in the Toronto area and have been thinking about getting into game development, whether for “stationary” devices like desktops, laptops and consoles or “mobile” devices such as tablets, slates and phones, you might want to go attend this weekend’s Board Game Jam , which takes place in Toronto this weekend. Once the sole province of enthusiasts, game are very popular these days. Console sales...

The 7th annual ShmooCon is on this weekend (things kick off at 3:00 p.m. Eastern today). If you’re into security, technology exploitation, interesting and inventive hardware and software solutions and hacker culture, you’ll probably find this conference of great interest, along with its west coast counterpart, ToorCon . ShmooCon’s taking place in Washington, DC this year. There are probably all sorts...

When you consider developing new applications for the Cloud - or consider migrating existing apps to the Cloud - you’re probably starting to think about the security of your application's data. There are many “ myths ” around this particular topic and many skeptics that use them as a safety blanket to stay away from putting applications in the Cloud . IT In Canada ’s Mary...

They’re barely in their teens and look so impossibly young, but they’re writing apps for Windows Phone 7. These kids from Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti , a special charter high school in Christchurch , New Zealand , where students do self-directed learning and follow their own interests and enthusiasms. In the video above, they’re being interviewed by Ben Gracewood about a WP7 game they wrote called Pop...

If you’re doing web development or design, you should be checking Smashing Magazine often. There’s always some useful article, tutorial or tidbit that you can add to your “utility belt”, whether it’s from their own articles or from the Smashing Network , a set of links to selected articles from design blogs. If it’s not in your collection of bookmarks or in your RSS reader, add it now! Smashing Magazine...

The East of Toronto .NET User Group always has something going on, and next month, they’ve got something big: they’re holding a Microsoft Web Camp in Ajax on Saturday, February 19th. Microsoft’s Web Camps are big workshop events where you can learn how to build websites and web applications using Microsoft web tools and technologies. From ASP.NET MVC (my preferred way of building sites on the Microsoft...

I held the first Coffee and Code of 2011 at a venue new to me: Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar , located in Toronto’s West Queen West neighbourhood ( 968 Queen Street West , to be precise). It’s a work-friendly café that also acts as the home base for its parent business, Cloud AdAgents , an advertising/marketing/communications/social media agency. Rochelle Latinsky , who works at Cloud, along with Managing...

Don’t forget, there’s a Toronto Coffee and Code today at Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar ( 968 Queen Street West , at Givins Street, a block west of Shaw, a couple of blocks west of Trinity Bellwoods Park) from noon until 6 p.m.. Join me for lunch – they’ve got a great lunch selection – or a coffee break, or the afternoon! This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

Today’s a great day to save on books! O’Reilly has a deal on the top 25 Microsoft Press ebooks , and Manning’s got a deal on the just-released SharePoint 2010 Workflows in Action . Enter the code dotd0126 in the Promotional Code box when you check out and both the paper and ebook are yours for USD$25! This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

For only today (Wednesday, January 26th), you can purchase any or all of the top 25 Microsoft Press ebooks, pictured above) from O’Reilly for half price! Just use the discount code DDM25 when you check out at Oreilly.com . The books are: CODE Code Complete, Second Edition Programming Microsoft LINQ in Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Windows Internals, Fifth Edition CLR via C#, Third Edition Microsoft SharePoint...

Here’s a video of David Kadavy, freelance web designer and author of the upcoming book Design for Hackers , spoke at Ignite Chicago back in November about the font everyone loves to hate: Comic Sans . He calls it “the most hated font in the world,” and it probably is – at least among typographers, designers, UX specialists and anyone who works with computers and has a modicum of taste. He talks about...

If you’re looking for a nice, readable, non-stuffy, example-rich book to help you get started with HTML 5, I suggest checking out Bruce Lawton’s and Remy Sharp’s Introducing HTML 5 . Covered in its chapters are: Page structure Text and structuring main content areas Forms Video and audio Canvas Data storage Running while offline Drag and drop Geolocation Messages, workers and sockets I picked up the...

There’s a group at Microsoft called Patterns and Practices whose job is to provide developers with guidance and advice on the best ways to write software for our platforms. If you visit their site, you’ll find material to help you make better software design and technology selection decisions, understand important concepts that will help you get the job done and even get some “best practices” code...

Manning Publications’ book deal of the day is for ASP.NET 4.0 in Practice . For today only (Tuesday, January 25th), you can get the ebook version for a mere USD$15 if you enter dotd0125 in the Promotional Code box when you check out. It’s one of their MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) books, which means it’s still a work in progress; buying it means you get the latest revision as well as the final...

Microsoft’s MIX conference , which typically takes place early in the spring, bills itself as being about “The Next Web”. I prefer to refer to it as Microsoft’s most right-brained conference, the one for the creatives, the design-oriented and the late-night hackers who love to tinker and experiment. It’s also where big announcements are made: last year, MIX was where we all found out about Silverlight...

The first Toronto Coffee and Code of 2011 takes place this Wednesday, January 26th! The folks at the Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar ( 968 Queen Street West , at Givins Street, a block west of Shaw, a couple of blocks west of Trinity Bellwoods Park) have invited me to hold a Coffee and Code at their location. I’ll be there from noon to 6 p.m., working away – if you want to talk about Windows Phone 7...

We’re at that same point as we were in the mid-80s to early ‘90s, when computer UIs were making the leap from 80 * 24 character interfaces (or perhaps 40 * 24, or if you had a VIC-20, a mere 22 columns) to GUIs and mice. This time, the new UIs are multitouch, and just as Solitaire taught millions how to click and drag, smartphones and touchscreens are now getting users to learn a new vocabulary consisting...

Expansys There may come a time when you, as a mobile developer, need to get your hands on phone specifically for development purposes. After all, emulators, while handy, can get you only so far, and there are a good number of reasons that your everyday phone – even though it’s the platform you’re targeting – might not be the right thing to use. I needed such a phone, and for mine, I turned to Expansys...