Transcending the Traditional Web

Today is a landmark launch day for anyone building Rich Internet Applications (also known as RIAs), particularly those that build compelling web-enabled experiences on the Microsoft platform.

We launched 2 new product versions today and it’s something all of us at Microsoft are very excited about:  Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3.

Silverlight 3 represents a big change in how you can build RIAs in .NET.  In a nutshell, below are some of the enhancements and new features you can use with Silverlight:

• Out-of-Browser Experience:  Build RIA applications that don’t require a browser to run.  This is a big deal as it means that you can use Silverlight to create connected desktop experiences that run on any Silverlight 3-supported platform.
• GPU Acceleration:  One of the hurdles many Silverlight developers and designers needed to overcome in prior versions of the platform was dealing with (or rather “faking” or “hacking”) 3D support within Silverlight.  This was due to the fact you couldn’t take advantage of the GPU hardware on the PC to deliver the 3D experiences you wanted to build.  With Silverlight 3, now you can leverage the PC’s GPU.
• Smooth Streaming Video:  Everyone is familiar with the experience of choppy video online.  Smooth HD Streaming has been incorporated into Silverlight 3 to help alleviate that problem.  In essence, Smooth Streaming allows the streaming server and the Silverlight plugin to determine your bandwidth and adjust the quality of the stream to best fit your bandwidth restrictions.  There is a good demo of this here.
• Development and Design Support:  The Silverlight 3 SDK provides over 100 new UI controls that Designers and Developers can use out of the box in their Silverlight apps.  It also provides a newly introduced navigation framework that helps with deep-linking and back/forward browser control.  It also provides much richer network support.
• Developer Tools:  With the launch of Silverlight 3, we also provide the tools for building Silverlight 3 applications in Visual Studio.  It’s also your choice where to get these tools.  You can get them using the Web Platform Installer or through the traditional channel at the Silverlight Dev Site.

You may have noticed I talked about developer tool support but I didn’t spend any time on Designer tools.  That’s because I want to focus a bit on the design tools in the section below.  Expression Studio 3 has been launched (although Expression Blend, the interactive design tool has been launched in RC form for now).  There is several cool things we have added into the Expression suite of tools for Version 3 (including full support for Silverlight 3).  I want to highlight the new features of two of the tools here, namely Expression Blend and Expression Web:

• Expression Blend 3 RC
  • SketchFlow:  This is a huge productivity gainer for developers.  Remember the days of sketching a screen design and app workflow on a napkin to show to the client?  Now you can do the same thing with Expression Blend without having to do manual sketches, wireframes and then build the actual app.  You can do this as one step now.
  • Intellisense support:  If you like to get into the code while using Expression Blend, you now have Intellisense support within the tool (including intellisense for C#, VB and XAML).
  • TFS Integration:  “Does Expression Blend support for code repositories (including check-in and check-out)?”  I have been asked this question many times and the answer was always a let down.  My answer was basically “save the work you did in Blend, go back to Visual Studio and check in the code assets from there”.  Well, no more – I’m happy to say that Blend now supports the ability to check your project assets into Team Foundation Server, Microsoft’s code repository tool.
• Expression Web 3
  • SuperPreview:  If you design websites, you are probably acutely aware of the pain that is testing your web application for rendering in multiple browsers.  Your process for this testing likely included multiple machines, constant flipping back and forth between browser windows and you still ended up missing incompatibilities.  SuperPreview fixes a lot of this pain by providing you with a way to look at how your website will render in multiple browsers, side-by-side with tools that help you identify inconsistencies.
  • New User Interface:  Expression Web is no longer “the tool in Expression that doesn’t look like the other tools”.  In keeping with design consistency, Expression Web now sports the slick, dark grey IDE UI that the rest of the tools do.
  • Auto-Hide Panels:  Screen real estate is valuable as a website designer.  You usually need to use most of the space on the screen to see how the website looks, viewing the actual code and the like.  Tool panels often get in the way.  With Expression Web 3, you have the ability to hide these panels as you see fit, which is very helpful when all you want to do is look at the code!

This is just a very quick summary of some of the things we have delivered in Silverlight 3 and Expression 3.  For more detailed info on these items, I encourage you to take a look at the following resources:

• Silverlight 3
  • The Silverlight 3 Launch Site
  • Scott Guthrie’s Blog
  • Tim Heuer’s Blog
• Expression 3
  • Scott Guthrie’s Blog
  • Morten Rand-Hendriksen’s Blog
  • Christian Schormann’s Blog

-Paul

If you develop/design public websites for your customers, you likely already know first-hand how important a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is to its success.  Generating traffic to a website is hard and is downright impossible to do well without making it easy for internet search engines like Bing, Google or Yahoo! to find the content on your site and index it properly for search queries.

Anybody that has been following most of the events I have been presenting of late knows that I think the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WPI) is kind of a big thing.  If you’ve seen or played with the WPI, you know how useful it can be for laying the groundwork for you to build your web solution on top of.  If you haven’t seen it yet, it may interest you to watch my webcast on the WPI on-demand here. You may be wondering how the WPI and SEO are linked.  Well, today, Microsoft announced a new feature added to the WPI called the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit.  You can download the SEO toolkit on its own from the link, but most web developers/designers building a site hosted on IIS will use the WPI to install it.

The initial announcement of this new feature of IIS came from the blog of Microsoft’s corporate VP for the .NET Developer Platform and serious technical wizard, Scott Guthrie.  He gives a very detailed tour of the IIS SEO Toolkit in that post so if you want to know the nitty gritty details, I would invite you to take a look at the post. 

In a nutshell, the IIS7 SEO Toolkit can:

• Improve the volume and quality of traffic to your website from search engines
• Control how search engines access and display your web content
• Tell search engines about locations on your site available for indexing

The IIS7 SEO Toolkit contains:

• Site Analysis tools to help you identify and fix SEO-related issues on your site
• User friendly tools to manage robot and spider exclusions
• A user interface for sitemaps and managing sitemap indices

Below are important links for the IIS7 SEO Toolkit:

• IIS7 SEO Toolkit Product Page
• Web Platform Installer
• SEO Toolkit Forums
• Tutorial:  Using Site Analysis to Crawl a Website
• Tutorial:  Using Site Analysis Reports
• Scott Guthrie’s Blog Post on the IIS7 SEO Toolkit
• Joe Stagner’s Blog Post on the IIS7 SEO Toolkit

So if you’re building public websites where traffic is an important consideration, you may want to check this tool out.

-Paul

As a solution provider, the web presents an ever increasing opportunity to grow your business.  As more and more customers (and potential customers!) look to the web as a way to broaden their message, increase their own revenue and lower their cost of doing business in general, you have the opportunity to make a real impact to those businesses with the skills you have in building web solutions.

It is for this reason that Microsoft Canada has created the Make Web, Not War Episode 2009 in-person event.  We know that Microsoft technologies are only part of a larger ecosystem of web platform technologies out there.  What many people may not realize is that Microsoft is playing an ever increasing role in reaching out to web solution providers that aren’t traditionally building web software on Windows.

Make Web, Not War Episode 2009 is a 2-city tour reaching out to web solution enthusiasts, whether you build your solutions on Windows or not.  The Vancouver stop is on Tuesday, June 2nd and the Toronto stop is on Wednesday, June 10.  For details on the specific agenda items for each of these cities, please visit the website but in a nutshell, we have a number of speakers from both enterprise and open source communities speaking about how Windows is a great platform to build web solutions on.  It will certainly not be the only platform you will likely build web solutions on, but you may very well find that expanding your skillsets to include providing Windows-based web solutions may well be worth your while.

Value Proposition:

• Hear from other Web Partners who build on Open Source & Microsoft technologies
• Network with fellow members of the Web Community
• Learn about the latest Microsoft technologies & how they work with Open Source
• Get technical training to build your Web Development portfolio
• Win prizes & get your Web Warrior DVD of all the latest Microsoft Web Resources

Some of the topics we’ll be covering between Vancouver and Toronto:

• Building great WordPress sites with Expression Web (Vancouver)
• How DigiTweet (an open source WPF-based Twitter client) was built (Toronto)
• The business opportunity on the web (Vancouver and Toronto)
• How Windows Hosting can help you build web solutions and your web business (Vancouver and Toronto

There is still limited seating available for both Vancouver and Toronto, so if you’re interested please register online at Make Web, Not War Episode 2009!

Silverlight, Microsoft’s plug-in for delivering cross-platform Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and experiences has been out for a while now.  The first, JavaScript-only version was released at Microsoft’s MIX07 conference in May of 2007.  Subsequently, Silverlight 2 (the first .NET-enabled version) was released as a go-live technology shortly following the 2008 Beijing Olympics where the beta version of Silverlight 2 had a stellar performance providing a truly immersive experience for viewing the Olympics online.  Silverlight 3, the newly announced next version of the plug-in was introduced in beta version at MIX09 back in March of this year has provided increased buzz and is looking like a very promising, forward-looking platform for RIA experiences.

Given the amount of time the platform has now been available, we’re starting to see some incredible creativity and very focused, user-centric applications being built for Silverlight.  I’m very excited about many of these applications and solutions for both business and consumer scenarios and I want to share some of these great experiences with you.  This first post will be about business-oriented Silverlight applications and a subsequent post will highlight some consumer-oriented applications.

It used to be that most rich experiences on the web were focused on public-facing or consumer-based applications.  It makes sense; we often see user-centric innovation outside the firewall before we see it inside due to the cost of re-vamping existing line of business applications as well as focusing investment on activities that directly impact customers positively.  While that is certainly still true, we are seeing business from all sorts of industries adopting user-centric software platforms for internal applications as well as customer-facing business applications.  Below are examples of how you could implement some business-oriented experiences in Silverlight:

The Patient Journey Demonstrator	Industry Vertical:  Healthcare Focus:  Internal LOB Application The Patient Journey Demonstrator is a Silverlight 2 application built by the Microsoft Common User Interface team to demonstrate how Silverlight can positively enable patient management in healthcare scenarios.
Industry Vertical:  Financial Services Focus:  Customer-Facing Application The Woodgrove Financial demo application (built by Infusion)was built to provide inspiration as to how you might be able to deliver a rich experience to customers using an online banking system.  While it is likely that an online banking site would not be built entirely in Silverlight, it is very interesting to see how a bank might implement important pieces of functionality with Silverlight to create a customer-focused experience.	Woodgrove Financial
Stock Trader Reference Application	Industry Vertical:  Financial Services Focus:  Customer & Internal LOB Application The Stock Trader Reference Application is included in the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team’s Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight.  This application is meant to be a demonstration of the types of applications you can build using a composite architecture (i.e.:  modularizing your UI into components to make it more manageable, maintainable and reusable).
Industry Vertical:  Manufacturing Focus:  Internal LOB Application The Factories Map application demo built by ComponentOne is a mashup using Virtual Earth, Silverlight (via the Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control) and internal data to provide a visualization of where a company’s assets are located worldwide as well as provide efficiency and productivity data for its factories.  The power of this demo is in the ability for solution providers to provide effective data visualization solutions at the fingertips of employees.	Factories Map
Stock Portfolio	Industry Vertical:  Financial Services Focus:  Customer & Internal LOB Application Another demo application delivered by ComponentOne is the Stock Portfolio application.  The scenario to this application is similar to that of the Stock Trader Reference Application above, but the implementation is different and shows how you can deliver an effective user interface for stock traders through data visualization and UI customization through various different and disparate data feeds.

These are just a few of the LOB-focused applications we are seeing built in Silverlight.  If you have an LOB application built in Silverlight that you would like to share, please let me know by commenting!

Paul

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis.

Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year.  By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background includes stuff like artificial intelligence, interactive installations, graphics and biometrics.  He attended the first two MIXes as a member of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Group, and the second two as Principal Consultant of Carrington Technologies.  His website is at http://robburke.net and his shiny new Twitter account is @rob_burke.

The original post by Rob can be found here.

In the hope they may also inspire you, here are four other sources of inspiration I found at MIX09,

1. Bill Buxton at MIX09 Third Place

1. Bill Buxton’s visit to “The Third Place.” He cites Henry Dreyfuss’s “Designing for People” as the next must-read book after his (preferably 1st Ed.). Render in the correct fidelity. Don’t rely on a “muse.” Consider minimally five alternatives. Persona and “Place-ona.” “Design is Choice.”

2. Johnny Lee and HCI wonders

2. Johnny Lee’s HCI talk. @shanselman a fanboi too. Know Johnny? Watch his MIX talk. Don’t know him yet? Check his TED talk first, which was worthy of a standing ovation. Johnny on the future of HCI: Dive off today’s local maxima. Want more HCI? Follow UIST, SigGraph, SigCHI, UBICOMP.

3. Joe Fletcher Surface Session - online!

3. Joseph Fletcher delivered a mightily polished Touch Computing presentation yesterday, and the session video is already online! Surface UX is “Hyper-real,” and Surface is Social, Seamless, Spatial.

4. MmmmmUrl

4. Purdy & Sells delivered an energetic talk on their RESTful DSL MUrl. Interested in languages, human and machine? “Oslo” and “M” are sexy. Probably this a good place to start. Their MIX09 Session is here.

Back to the Drawing Board - Literally

Bill Buxton during the second MIX09 keynote

To sum it up, there are four things I carried away from MIX09:

1. Bill Buxton urges us to focus on people, and craft our technology with informed design.
2. Johnny Lee says we’ll need to get off our local maxima and be uncomfortable before we can progress.
3. Joseph Fletcher and his team want to invent a totally new paradigm.
4. Purdy and Sells were among speakers and teams too numerous to mention who introduced potentially game-changing technologies with which we can innovate.

This reaction in our community is consistent with the global sense of a need for something new.  Put simply, the status quo isn’t good enough any more.

This message was embodied by Deborah Adler.  There’s a reason why Microsoft so boldly chose to focus half a keynote on Ms. Adler’s contribution — it’s time for us to stop thinking like techies, and start thinking about the people using our creations, and the contexts in which they’ll be using them.

To get there, we were all encouraged to use unconventional tools, and reminded that big ideas can come from going back to basics: a sheet of paper and a decent pen.

I’m sure I’ll see more techies at the local cafe, rubbing elbows with thinkers who have always used these basic methods to achieve greatness.

Until Next Year…

As I type, the sessions are coming online at the VisitMIX site. Through a fog of tweets and jetlag this morning in Toronto, I was struck hard that MIX has made me want to return to doing the stuff that brought me here in the first place, whatever that means for me in 2009.

I want to extend my thanks to the organizers of MIX for so much inspiration, and to the Microsoft Canada team for letting me share MIX09 with you.

MIX09 boldly declared that “The Next Web” is a place where design matters.  We were taught to seek returns on user experiences, and think first about how our creations influence lives.  This is a future I want to help invent.

Looking forward to continuing the discussion. You can always find me at robburke.net.

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis.

Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year.  By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background includes stuff like artificial intelligence, interactive installations, graphics and biometrics.  He attended the first two MIXes as a member of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Group, and the second two as Principal Consultant of Carrington Technologies.  His website is at http://robburke.net and his shiny new Twitter account is @rob_burke.

The original post by Rob can be found here.

Deborah Alder at MIX09 Keynote

Bill Buxton, the Spirit of MIX09 (who, incidentally, now has a typeface named after him), was very welcome back for this morning’s keynote to introduce Deborah Adler, whose work as principal designer for Target’s ClearRx medicine bottles provided the focus for our discussion about design and its impact on user experience.

ClearRx Case Study

Deborah’s research identified and addressed many serious problems with traditional medicine bottles. Her prototype was refined by Target into the ClearRx products, and the resulting “return on experience” includes brand awareness for Target — and, much more importantly, the potential to change behavior and save human lives.

Her advice to us was twofold - to have a love affair with our customers, and to bring our design skills to bear both humanly and humanely.

There is more information about Deborah’s work at the Target:Health site.

[Update: I just saw Robby Ingebretsen's post and agree with him - these two keynotes together (and particularly, Deborah and Bill's contributions) made for the best and most inspiring MIX keynotes yet.]

Clear Rx (link goes to Target ClearRx site)

IE8: In other keynote news, Dean Hachamovitch announced that Internet Explorer 8 was released today.

For more info: You can now watch streaming video of the keynotes (for both days) here, and Tim Sneath’s thorough Play-by-Play is here and here.

The Cloud?

So I expected today’s keynote was going to be about the Cloud. I was totally wrong.  But it’s all good.

My Mind Map, with Day 2 on the bottom, now makes more sense: the “Return on Experience” discussion provides the roots for everything we’ve discussed at MIX09 this week.

MIX09 Keynote Mind Map - Days 1 and 2 - with Return on Experience at the root

p.s. More Misc MIX notes on the rest of Day 2 in a future post — I am shattered tonight. Johnny Lee’s HCI talk was particularly memorable (link goes to his killer TED talk).

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis.

Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year.  By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background includes stuff like artificial intelligence, interactive installations, graphics and biometrics.  He attended the first two MIXes as a member of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Group, and the second two as Principal Consultant of Carrington Technologies.  His website is at http://robburke.net and his shiny new Twitter account is @rob_burke.

The original post by Rob can be found here.

Today’s MIX09 Day 1 Keynote and Sessions put the ‘Software’ into Microsoft’s ‘Software plus Services’ vision.

It was the “feet on [presentation layer] ground” bit, made memorable by the energetic call to action delivered by Bill Buxton to get things started. His job was to deliver the “what”, and the Blend team is helping provide the “how.”

Hotlinked Play-By-Play

Tim Sneath has a thorough and thoughtfully hotlinked play-by-play of the keynote in two parts - here and here.  And fellow Canadian Jean-Luc David took over 500 keynote photos which I am sure he will filter before he uploads them here on Flickr, because apparently the man does not need sleep!

In the spirit of Bill’s Sketching User Experiences, I drew a mindmap, even though I have all the artistic ability of a slug (see below).

Blend 3 and SketchFlow

The most important words on my entire mind map the morning were “THEY HAVE CHANNELLED BUXTON”.

SketchFlow in Blend 3 looks superb. SketchFlow and its player will, unquestionably, change the way I flesh out user experiences to clients and get their feedback.  It will be very interesting to see how this tool actually gets used in practice, and evolves as designers and developers embrace it.  It’s not SketchFlow’s intent to replace all other forms of sketching, but rather to augment them with something innovative and useful.  I hope it will also improve developer/designer communication, by providing a tool and talking point that both can use.

MIX09 Keynote: ScottGu sporting red

Silverlight 3

Although nothing surprised me per se during the Silverlight 3 announcements, that was a good thing. There are significant improvement in v3, and answers to some (but not all) hopes.

The very promising: Updates like offline capabilities, server data push (caching on client), VisualStateManager invalid states and validation, Merged ResourceDictionaries, etc., that will address important shortcomings and challenges for people building Silverlight line-of-business apps.  Things like SaveFileDialog.

The important: Better text (desperately needed), library caching (for reducing download time - how many of my SL2 apps bundle whittled-down bits of the SL Toolkit?), sample data.

The cool: GPU support (opt-in @ plug-in and control levels). Multitouch support. Perspective 3D, which will be much more approachable than the 3D support in WPF, and address most of the scenarios where 3D adds UX value.  Pixel Shader effects - which aren’t hardware accelerated, but look good. Pixel and Bitmap APIs which open up new scenarios.

The awesome postscript.: Siverlight 3.0 runtime is actually 30k smaller than Silverlight 2! Madness!

The things I hoped for but didn’t find in v3: Commanding, Printing (unless you count Nikhil’s “make an ASP.NET page and print that” solution), FlowDocument.

The change in messaging that I didn’t expect: I attended BradA and NikhilK’s Silverlight presentations in the afternoon for more information about building business apps in Silverlight 3, and feel like I need a little more time for all of it to settle in.  The core message seems to have shifted a bit: from “you can run Silverlight on any web server”" to “you can run Silverlight anywhere, but it’s better together with ASP.NET, and you can use ASP.NET to obtain some things you’re looking for in Silverlight, like SEO and Printing.”  I’m also a little foggy on how some of the this ‘prescriptive framework’ all fits into where my mind was going with Prism and MVVM for Silverlight, as proposed by the Patterns and Practices group.

IIS Media Services: As someone who’s more Dev than IT Pro, I’m not best qualified to comment on this… but adaptive, on-demand and live streaming sounds and looks pretty amazing.

The New Microsoft-ism: It’s the verb “to party,” which I heard in contexts such as these:

“now we can party over this data we got back”, and

“you can go ahead and party on this query now” or in summary

“I’m super-jazzed that we can go ahead and party over this data we’ve got back from the DataSource.”

I expect tomorrow we will party over the cloud.  (The cloud and Azure, although mentioned, were not today’s focus by any stretch).

And that’s why this MIX09 Keynote half-sketch is really upside down, isn’t it? I should have left the top side of the page to deal with the part that’s “in the clouds!”

MIX09 Day 1 Keynote Mindmap (would make a nice deep zoom)

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis.

Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year.  By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background includes stuff like artificial intelligence, interactive installations, graphics and biometrics.  He attended the first two MIXes as a member of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Group, and the second two as Principal Consultant of Carrington Technologies.  His website is at http://robburke.net and his shiny new Twitter account is @rob_burke.

From now through the end of the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Rob Burke will be providing his insights from the conference on a daily basis.

Robert Burke is a Toronto-based IT Consultant who’s attending his fourth MIX event this year.  By day he’s knee-deep in Microsoft User Experience technologies, including Silverlight and the Windows Presentation Foundation, but his background includes stuff like artificial intelligence, interactive installations, graphics and biometrics.  He attended the first two MIXes as a member of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Group, and the second two as Principal Consultant of Carrington Technologies.  His website is at http://robburke.net and his shiny new Twitter account is @rob_burke.

What can we expect at this week’s intersection of design and technology in Las Vegas?

Before a week for looking forward, a brief pause and a quick look back for context.

I mentioned previously that I visit MIX for the buzz.  This week I’m there again to meet, to chat, and to think — and specifically, to ask what should we do with all this  stuff? What could I do for my clients? For their organizations? For my own projects?

Even if you’re not able to attend, the keynote will be streamed live, and you’ll have a chance to ask ScottGu some questions online 30 minutes after it’s over.

We’re three years into this MIX journey to The Next Web.  This week, we expect to gain insight into Microsoft’s perspective on the road ahead.  I’m going to try to write here daily, and figure out how to use this Twitter thing as well.  Inspired by keynote speaker Bill Buxton, I may even try my hand at a little sketching, and change up my technology choices as an audience member for the keynote and sessions. (hint: thinking of leaving the laptop behind).

Right - that’s enough context - I’m off to Vegas to Mix things up a little!

This blog post was originally posted at http://robburke.net/2009/03/16/a-brief-history-of-mix-feet-on-ground-eyes-on-cloud/.

My colleague Joey deVilla is brilliant.  He sets up the coolest events and really connects with the developer audience.  He’s now come up with an interesting concept called “Coffee and Code” where he picks a Toronto-based coffee house and spends the day there so developers can show up and chat with him.

I wish I had thought of it myself, but since I didn’t I decided to join him at today’s Coffee & Code in Toronto.  From Joey’s Coffee and Code Blog:

Yes, there’s going to be a Coffee and Code in Toronto this Friday, March 13th, and this time, it’s going to be midtown. I’ll be holding it at the Starbucks at Yonge at Davisville (1909 Yonge Street, right by Davisville subway station) from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m..

This particular Starbucks branch is pretty big, with a large second floor. A number of local groups, such as the Toronto Spanish Group, the “Mompreneurs” and other business networking groups have used it as a meetup location. The WiFi isn’t free, but if you have a Starbucks card with at least a $5 balance, you get two hours’ worth of wifi access at any wifi-equipped Starbucks every day.

I’m planning to show up for around 11AM and I’ll likely stay until around 3PM, so please drop by if you can and say hello!

Microsoft Canada has a great offer for any Canadian web solution provider that isn’t already a Registered Microsoft Partner.

For a limited time, we are offering a free copy of Expression Web 2, our premier web design tool for building compelling web sites.

All you need to do is go to this site, register as Microsoft Partner on the site (which is completely free) and enter your Partner ID to get your free copy of Expression Web 2.

There are many other benefits with this offer as well.  We are offering access to free training on Microsoft web platform technologies, great hosting offers and other benefits as well.

In addition to all that, by registering as a Microsoft Partner, you get other offers for training, deeply discounted software to help you start your business as well as support from Microsoft to help you grow your business.

If you haven’t registered as a Microsoft Partner yet, this may be a great time to do it!

-Paul

A common complaint that I hear from people who build web solutions is that when they try to start building web solutions on the Microsoft Platform, they hit a wall because of 2 things:

1. There is so much information they don’t even know where to start.
2. There is no consolidated set of resources that give them a launch pad for learning and using the Microsoft Web Platform.

The fact of the matter is, the people I talk to are right!   We literally have gigabytes of very useful and relevant information for anyone that wants to build great web solutions with our tools and platform technologies but there are so many places where you need to go to get that information it becomes frustrating and turns people away.

Well, we’ve heard these complaints and to help you get the resources you need, we have provided a Canadian-focused portal for building web solutions on the Microsoft platform.  This portal is intended to provide a launch pad for finding the information you need about our web platform.  This includes:

• Information on the tools you need to build on our platform and where to get them
• Learning facilities where you can get online training on our platform technologies – for free!
• Information on how to join the Microsoft Partner Program and why registering for free can help you grow your business
• Offers on software, 3rd party training and other benefits to help you get up to speed at a reduced cost
• Whitepapers to help you understand some of our best practices for building Microsoft-based web solutions
• Links to important blogs on our web platform
• How to find a hosting partner for your solution on Windows
• and much, much more

If you are building web solutions on the Microsoft platform or if you are thinking about it, I strongly encourage you to visit the site.  If you have feedback on the site, please let me know by submitting a comment to this post!

-Paul

Technorati Tags: Web Development Resource

Every year, Microsoft Canada puts on an event called EnergizeIT.  In the past this event was a one-day event held in Toronto where we talked about the great new technologies that we are going to be releasing.  This year, we’re changing the format so that people across Canada can experience EnergizeIT!

My colleague Damir Bersinic has created a blog post all about it – I encourage you to take a look at it!  If you want to hear about Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, IE8, Hyper-V, Windows Azure and many other upcoming technologies from Microsoft, this is where you want to be!

Technorati Tags: EnergizeIT

The community of Microsoft Regional Directors (individuals who are leaders in the Microsoft technology they specialize in and are considered among the top speakers on those technologies as well) have come up with their predictions on where Microsoft and IT in general will be going in 2009.

I always like reading these predictions (just like I like to read preseason Superbowl predictions from NFL sports analysts) – some are always bang on and some not so much.

The consolidated list is found on the global Regional Directors website.

Some of our Canadian Regional Directors have created their predictions as well.  Some are great predictions and some are ones we’ll have to see if they turn out, but I’ve listed links to some of our Regional Directors’ blogs below for your enjoyment:

• Guy Barrette’s Predictions (I’ll admit the first part of the post made me think he went off the deep end…)   :)
• Barry Gervin’s Predictions
• Joel Semeniuk’s Predictions
• Derek Hatchard’s Predictions

I’m looking forward to seeing who is the most correct by year’s end!

-Paul

Joe Stagner, one of the people at Microsoft that I greatly admire wrote in his blog about this nice little gold nugget about the ASP.NET MVC Code Gallery being released.

If you are a fan of the MVC pattern and you’re interested in using the ASP.NET MVC framework, this is a great place to start.  The code is contributed by the community and the licensing for it Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license so have a look and feel free to use it to learn and build MVC-based applications in ASP.NET!

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