June, 2011

Since it is the week leading up to Canada day , I thought it would be fitting to celebrate Canada’s birthday by sharing the stories of Canadian developers who have developed applications on the Windows Azure platform. A few weeks ago, I started my search for untold Canadian stories in preparation for my talk, Windows Azure: What’s In the Cloud, at Prairie Dev Con . I was just looking for a few stores...

About six months ago, fellow Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Michael Kordahi ( @delic8genius ) launched Make Awesome Web , a link-blog dedicated to client-side web awesome-ness: Hours after its launch, I asked Michael if I could help out. Reason being, over the past number of years, I’ve used a number of tools and found a lot of awesome examples. The problem? I didn’t have a great place to share them...

It’s finally here! The first long weekend of the summer! Looks like all of the stars aligned, giving us an amazing opportunity to spend three whole days ramping up on Windows Phone 7 Mango. Yesterday, Brandon Watson of the Windows Phone team announced the availability of the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta 2 on the Windows Phone Developer Blog . There’s lots of new features to play with in this...

Since it is the week leading up to Canada day , I thought it would be fitting to celebrate Canada’s birthday by sharing the stories of Canadian developers who have developed applications on the Windows Azure platform. A few weeks ago, I started my search for untold Canadian stories in preparation for my talk, Windows Azure: What’s In the Cloud, at Prairie Dev Con . I was just looking for a few stores...

Since it is the week leading up to Canada day , I thought it would be fitting to celebrate Canada’s birthday by sharing the stories of Canadian developers who have developed applications on the Windows Azure platform. A few weeks ago, I started my search for untold Canadian stories in preparation for my talk, Windows Azure: What’s In the Cloud, at Prairie Dev Con . I was just looking for a few stores...

Since it is the week leading up to Canada day , I thought it would be fitting to celebrate Canada’s birthday by sharing the stories of Canadian developers who have developed applications on the Windows Azure platform. A few weeks ago, I started my search for untold Canadian stories in preparation for my talk, Windows Azure: What’s In the Cloud, at Prairie Dev Con . I was just looking for a few stores...

Since it is the week leading up to Canada day , I thought it would be fitting to celebrate Canada’s birthday by sharing the stories of Canadian developers who have developed applications on the Windows Azure platform. A few weeks ago, I started my search for untold Canadian stories in preparation for my talk, Windows Azure: What’s In the Cloud, at Prairie Dev Con . I was just looking for...

On June 10, we announced the finalists of Code Your Art Out , a “wicked” coding competition, as described on the competition’s home page . Last night, the Code Your Art Out Finale was held at the BizMedia Rooftop in downtown Toronto and was packed with developers, designers, people who are passionate about non-profits, other Code Your Art Out contestants, the finalists, and their close friends and...

My team is in the midst of our planning cycle right now and a question came up that has us scratching our heads. “What conferences or face to face activities do developers and architects in Canada attend in order to get training and keep up to date on what’s out there?” Times have changed – there used to be a lot of conferences and activities years ago – but what about now? Oh – I am also talking about...

Last week, I was at Prairie Dev Con and had the pleasure of sitting in on David Alpert ’s sessions on user experience called Design for Success . I found it fascinating that such an important part of an application never really gets the attention that it deserves, and most times, overlooked entirely. This is very bad, and David explains why in his talks. If you have a chance to see this talk live,...

There was much talk about Silverlight 5 during this year’s DevTeach in Montreal. Last week, Susan ( @HockeyGeekGirl ) posted her DevTeach conversation with Laurent Duveau ( @LaurentDuveau ) about how Silverlight 5 takes DataTemplate to the next level with implicit data templates. Colin Melia was also talking about Silverlight 5 at DevTeach, with a demo during the conference keynote, and a session...

The Microsoft Imagine Cup brings together student developers from all over the world and asks them to use their creativity and passion for technology to help solve the world’s toughest problems. This year, more than 350,000 students from 183 countries and regions registered to compete and, from July 8-13, the finalists (more than 400 students from 70 countries) will meet for the Worldwide Finals in...

It’s official! You can now start developing Windows applications that make use of Kinect! The live launch event is actually still on Channel 9 right now ! Go check it out. If you’ve missed parts of the event (it started at 9:30 AM PST this morning), they’ll be available in the Channel 9 Live Events Area within 24 hours. Want to jump right in and start playing with the SDK? Here’s what you need: Download...

If you were one of the 167 developers that were in Regina, SK these last couple of days for Prairie Dev Con (and if you weren’t, then make sure you are next year because it is just a great event! More on that at another time…), you would have heard Jeff Sandquist ( @jeffsand ), Senior Director for Channel 9, make mention of something happening this week during his keynote. He didn’t say what, he just...

Today’s blog comes courtesy of Christopher Harrison ( @GeekTrainer ), a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), teaching mainly SharePoint and SQL Server and the owner and Head Geek at GeekTrainer Inc. Christopher has been training for the past 12+ years, with a couple of breaks in the middle to take on full time jobs. These days he focuses mainly on training, presenting at conferences, and consulting....

I recently attended DevTeach in Montreal, where I saw lots of great sessions and speakers! One of which was Laurent Duveau ( @LaurentDuveau ), Laurent is a Microsoft Regional Director and a Silverlight Most Valuable Professional . He loves web technologies and currently focuses on Silverlight, RIA/Touch and Windows Phone apps. You may have seen him presenting at TechDays, user groups, or code camps...

Last month, during TechEd North America , we were introduced to some of the new features that were coming in the next version of Visual Studio, specifically in the area of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). Susan was at TechEd and blogged about some of those details . If you weren’t able to get out to TechEd and haven’t yet watched sessions on-demand that talk about Visual Studio vNext, you absolutely...

Back in March, Frédéric ( @fharper ) introduced Code Your Art Out , a “wicked” coding competition, as described on the competition’s home page . Between March 1st and June 1st, any kind of web app could be submitted. Over the last week, the apps were judged on their interoperability with different technologies, creativity, and usability, and now I can announce the finalists! But before I do, just a...

Registration is now open! http://html5summerdevfest.eventbrite.com/ (Tickets are limited) Come celebrate the Summer Solstice by joining us for a little something we like to call HTML5 Summer DevFest , a one-day event on Tuesday, June 21st, 2011, at The Waldorf Hotel . This event is designed to showcase what you can do today, as well as to highlight some of the evolving standards and technologies that...

I love pinned sites in IE9, they really are cool, and they are good business. At the last IE9 code camp, I was asked “If someone has pinned your site to their taskbar, how can you update the pinned functionality?” Great question! I did a little digging and wanted to share what I found out. Since there are different aspects of the pinned site to update, I will break this up into a series. Quick aside...