January, 2012

One of my favorite things to do is to check and see what folks are talking about on that Internet thing and one of the people I enjoy reading is the handsome and dapper Martin Beeby who we lovingly refer to as “The Beebs” . He is a developer evangelist for Microsoft and loves HTML5 just like me, but because he is on the other side of the world, he tends to see things before I do (grrr!). The past few...

A good number of us from the team are in Redmond this week on our annual pilgrimage to the mothership (Microsoft Headquarters) for training, so content from me will be a little lighter than usual. As a result, I wanted to share with you a set of links and resources that are new to help you learn more on Windows Phone development and also a reminder of some older links that you might want to bookmark...

On this D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE special, the D³ crew goes on location, visiting the East of Toronto .NET User Group where Paula Rainford, Account Manager at TEKSystems in Mississauga, ON speaks about industry trends as they relate to the .NET development community. Paula shares specific networking and job hunting techniques to assist in landing that next opportunity . Plus: Paula zeros in on what...

If the answer is yes, could your hatred be caused by your local implementation? In this blog series we look at four common problems with SharePoint implementations and how you can address them. We continue our series by Neil McIsaac , SharePoint MCT, for putting this together. Happy reading! If you missed it you can still read Part 1 and Part 2 of the series SharePoint is an interesting platform and...

February 1, 2012 | 12:00 PM ET | Add to Outlook >> Next week on Developers, Developers, Developers: LIVE & INTERACTiVE : Developer security experts and TechDays speakers Joël Herbert and Steve Syfuhs will be will be on the show to chat about securing .NET applications easily and effectively. Plus: Gladstone Grant , VP of Microsoft Canada’s Developer & Platform group, will be talking about...

If you’ve built modern mobile apps, you probably already know that coming up with the idea for the app/game and coding it is really only half the battle .  Success is largely determined in the marketing strategy you adopt for your app.  There are quite a few strategies that you can take and you can likely mix and match them, but there is no one “silver bullet” that will make your app an instant...

This blog post is a guest post from Maxime Rouiller. If you want to make blog post about Web technology, please contact me at fredh@microsoft.com . Maxime Rouiller is a passionate .NET technology specialist and ASP.NET MVP, working for 8 years in large software development, advocating Agile and TDD. Aware of the latest technological trends, he intervenes as a specialist in the .NET Montreal usergroup...

I believe that the best way to learn is to learn from each other, so I’m always on the search for stories of Canadian developers who have either built new applications using Windows Azure services or have migrated existing applications to Windows Azure. This is the story of Druida . Key Points [04:33] (Mapping on-premises components to Windows Azure): “For the application server, the Web Role is typically...

On this D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE special, the crew travels to the East of Toronto .NET User Group in Pickering, ON for a special presentation by Gladstone Grant, VP Developer & Platform Group at Microsoft Canada (my boss’ boss) ( LinkedIn , Twitter ). Gladstone talks about Microsoft’s overall technology direction and the opportunity it provides developers to be successful and to help their customers...

I have been working with Visual Studio for years, and I’ve found a few tricks along the way that make my coding easier. In this blog post I’ll show one of my favourite time savers the Error Correction feature. When you are writing code for a form or a class as part of a team, or even if you are just starting work on a project which will be made up of multiple classes, you always end up having to reference...

If the answer is yes, could your hatred be caused by your local implementation? In this second part of our blog series we continue to explore four common problems with SharePoint implementations and how you can address them. Once again, a huge thank you to Neil McIsaac , SharePoint MCT, for putting this together. Happy reading! If you missed Part 1 – Information Management, you can read it here SharePoint...

Windows Azure is a platform with many different services that you, the developer can piece together to create your solutions. But when do you use which service and how? In this blog series, you’ll discover the answer to that by using different scenarios used by developers working with Windows Azure today. I’ll never forget this one time (at band camp? LOL) I was doing a presentation...

With the end of the year it is always an industry staple to pontificate on what is going to be important in the coming year. Although I am not a psychic, I have spent time this week getting a read on what will be important around HTML5. Here is my list: Responsive Web Design grows and matures. The concept of Responsive Web Design is no longer a toddler, but it still is not perfect and that is ok. We...

There are user groups all over the country where fellow geeks meet, share knowledge, network, and talk technology. Find your nearest user group and check it out! I was speaking recently about HTML5 and pinned sites in Internet Explorer 9 to 58 developers in Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was a meeting of the Fredericton Developer User Group . They meet once a month. A typical evening involves pizza...

If you waited on reading my 5-part Metro and Mobile app design series until the final post, there’s great news in that you can now read each of them online.  Also, if you want an overview of the developer perspective of Windows Phone, from a development standpoint as well as a Marketplace and marketing strategy standpoint, I will be conducting an in-depth webcast on this on Thursday, January 19th...

The shorter version of this interview originally aired on Episode 2 of D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE , streamed live on January 4, 2012. Watch D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE every 1st Wednesday of the month and on-demand. More >> Continuing with the theme from the last D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE,   starting something, well known community expert, Microsoft MVP, and career coach Miguel Carrasco...

Thursday January 19th, 1PM Eastern time is a free webcast discussing the challenges of Release Management and how you can use Visual Studio features to help. Release Management is a tricky business to get right and it’s crucial to the success of a project. There are so many things that need to come together to ensure a release goes smoothly. Applying a few good best practices and leveraging tools that...

If the answer is yes, could your hatred be caused by your local implementation? In this blog series we look at four common problems with SharePoint implementations and how you can address them. SharePoint is one of those tools where the line blurs between the developer and the administrator, much like SQL Server and much like SQL Server, SharePoint is everywhere! So even though this post is not about...

Windows Azure is a platform with many different services that you, the developer can piece together to create your solutions. But when do you use which service and how? In this blog series, you’ll discover the answer to that by using different scenarios used by developers working with Windows Azure today. I’ll never forget this one time (at band camp? LOL) I was doing a presentation...

When you look at successful mobile apps and games, there are a few common traits that you will notice in them. They all achieve a certain set of goals that may be subtle or completely obvious (or both!). If you harness the power of motivation for your app user, you have created an experience for your app that will make that user use your app more often than others, make them champions for your app...

The shorter version of this interview originally aired on episode 2 of D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE , streamed live on January 4, 2012. D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE full length episodes are available on-demand a few days after the live show. Watch >> The theme of the last D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE was starting something – starting something new, something different in the new year. Given the theme...

FAST university has free webcasts on Enterprise Search and other SharePoint topics At the MCT Summit in October, I had a chance to chat with Larry Kaye, a Microsoft Certified Trainer. Larry works with FAST University. I hadn’t heard of that organization before, so I asked Larry to fill me in on what they do. I’ll summarize the key offerings here, but if you don’t feel like reading, just watch my interview...

Recently Microsoft sponsored an event on campus with the W3C which included practical talks around standards and HTML5 topics. This included speakers from the W3C, Google, Opera, influencers and our own Rey Bango and Giorgio Sardo . Good for everyone is that all the sessions were recorded for your viewing pleasure . Do you think Microsoft gets Web Standards? Do you think the web standards process is...

Happy New Year! With 2012 upon us and a fresh outlook on what a new year can bring, you might have a few ideas up your sleeve for apps/games that you’ve always wanted to build. Windows Phone should definitely be one of the platforms you target for your upcoming masterpieces; given the momentum the app ecosystem for the platform is seeing now is the time to seize the moment and publish.  In this...