April, 2011

Do you present at user groups, or conferences? Maybe you have to walk through your code at team meetings. Regardless, there are a number of little things you can do to make your code demonstrations more effective. Whether you are working with SQL Server Management Studio , Visual Studio , or the Command Window , it is worth taking a little time to learn a few best practices. That’s why I co-presented...

There are probably a lot of French people reading this blog who understands English, but I want to introduce you the French blog for Canadian developers, that we start this year. Even if we'll probably traduce some blog post from here, as there is a lot of awesome content, this new blog isn’t a stricly version of the Canadian Developers one. It will be a good place for you to see some local...

AzureFest is making a surprise visit to Calgary this weekend ! If you haven’t yet heard of AzureFest, check out this post where AzureFest is described in full. Remember, Azure Fest is a hands-on event . This means that you’ll be following along on your own laptop and actually deploying your solution during the event . In order to get the most out of the experience, make sure to bring your laptop, a...

The traditional view of the developer or system administrator is that of a nerd. A complete geek with no social skills whatsoever (Big Bang Theory anyone?) But those of you who have a successful career in IT understand that even though we work with technology, we also work with people. We have deadlines to meet, we have priorities to balance, we have new staff to train, we have users with requirements...

Hi there, my name is Susan Ibach, and I am psyched to have just joined the Developer Evangelist team! ( I swear I was hired before Joey announced he was moving on, and no I do not play the accordion) I love working with people, I love helping people, and I am a geek, so when the opportunity presented itself to join the developer evangelism team, well, to quote a cheesy Tom Cruise movie “They had me...

If you’re curious about NUIs – that’s Natural User Intefaces – and if you’re going to be in the area of the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, you’ll probably going to want to check out this TorCHI session: Best Practices in Interface Design and Applying Them to Microsoft Surface . Here’s the abstract: See how Natural User Interfaces such as Microsoft Surface and gesture-based UI’s such as Kinect...

The news is all over online – perhaps you saw the PC World article or the official Microsoft announcement – Office 365 is out as a public beta and ready for you to take it for a spin! It’s the successor to BPOS, Business Productivity Online Suite and gives you productivity goodies such as: Hosted email and calendaring with Exchange Online Online collaboration through SharePoint Online Real-time conferencing...

Billing itself as the biggest mobile development conference in Canada, MobileTeach will take place in Montreal from Monday, May 30th through Friday, June 3rd. It’s put on by our friends at DevTeach and part of the annual DevTeach conference (also taking place May 30th – June 3rd) and will cover Windows Phone 7 development along with development for the Esteemed Competition’s platforms. Among MobileTeach...

East Coast, after many hours of logistics discussions and preparations, AzureFest is coming your way! If you haven’t yet heard of AzureFest, check out this post where AzureFest is described in full. Remember, Azure Fest is a hands-on event . This means that you’ll be following along on your own laptop and actually deploying your solution during the event . In order to get the most out of the experience...

I’m told that if Brandon Foy’s funky indie ad (as in it wasn’t commissioned by Microsoft; he just came up with the idea and made it himself) for Windows Phone 7 gets 200,000 views, it’ll get aired in a national spot . Let’s give this young digital artist’s career a jump-start, shall we? Brandon also created this ad (also for Windows Phone 7): This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

More IE9 / WP7 Boot Camps? Where and When? We’ve had some great Internet Explorer 9 / Windows Phone 7 Boot Camps in many cities across Canada already, and here are two more! The Ottawa Boot Camp takes place on Wednesday, May 11th. It runs all day (8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.) and takes place at the National Arts Centre ( 53 Elgin Street , at Confederation Square) in the Panorama Room. This event is free...

As a Windows Phone "Champ" -- one of a select group of developer evangelists whose job is to get developers to build apps for Windows Phone – I get a lot of direction from Brandon Watson , whose business card reads “Director, Developer Experience, Windows Phone”. The dude is smart, savvy in the ways of both business and geekery and driven in that way that only people who participate in Ironman...

One of the Canadians at MIX11 was Imaginet’s Miguel Carrasco , whom you may have seen either speaking or track hosting last year at TechDays. He’s a developer, UI guy and Expression Blend MVP, and as such, the content of the MIX conference was exactly the kind of stuff that he was interested in. I caught him at the very end of the last day to talk about what he checked out at MIX, what he was up to...

A Shallow Pool The subtitle of the Wall Street Journal article Mobile App Talent Pool is Shallow tells the story: “Companies Scramble for Engineers Who Can Write Software for Smartphones”. If you’ve got the mobile dev know-how, you can write your own ticket anywhere. Some of the key take-aways of the article: Companies are competing fiercely with each other in an attempt to snap up mobile development...

When was the last time you had a chance to go to the movie theatre during the day? More importantly, when was the last time you learned something new at the movie theatre? Well Azure at the Movies will not only get you out to the ScotiaBank Theatre on May 5, 2011 from 9 AM to noon, but it will also guarantee that you walk away having learned how to provide stability and elasticity for your web based...

“We enter as friends, we leave as friends,” said Mark Relph , then the VP of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Group as we did my final interview in early October 2008. I started just under a fortnight later, on October 20th , and for the past two and a half years, I have proudly held the title of Developer Evangelist, representing Microsoft to Canadian software developers, and in turn, advocating...

One of the highlights of the Day Two keynote at the MIX conference was the Kinect presentation, where we showed off a number of things that were possible with the upcoming Kinect API for Windows. One of the projects was Clint Rutkas’ Jellybean , a Kinect-controlled lounge chair (pictured above) that can be driven and reclined using only hand motions. Later that day, Scott Hanselman interviewed Clint...

We brought in a handful of guests to join us at the MIX conference , one of whom was our good friend Morten Rand-Hendriksen , whom you may know from his work designing gorgeous sites or perhaps from meeting him at last year’s Make Web Not War in Montreal. He’s an interesting guy with interests ranging from metal guitar to photography to ballroom dancing to performing Rihanna numbers at karaoke bars...

Nothing good can come from this. Here are Scott Hanselman , Miguel de Icaza and Phil Haack , hanging out right by the Channel 9 Live soundstage at the MIX conference , working away on something so very wrong that Scott can’t conceal the guilty look on his face. The Channel 9 soundstage is where they’re holding interviews all through the day at MIX – tune in to live.visitmix.com to see them! This article...

Pictured above is our very own Senior Developer Evangelist John Bristowe , making final preparations during the last few moments before he began his MIX11 session this afternoon: Adding the Awesomesauce Flavor with Internet Explorer 9 Pinned Sites . In this session he showed how you can make your own sites pinnable for IE9 (and 10) and why you’d want to do it: increased return visits! If you weren...

Don’t forget to mark September 13th through 16th, 2011 in your calendar: it’s when the next major Microsoft developer conference takes place. Stay tuned for more details. This article also appears in Global Nerdy .

Now That Was a Keynote! First, allow me to offer a graphic representation of today’s keynote at the MIX conference : It was that nice. Great announcements, great demos, great flow and wonderful surprises – everything a technology keynote should be. If you missed the live stream, check back at the MIX conference site in 24 hours and watch the recording. You won’t be disappointed. I’ve got to run and...

As with Day 1, today’s MIX11 keynote – which largely focused on what’s coming up in Windows Phone (and yes, lots of good stuff there) – is available via live stream. Point your browser, whether it’s IE9 . IE10 Platform Preview 1 or any of those other, lesser browsers at live.visitmix.com to catch it. This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

If you’ve been to the South by Southwest conference and caught one of the bigger presenters, chances are you’ve seen the folks at ImageThink working furiously away on murals as the presenters did their sessions, capturing their ideas and turning them into graphical form. They were at the MIX conference this morning, capturing all the announcements about Internet Explorer 9 (and 10). Their murals were...

Here’s a game that you can play in your browser that shows off what’s possible with HTML5 and what happens when you run HTML5 in Internet Explorer (hint: it runs much faster!). It’s the World’s Biggest Pac-Man game! The World’s Biggest Pac-Man game starts with the standard Pac-Man board, but if you go into the tunnels on the sides of the maze, rather than emerging from the other side, you emerge in...