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!