Shortly after James Kovacs and I wrapped up our video interview (see here ), I suggested that he and I cover some of the finer points around agile development in a phone interview. Download MP3 Audio - James Kovacs on Agile Development (12.79 MB -...

To prepare for the trip to South Korea, I had to go through a bit of research. The first part was figuring out the timezone - the official timezone is GMT/UTC +9. I've worked out an algorithm to help me quickly figure out the time in Toronto and vice...

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 has been released today! Here is the link if you want to download the bits . I'd highly recommend the Virtual PC image - if you opt for the full install, you should use a test machine, don't install it on a production machine...

The theme for this year's Imagine Cup is Education - the challenge is "Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all." (the themes year after year are similar in one way - they challenges students to thing of ways that software can...

My Chat With Dana Epp (MP3) Dana Epp is one of my heroes. I'm a big fan of his blog and have been following his community involvement for the past three years. Earlier today, I got a chance to chat with Dana about security. More specifically, we chatted...

Earlier this week, I met Richard Fung , an undergraduate student from the University of Calgary . Richard is part of a team of developers who submitted an entry for the MSDN Code Awards , which concluded at EnergizeIT 2007 in Toronto. You can check out...

This year, I will be travelling to Seoul, South Korea with 9 Canadian finalists as part of the Imagine Cup challenge. I feel very privileged to have been picked to accompany these really talented students to cheer them on! For those of you who are unfamiliar...

My Chat with Justice Gray (MP3) Earlier today, I called Justice Gray to chat about some of the things developers can do to advance their learning and skills. This conversation was fostered around the Internet meme that has caught fire of late. The...

Yesterday, I attended an event hosted by the Calgary .NET User Group . Fellow Plumber and agile junkie, James Kovacs delivered a presentation entitled, "Simple Patterns for Simple Problems". Following his presentation, I got a chance to catch up with...

Etienne Tremblay ( MVP profile ) is a senior software architect for EDS Canada with more than 15 years of experience in enterprise application development. His primary focus has been the manufacturing and mining industries and lately configuration management...

Charles Wiebe and John Hansen (Ottawa, ON) Silverlight offers designers a new degree of flexibility in creating vivid and exciting graphics for asp.net web pages. These web pages are described in the Silverlight dialect of Xaml (XML) and an excellent...

A few weeks ago, Richard Campbell dropped by to deliver a presentation to the Calgary .NET User Group . Since Richard is a good friend of mine, I insisted that he visit me in the suburbs of my fine city. Shortly before heading over to venue, Richard and...

The news just came out on the wire that our official launch date in Los Angeles for Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 (formerly codenamed "Orcas"). The Canadian plans have not been ironed out yet, but the moment they are, we...

On Tuesday, I'll be at the University of Calgary attending DemoCamp Calgary . (You can read about DemoCamp here .) We have a vibriant software economy out here in western Canada . I'm constantly amazed by all the innovation being done and I'm really...

Last Saturday, Microsoft Canada hosted an incredible event called EnergizeIT in Toronto (AKA, Accordion City ). Approximately 1500 people showed up to this event, which featured tracks for designers, developers, IT professionals, and many others. We've...

Thanks to everybody who was able to attend my security webcast. As promised, here are some resources you can use to better understand what the SDL can do for you! Tools: (The ones I used during the webcast) Microsoft Threat Analysis & Modeling...

Earlier this week, I arrived in Toronto in preparation for Energize IT this Saturday. It's going to be an awesome event. This year, I'll be running the Developer Track, which will feature a ton of content on Web development using AJAX and Silverlight...

3 days and counting... This coming Saturday, the Metro Toronto Convention Center will host Energize IT , a cool community event I blogged about which provides you with an opportunity to connect with the community and "get your geek on"! The onus here...

Technorati Tags: ColdFusion , .NET Earlier this week, Mack Male (a prolific blogger and influencer in the developer community) published some thoughts about the recent release of a public beta of ColdFusion 8. You can read his blog post at the following...

This week we released a brand new technology to simplify the job of Windows client developers, code name Acropolis. This new techno will allow the developers to assemble Windows Presentation Foundation applications using parts and focus on the business...

At TechEd, we made some important announcements such as the naming of the next version of Visual Studio ( Visual Studio 2008 - formerly Visual Studio Codenamed "Orcas") and SQL Server 2008 (formerly Codenamed "Katmai"). Another announcement we made was...

On Wednesday, my colleague Christian Beauclair posted about the expiry of the Betas and Release Candidates of Windows Vista . Last night, I attended Kate Gregory's talk on " Programming for Windows Vista " for the Toronto .NET User Group and a lot of...

If you have the opportunity, be sure to attend this final installment of the Office 2007 Webcast Series . We'll be covering many topics including creating Custom Web Parts, Page Layouts, Master Pages and integrating ASP.NET AJAX in your SharePoint site...

Just wanted to make sure everyone is aware of this. On May 31, 2007, pre-release versions of Windows Vista will expire. If you are running a pre-release version of Windows Vista (Beta 2, RC1, or RC2) you will begin to receive notifications about the upcoming...

Thanks to everyone who attended my webcast on the Business Data Connector in SharePoint. If you didn’t get a chance to attend it live, the recorded session should be available soon. If you are interested in how you can leverage the Business Data Connector...