March, 2011

The Windows Phone Team’s Brandon Watson gave out the number behind Windows Phone 7, and I thought I’d spice it up with some graphics. Enjoy! This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

I just picked up the ebook version of the latest book on Windows Phone game development: Wrox’ Professional Windows Phone 7 Game Development , written by Chris G. Williams ( @chrisgwilliams on Twitter) and George W. Clingerman ( @clingermangw on Twitter). Both authors are XNA MVPs and have written a great deal about XNA online, which makes them choice authors for a book on making games for WP7. Among...

Today only – that’s Monday, March 28th – Manning is making the print edition of SharePoint 2010 Workflows in Action available for USD$25 (CAD$24.38 as of this writing). To cash in on this deal, order the book from Manning.com and enter dotd0328 in the Promotional Code box when you check out. Here’s a quick description of what’s in SharePoint 2010 Workflows in Action: You can use SharePoint 2010 workflows...

ame While at the South by Southwest Interactive conference , I ran into Justin Peck, who’s working on QONQR (pronounced “conquer”), which he describes as “the geosocial game of world domination”. I interviewed him, asking about the game (imagine the board g “ Risk ”, but played online and in the real world), the technology on which it’s built (.NET, baby!), how the game got started and Windows Phone...

As of today, connecting Windows Azure to your application running on Windows Phone 7 just got a whole lot easier with the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 designed to make it easier for you to leverage the cloud services running in Windows Azure. The toolkit, which you can find on CodePlex , includes Visual Studio project templates for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure, class...

Don’t forget, we’ve got IE9/WP7 boot camps taking place this weekend in Mississauga and Vancouver! Here’s what’s on tap, and remember, these events are free-as-in-beer to attend! Registration links are below. Internet Explorer 9 A Lap Around Internet Explorer 9 and HTML5 A look at IE9’s support for the troika that collectively goes by the name “HTML5”: HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. You’ll see how standards...

On Saturday, December 11, 2010, Canadian MVPs Cory Fowler ( @SyntaxC4 ) and Barry Gervin ( @bgervin ) met with developers in Mississauga and showed them how developing and deploying applications to Windows Azure is fast and easy. You can read about it on Joey’s post from that Saturday. Now, AzureFest is back! If you weren’t able to come out in December, now’s your chance to see how you can leverage...

Kate Gregory ( @gregcons ) is a developer’s developer. (And, she’s Canadian too!) She’s smart, funny and incredibly talented. So, it’s no surprise to me when she’s featured on Channel 9 . Recently, she was interviewed by Charles Torre about C++:   You may remember that last year, she and Richard Campbell hosted a series of events called the Building Awesome Apps for Windows 7 Community Tour ....

I never thought I’d see Ze Frank do a promo for IE9, but there he was at South by Southwest Interactive , doing just that! Ze (pronounced “Zay”, a shortening of his real name, Hosea ) is probably best know for The Show with Ze Frank, a series of videocasts that ran the gamut from comedy bits to Daily Show -esque commentaries, all with Ze’s trademark oddball sense of humour. He’s been invited to do...

In the first 24 hours since the Monday night release of Internet Explorer 9, it’s been downloaded 2.35 million times. According to the Exploring IE blog, that’s over 27 downloads every second. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, stop reading and download it now! Want to know what goodies are in IE9? Rather then me telling you, I’ll let Lockergnome’s Kelly Clay and all the demo partners she’s interviewed...

Here’s an updated schedule for the IE9 / WP7 Boot Camps taking place across Canada in the next few weeks. They cost nothing to attend – all you have to do is register, and you’ll get some great training on building sites and apps for Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7! A Lap Around Internet Explorer 9 and HTML5 A look at IE9’s support for the troika that collectively goes by the name “HTML5”:...

If you’re in the downtown Toronto area this Friday afternoon and want to learn about Windows Phone 7, you should attend the free-of-charge WP7 Boot Camp! It’s taking place this Friday, March 18th at the downtown Microsoft offices (TD Centre, Ernst & Young Tower, 12th floor) starting at noon. Come on down and catch these two sessions: Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Recipes You’ve read the introductory...

Some quick notes on what Microsoft is doing for Japan in light of the recent earthquake and tsunami : Microsoft Corporate (as in the head office in Redmond) made an initial commitment of $2 million to support relief efforts. $250,000 of this is a cash donation to the Japanese Red Cross. Free-of-charge support, software licences and online services to help Japan’s businesses and organizations get back...

While at the South by Southwest Interactive conference , I caught up with the Globe and Mail’s Craig Saila (“It’s ‘alias’ spelled backwards!” he told me), director of digital products and turner of newsprint into pixels. I managed to buttonhole him for a quick interview to ask him what he’s been up to and how IE9 factors into it: This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

Two things happened yesterday: Pi Day 2011 -- March 14th, or 3.14.2011 – took place. I celebrated by calculating the circumference of a circle with a radius of one. Internet Explorer 9 was released! You played a vital part of the process of getting IE9 up and running. Unlike previous versions of the browser, IE9 was made available to the public quite early with the Platform Previews, which were made...

Free Texas beer! Free tacos! And I, along with the fine folks at the Microsoft IE9 team will be out in full force, talking up the upcoming IE9, which is chock full of HTML5 goodness. If you’re in Austin, please drop by! This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

The Great Canadian Appathon , the 48-hour cross-Canada mobile game coding marathon, takes place this weekend! In fact, as I write this, it’s been under way for about half an hour. There’s still time for you to register – if you’re keen to write apps this weekend and win prizes and recognition, it’s not too late for you to register and start coding ! There’ll be coding events taking place on university...

I spent a good chunk of last Friday and Saturday at Ryerson University’s Digital Media Zone (DMZ) , an incubator for Ryerson students and alumni who want to get their first taste of tech entrepreneurship. I was there – along with some help from RedBit Development and ObjectSharp -- to help out at a Windows Phone 7 Code-a-thon , where students from all over the greater Toronto area were challenged to...

Microsoft is the Platinum sponsor of Austin JavaScript’s SxSW party taking place this Sunday . Among other things, they’ll be promoting the IE team’s {Dev:unplugged} competition, where web developers will be challenged to push the limits of a modern browser without plugins – just pure HTML5, baby! I’ll write more in a later post. This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

The South by Southwest (SxSW) conference may have started off as a music festival – and it still is; if you want to see up-and-coming bands before anyone else hears about them, this is the place – but it’s grown to include the film and interactive sections. I’ve been told that nowadays, the Interactive part of the conference is larger than Music and Film. It was at SxSW that Twitter and later, Foursquare...

Are you a Canadian post-secondary student? Do you think you (or better still, you and a team of your fellow students) whip up a mobile game in 48 hours? Are you looking for something to do this weekend, something where you could end up with a published app, some fame and prizes? Then the Great Canadian Appathon , which takes place this weekend, is right up your alley. Toronto-based mobile game shop...

If Visual Studio 2010 is your primary tool and you have an MSDN subscription, today was a great day! If you’re a Visual Studio 2010 developer but don’t have an MSDN subscription, Thursday, March 10 will be a great day for you! Why is today (or Thursday) a great day? Simple. Today (or Thursday) is the day when some really cool updates and enhancements are released for Visual Studio 2010 delivering on...

The Situation Every company pursues strategies to differentiate from competitors. Effective software integration and custom applications are essential in providing that competitive differentiation. As a developer, you’re always under pressure to reduce the time it takes to move from concept through design, coding, testing, to deployment, enabling your client to take advantage of an opportunity within...

Do you know the conference named Confoo ? This Web conference that was born last year, are back this year. It is made by PHP Quebec , Python Montreal , Ruby Montreal , W3Quebec and OWASP Montreal , and it will happen very soon, from the 9th to 11th March at Hilton Bonnaventure . It's more than 140 sessions divide into 8 tracks on 3 days that reserve us the organizers. The subjects are varied, but...

Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7 are two Microsoft technologies that have taken a lot of people by surprise. People expected them to be mere incremental releases rather than what they were: complete re-thinks of their predecessors. IE9 brought serious web standards compliance and hardware acceleration to Internet Explorer, and WP7 was a complete from-the-ground-up reworking of the way we did...