Daniel Shapiro's WebLog

Interesting news from Gartner last week. According to the research firm, cloud computing now leads the list of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. That may come as a surprise to some, but it’s consistent with what industry observers have been...

Came across an interesting item the other day from David Senf of IDC Canada. He’s posted a TweetPhoto of a tag cloud from a recent IDC cloud computing study. Beside the two most predictable words (“internet” and “virtual”), it’s interesting to see how...

1,250 Slices of Pizza 1,115 Cans of Pop 480 Time Horton's Donuts ~100 Litres of hot Tim Horton's Coffee 375 "This one time at Game Camp t-shirts" 300 Visual C# Express CDs 5 deep XNA sessions 351 Passionate Attendees! 1 Game Camp So we held the kick off...

I work closely with Dan Fernandez and it does bring a tear to my eye... Happy Birthday Express , On behalf of Canada! :)

Someone vote for Alfred ! You know he deserves it!

I thought this was particularly special given that we shipped Vista this week... Remember these days? Video: Original Microsoft Windows 95 Commercial

This is a horrible reminder of what the next 5 months have to offer us Canadians.... Video: Car towed off snowbank

A big thank you to the guys at Schtickers.com. I just got my wicked/awesome Superman Laptop Schticker... Nice.

I don't know why I found this funny. Maybe it's the fact that Microsoft has always had tons of fridges filled with free pop, including Coke... Oh ya, I remember now. I drink Pepsi. Video: Bill Gates for Coca Cola

Great post by Alfred Thompson . We encounter this discussion all the time. Educators look to Microsoft and other companies for guidance with what tools and languages they should teach with. My response has always been that Microsoft and others provide...

Can you tell i'm excited? That's right... Beta 2 for XNA Game Studio Express is on its way!!! Check out the XNA Team Blog for details...

Dan Fernandez gave you a glance at what the new Coding4Fun site will look like. I do think it looks pretty cool. I'm a fan of the objects in ice look. To be honest, i'm just a big comic book fan. I can't wait to see the finished site. What do you think...

There are amazing opportunities for IT jobs in Canada. The SHRC suggests that almost 89,000 new jobs are expected in the next three to four years with only 7,000 estimated new graduates to fill these jobs. http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News...

Check out Laura Foy's Imagine Cup "behind the scenes" video. Featuring the winning Short Film team from.... CANADA! BTW, what do you think of On10.net ?

I needed a title for this awesome video! Video: What a great driving skill

So I missed X06. I missed getting to play with all the games coming out this holiday season... but Mark Relph, Barnaby Jeans and John Oxley were there. Mark made this video for Soapbox... Video: Mark Relph on XBox 360 & XNA

About once every 3 or 4 months I get to go back to our head office which is located just outside Seattle. It's always a pretty cool experience for a couple of reasons. The first is that I spent a few summers back in the late 90s interning out at Microsoft...

This year, i'm happy to announce that Microsoft Canada is playing host to the 8th Annual ACSE Conference. It's being held on November 18th at our offices in Mississauga. I hope you get a chance to join us and come by and say hi! Btw, we have some really...

XNA Game Studio Express ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna ) is being demo'd tomorrow at X06. It's pretty awesome too. I got a chance to see the demos and i think the attendees will be pretty impressed. Essentially XNA GSE allows anyone to build games for...

If building games for the Xbox 360 or Windows gets you excited then you have to be at this event. For the first time, Microsoft will take you through the details of our (soon to be released) XNA Game Studio Express. If you didn’t already know, anyone...

CanUX 2006 was this weekend: www.canux2006.com CanUX (pronounced "CAN-UCKS") is a conference dedicated to User Experience. It's a pretty cool conference being held in Banff this year. This year, John Bristowe ( http://blogs.msdn.com/jbristowe ) Joey...

Disclaimer: Only useful or interesting to anyone who has to do some data analysis as part of their job... I got a phone call from a friend in Toronto who was having a tough time doing some data analysis in Excel.... after listening to what she was...

I'm quite proud of one of our Canadian teams that made it to the Imagine Cup Finals this summer in India. One of the competitions is a Short Film Competition. It's important to point out that the theme of this years Imagine Cup is all about improving...

From Alfred Thompson's blog , I found links to these videos . Brian Scarbeau has done a variety of training across the U.S. and Canada for Computer Science teachers. He's a great resource for you!

I was looking for some individuals blogs and I thought I'd write my wish list... If you know of where these are, please let me know so I can update my reader... 1. Bill Gates, I know he's incredibly busy, but it would be pretty cool... Even if his...