Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a busy guy. He’s a Technical Specialist with Habanero, Systems Architect at Bluekarbon, SharePoint MVP, author, and a TechDays presenter. He’ll be doing the IE9 Turbo Talk on Tuesday and the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for Developers of Microsoft ASP.NET presentation on Wednesday.

If you can’t catch him at TechDays Calgary (taking place this Tuesday and Wednesday), you’re in luck: Yaroslav will be doing a presentation on Tuesday night at Calspug – the Calgary SharePoint User Group. His presentation: Taking Your Existing SharePoint 2010 Solution to the Cloud. Here are the details:

Topic

Taking Your Existing SharePoint 2010 Solution to the Cloud

Audience

SharePoint application/solution developers and architects

Abstract

In the last year – there has been significant interest in hosting SharePoint solutions in the cloud. There are many vendors out there offering SharePoint 2010 hosting in the cloud. This session will focus on understanding key differences that affect solution development for the cloud. Developers will learn how they can leverage their existing tools to create basic and advanced solutions ready for the cloud.

Time, Place and Other Details

• When: Tuesday, December 14, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. (doors open at 5:30)
• Where: Global Knowledge (formerly Nexient) 2nd Floor Training Centre
  144 – 4 Avenue SW, Suite 200
• Cost: Free
• Donations: Calspug is accepting non-perishable food item donation for the Calgary IF Food Bank. Bring something!
• Food and beverages will be provided

Bonus Goodies

Yaroslav will be giving away copies of his book, Top 60 Custom Solutions Built on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

Registration

Registration for this event is free – just sign up on the registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Creative Commons photo by Angela MacIsaac. Click to see the original.

Seven cities down, one to go. This year has been our biggest TechDays tour, spanning the cities of Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Halifax, Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg and this week, Calgary. Among other things, it’s the city that Developer Evangelist John Bristowe calls home.

All of us are looking forward to seeing everyone there, especially Damir!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Our friends at Imaginet are hosting two-hour events in Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary where they’ll show Visual Studio developers how to get up to speed with all the goodies that have packed into Visual Studio 2010. Here’s what they’ll cover:

What’s new in Team Foundation Server 2010

Learn about important updates and enhancements to Team Foundation Server in the 2010 release.  Understand key components such as: Branches as a first class citizen, Branch visualization, and Change set history visualization.  See how using Team Project Collections can improve manageability and scalability.  Imaginet will demonstrate hierarchical work items and typed work item relationships as well as improvements to Team Build including features such as Buddy Builds and Gated Check In.

Testing Tools & Rich Developer-Tester Interaction with Visual Studio 2010

Imaginet will demonstrate the new testing tools in Visual Studio 2010 and how the generalist tester is now brought into the full Microsoft ALM platform.  The new Test Professional product is a purpose-built tool for test professionals to plan, execute and manage testing of your web, Windows Forms or WFP application.  See how the rich defect reporting including IntelliTrace and other information about the execution and system under test, helps eliminate the “I can’t reproduce the bug” response from development.  Test Lab Management can also assist in streamlining the setup and teardown of test labs for test.

These events are free, and they’ll be taking place in the following cities on the following dates:

City	When	Where
Vancouver (click here to register)	Monday, October 25	Fairmont Waterfront Hotel Malaspina Room 900 Canada Place Way
Calgary (click here to register)	Monday, November 8	Met Centre Grand Lecture Hall 333 Fourth Avenue SW
Edmonton (click here to register)	Tuesday, November 9	Shaw Conference Centre Salon 12 9797 Jasper Avenue

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Pre-manufacturing Windows Phone 7 devices are incredibly hard to come by, but we’re working on ways for you to test your WP7 apps on the real thing. One way we’re doing this is by holding “Deployment Clinics” all over Canada.

Today (Thursday, Sept 2): Toronto

• If you’re in downtown Toronto, I’ll be holding a Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. today at the Starbucks at King and Yonge (northwest corner, right above King subway station). We’ll be at the big table in the back. Bring your Windows Phone 7 app and see how it runs on a real phone!

Friday, September 3: Calgary and Toronto

• Hey, Calgary! John Bristowe will be holding a Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code from 9:00 a.m. to 12 noon at Kawa Espresso Bar (1333 8th Street SW). He’ll have a Windows Phone 7 device, so bring your apps!
• Toronto WP7 developers get a second shot at deploying their apps to a WP7 device: I’ll be holding another Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Starbucks at King and Yonge on Friday.

Next Week: Montreal

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Francophone, Anglophone or allophone: we want you to come see and deploy to Windows Phone!

Thursday, September 9th

A Microsoft Canada event: Windows Phone 7 Night in Montreal (featuring a developer device!)
5:30 – 8:30 p.m. at the Microsoft Montreal office (2000 Ave McGill College, Suite 450, Montreal)

Join Christian Beauclair from Microsoft Canada, along with Colin Melia from DreamDigital, for an evening about Windows Phone 7 in the flesh.  That’s right, they’ll be there in person, oh and so will a real developer device!

In October, Microsoft will start accepting application submissions on the mobile marketplace for Windows Phone 7 applications, with devices being available at retail shortly thereafter.

Will you be one of the first developers selling a cool application? Are you an IT Pro that wants to figure out how these devices fit into your organization?  To get to grips with this new mobile platform and build on your existing .NET and infrastructure knowledge, you’ll need to know the features of the new phone platform.

Visual Studio 2010 together with the WP7 tools make building applications a delightful experience. During this evening event, you’ll have the opportunity to see the phone in action, learn about the tools and understand how the phone integrates into your enterprise.

You absolutely must be registered to attend.

Register for this event

Friday, September 10th

Deployment clinic at the Microsoft Montreal office (2000 Ave McGill College, Suite 450, Montreal)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom:

I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages!

As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee who brought a cowboy hat. The only other similarly-haberdashed people on the premises are the Calgary Stampede staff and the washroom signs:

There are a number of Christmas-related events taking place at the BMO Centre before and after TechDays, so the place is all decked out for Christmas:

The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:

…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:

Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:

Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:

Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:

The people who couldn’t fit into the ASP.NET MVC sessions were still able to catch the proceedings on a monitor outside the room:

Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:

And one door over, Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter (the first guy to suggest to me that I get a job at Microsoft) spoke at the Inside the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 session:

Here’s a scene from the speaker prep room that reminded me of the Sesame Street song One of These Things is Not Like the Other:

“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”

And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:

Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:

And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:

Someday, arranging for conference wireless will not be an arduous, expensive affair, but in the meantime, we set up these hard-wired internet access stations. Note the anti-bacterial lotion beside the laptop – a sign of these H1N1 times. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have bought a lot of Purell stock:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The next stop on the TechDays Canada cross-country conference tour is Calgary! We’ll be there for most of the week, and the conference itself takes place on Tuesday, November 17th and Wednesday, November 18th at the Calgary Stampede Roundup Centre.

After that, we’ve got the following dates in December:

• Montreal (Sold out!) – December 2nd and 3rd
• Ottawa – December 9th and 10th
• Winnipeg – December 15th and 16th

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays Toronto Wraps Up

TechDays Toronto took place last Tuesday and Wednesday, and it was a success! Over 1200 people registered to attend, and based on the attendee comments I’ve received, both face-to-face and online, people found their experience there both valuable and enjoyable.

As much as we hope the attendees learn at TechDays, we learn a lot at TechDays too. By holding events where you get to meet us face-to-face and talk to us, we learn about what you need to boost your knowledge, skills and career. If you have any questions, comments, concerns or suggestions about TechDays, please let us know! Leave a note in the comments or feel free to drop me a line.

When Halifax got added to the cities in TechDays Canada’s cross-country conference tour, there was some concern about how many people would register. It’s the first time we’ve held a conference of this scale and scope in the Maritimes, but it turns out that we needn’t have worried: as of Thursday, every available seat for TechDays Halifax’s venue has been sold.

Thanks for being so enthusiastic, Halifax techies, and we look forward to putting on a worthy event!

TechDays Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg Coming Up

The early bird pricing – that’s $299 Canadian – is still available for the other TechDays Canada cities:

• Calgary (November 17-18)
• Montreal (December 2-3)
• Ottawa (December 9-10)
• Winnipeg (December 15-16)

With over forty intermediate- to expert-level sessions covering Windows 7, SharePoint, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, Expression Blend, Windows Server 2008 R2, WCF, Visual Studio, Hyper-V, System Center, Silverlight and more, TechDays Canada is your chance to learn about how to make the most of the Microsoft tools and technologies that are available right now. Register today!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I haven’t been posting much this week because I’ve been pouring heart, soul and brain cells into my first presentation at a Microsoft conference – TechDays 2008 in Calgary — which happens at 1 p.m. Mountain Time today. My regular posting should resume tomorrow or Friday at the latest.

The Empire’s still got some money to throw around, so every speaker gets two official button-down dress shirts with logos, one for each day of the conference. I have to admit I never thought I’d seen the day when I’d be wearing one of these:

My friend and co-worker John Bristowe keeps singing the “Damien” choir music from the The Omen every time I run into him with this shirt on.

I’ll be in Calgary from Monday to Friday next week, catching up with my friend and co-worker John Bristowe (he’s Microsoft’s Developer Evangelist for Western Canada) and speaking at the Tech Days conference.

If you use (or are thinking of using) The Empire’s technologies, Tech Days is a pretty good place to get immersed. It’s a conference focused on learning about Microsoft tech on its target platforms – PC, web and phone – both current and upcoming. It’s also a chance for Microsoft developers to get together and network, and you leave the conference with a nice package of free stuff, including a full version of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. (And just between you and me, if your company’s paying for it, Tech Days is also a good excuse to get a couple of paid days out of the office.)

In addition to the conference notes and reportage that you’ve come to expect from Global Nerdy and the accordion playing you’ve come to expect from me, I will be contributing in another way: I’m delivering the A Deep Dive into the ASP.NET Ajax Extensions presentation (it’s part of the web development track and taking place on Wednesday, December 10th at 1:00 p.m.. Here’s the abstract for the presentation:

The ASP.NET AJAX Extensions are the server half of ASP.NET AJAX. Aside from adding controls such as ScriptManager and UpdatePanel to the platform, they extend the ASMX model to support client-side callbacks and JSON serialization. In this session, we’ll explore ASP.NET AJAX on the server – both inside and out – in order to provide you with the knowledge you will need to exploit it to its fullest.

(If I had more time, I think I’d write my own abstract.)

I looked at the time slot I was given and went “uh-oh”. It’s one p.m., right after lunch, which is what people used to call the sexta hora in Latin. That means “sixth hour” and refers to the sixth hour of being awake, which is when people start to get a little bit sleepy. That’s where the word siesta comes from – it’s a bastardization of sexta hora. I’m going to have to make sure that I keep things interesting – I welcome that challenge.

See you in Calgary!