This afternoon (Wednesday, November 4th) from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Atlantic time, I’ll be holding a Halifax edition of “Coffee and Code” at Just Us Cafe on Barrington (1678 Barrington). My coworkers Damir Bersinic and Rodney Buike will be joining me. Come on down and chat with us about Microsoft, the tech industry in general, the job market, accordions, whatever!

(If you’re a developer who’s interested in building a cloud computing-based application on Windows Azure, you might want to come down for this one, as I might have an offer that you might find difficult to resist. Just sayin’.)

There may be plans for dinner and accordion-and-beer-fueled mayhem this evening, so if you’re into that sort of thing, drop me a line.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays, Microsoft’s cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros took a break in October, but returns in November to complete its tour of the five remaining cities, starting in Halifax!

I, along with the rest of the TechDays team will be in Halifax and places nearby starting this weekend and for most of next week:

• We’ll be around on the weekend doing setup and rehearsals for the TechDays conference
• The TechDays conference itself will take place on Monday, November 2nd and Tuesday, November 3rd at the World Trade Convention Centre Halifax.
• On Wednesday, November 4th, I’ll be hosting a Coffee and Code event at the Just Us Cafe (1678 Barrington Street) from 2 to 6 p.m.. That means I’ll be working from that cafe – drop by and chat!

And don’t forget that TechDays Canada is also visiting these cities:

• Calgary: November 17th and 18th
• Montreal: December 2nd and 3rd
• Ottawa: December 9th and 10th
• Winnipeg: December 15th and 16th

Tickets are a still available for these cities.

In case you’ve forgotten the TechDays formula, here it is again:

See you in Halifax!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m going to be in Vancouver from the afternoon of Friday, September 11th until the morning of Friday, September 18th. I’m there first and foremost to manage the “Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform” track of the TechDays conference, then to meet up with the local tech community, but also to enjoy the city I fondly refer to as “Vangroovy”.

Here’s what I’ll be up to:

Coffee and Code Vancouver: Saturday, September 12th

My coworker John Bristowe and I will be holding Coffee and Code on Saturday, September 12th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Pacific time, of course) at the Take 5 Cafe on Granville (429 Granville, near Hastings). We’ll be there to talk about TechDays, The Empire and the tech industry in general – but it won’t just be geeky stuff; we’ll provide scintillating conversation about accordions, the Calgary Flames, deep fried snack foods, “Am I metrosexual or not”, life, the universe and everything. I will have the accordion with me, so tunes are definitely on the menu!

You can register for Coffee and Code Vancouver on its event page.

TechDays Vancouver: Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th

TechDays is Microsoft Canada’s cross-Canada tour, where we highlight what you can do with currently-available Microsoft tools and tech that you probably aren’t doing yet. We take the content from the infinitely more expensive TechEd North America conference (admission fee USD$2000), update it, and have local techies present it near you at a price you can afford (CAD$299 if you caught the early bird rate, CAD$599 otherwise). You get great content at a great price, and we get to make contact with tech communities across the country. Think of it as “Geek Global, Spend Local”.

TechDays Vancouver will be happening at the Vancouver Convention Centre, which is also the venue of…

Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14th @ 7:00 p.m.

Since we had the Vancouver Convention Centre booked for two days, it meant that we had these big rooms lying fallow on the first night. I wanted a pajama party for accordion players, but since that idea got nixed, I called on Boris Mann and suggested we hold a DemoCamp-style event. The end result: Demo Ignite Camp!

Thus far, we’ve got 5 out of 8 presentation slots filled:

1. Joey deVilla’s Ignite Presentation: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
2. Avi Bryant will demo Clamato, a Smalltalk dialect that operates within the JavaScript runtime.
3. Dima Berastau will demo RestfulX, a RESTful framework for Flex and AIR applications.
4. Carson Lam will demo TransitDB, his Vancouver transit information web app, which won the PHP FTW competition earlier this year.
5. The folks from Ayogo will present their iPhone games built using the PhoneGap cross-mobile-platform framework.

I’m more than happy to drop my Ignite presentation to make room for a demo or Ignite by someone local. I’m already hosting, and Demo Ignite Camp is about the Vancouver tech scene, not me!

For more information, see the Demo Ignite Camp event page.

Launch Party Vancouver, Wednesday, September 16th

My fellow TechDays coordinators and I will be attending Launch Party Vancouver, which is:

…a lively mixer for the city’s brightest entrepreneurs, tech junkies, and bloggers, who are doing it, have done it or want to make their ideas happen here. The goal of the event is to connect BC’s growing community of Internet and new media leaders with investors and other trailblazers across Canada and abroad.

Founded by local entrepreneurs,  LPV is not your typical networking event. There are no presentations or panels to be found.  But what you will discover are the individuals responsible for making Vancouver one of the greatest start-up cities in Canada.  Every event features local, early stage new media companies strutting their stuff and sharing their ideas with the community.

It’s happening at Circa Resto Lounge from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.; tickets are available via EventBrite.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If it’s Friday, it must be time for another Toronto Coffee and Code! This one will take place at the usual location – the Dark Horse Cafe, 215 Spadina – and will run from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m..

Coffee and Code is my Friday afternoon ritual (a phrase that my classmates at Crazy Go Nuts University will find hauntingly familiar) in which I work out of a cafe and announce that I’ll be there. I’m making myself available as both a Developer Evangelist working for Microsoft Canada and a member of the Toronto Tech Community to answer your questions, take your comments, bounce ideas off or just chat with. Come on down, have a coffee (or tea, or juice) and say hi!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s gonna be a busy week for me — there’s a lot going on!

Monday: Damian Conway and The Missing Link

On Monday evening, I’ll be catching Damian Conway’s presentation, The Missing Link. There’s nothing quite like a Damian Conway presentation – they’re equal parts computer science, mathematical digression, history lesson, physics lecture, pop-culture observation, Perl module code walkthrough and stand-up comedy routine.

If you’re up for an entertaining and enlightening presentation by one of the bright lights of the open source world and you’re going to be in Toronto tonight, you should catch this one. There’s no charge for admission and no registration process – just show up at University of Toronto’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology (40 St. George Street, west side, just north of College) at 7:00 p.m. and head to room 1160 (the big lecture theatre near the back of the first floor).

Tuesday: DemoCamp 21 with Special Guest John Udell

Tuesday evening brings the 21st edition of DemoCamp, which I like to describe as “show and tell for the bright lights of the Toronto-area tech community”. It’s a chance for people, from hobbyists working on a pet project to enterprise software developers building something globe-spanning to show their peers their projects in action or share an idea. It’s put together by my fellow Microsoftie David Crow (who’s also in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group); I cost-host the event with Jay Goldman.

This one’s going to be a special one for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this will be the first DemoCamp held at the Rogers Theatre. Second, Jon Udell, Microsoft Tech Evangelist extraordinaire, will be there.

The presentations on the schedule are:

• You can’t pick your neighbours, but you can pick your neighbourhood!
  Saul Colt, Zoocasa
• ArtAnywhere : Where Lost artwork meets Empty walls
  Christine Renaud, ArtAnywhere
• Bringing Social Media to Contractors
  Brian Sharwood, HomeStars
• Create a BlackBerry/iPhone Mobile App in 5 Minutes
  Alan Lysne, Cascada Mobile
• Stories Told Together – Introducing Social Cards
  Shaun, MacDonald, MashupArts
• WeGoWeGo.com: semantic search for city events
  Dan Wood, WeGoWeGo.com
• Guestlist – online event management
  Ben Vinegar, Guestlist
• guiGoog: Advanced Visual Power Search
  Jason Roks, GuiGoog

Alas, this event is sold out. I’ll take notes and post them on this blog.

Wednesday: Science 2.0

The Science 2.0 conference takes place on Wednesday afternoon. Its topic: how the web and computers can radically change and improve science. It takes place at the MaRS Centre and the presentations are:

• Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
  Titus Brown
• A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
  Cameron Neylon
• Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery
  Michael Nielsen
• Using “Desktop” Languages for Big Problems
  David Rich
• How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method
  Victoria Stodden
• Collaborative Curation of Public Events
  Jon Udell

As with DemoCamp, this event is a popular one and is sold out. I’ll take notes and blog the conference.

Thursday: Windows 7 Blogger Event

I’ll be helping out at a gathering of Toronto bloggers on Thursday, where we’ll be showing them Windows 7.

Friday: Coffee and Code

If it’s Friday, it must be time for Toronto Coffee and Code! It’s the day when I set up shop at a cafe – usually the Dark Horse – and work from there, making myself available to answer questions, hear your opinions and comments and chat. I’ll talk about Microsoft, our tools and tech, the industry in general, whatever!

This Friday’s Toronto Coffee and Code will take place at the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina) from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.. Feel free to drop by!

Other Stuff Going On This Week

• Along with the other people on the team, I’m helping out with the preparatory work on the TechDays conference, which will be taking place in seven cities across Canada this fall.
• I’m also working on ongoing series of articles covering stuff like coding fundamentals, ASP.NET MVC, mobile and some other stuff that I have to keep on the down-low for the time being.
• And it’s not too late for me to start working on the ASP.NET MVC presentation that I’m doing with ObjectSharp’s Barry Gervin at the Toronto edition of Stack Overflow’s DevDays conference in October.

There’s a Guelph Coffee and Code taking place tonight at the Albion Hotel. Cory Fowler has the details at the Coffee and Code blog.

[Creative Commons photo courtesy of “macinate”.]

The scene at the big communal table at the May 29th Coffee and Code.

There’s a Toronto Coffee and Code this Friday! For details, see the Coffee and Code blog.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be time for Guelph Coffee and Code! See the Coffee and Code blog for details.

I’m going to be in Ottawa this week doing a presentation on web accessibility, so I’m taking advantage of my being there and declaring a Coffee and Code event for this Thursday, June 18th at the Bridgehead Cafe at 109 Bank Street (at the corner of Bank and Albert). It’ll run from 12:00 noon to 5 p.m..

I will be joined by my fellow Microsoft evangelists from the area, the guys I like to refer to as “Les Bons Gars”:

• Christian Beauclair
• Rick Claus
• Pierre Roman

Come on and down and join us at the Bridgehead for some coffee, food and conversation! We’ll be there to answer questions, hear your comments, show you what we’re working on and even hook you up with a copy of the Windows 7 Release Candidate.

This would be a good time for you Ottawa-area Developers and IT Pros to come and give us your suggestions for the upcoming TechDays 2009 cross-Canada conference, a two-day deep-dive conference covering what you can do with Microsoft Tools and Technologies. TechDays will stop at Ottawa on December 9th and 10th, and we’re picking out our topics and speakers. Come by Ottawa Coffee and Code this Thursday and let us know what you’d like to see and if you’d like to present at TechDays 2009!

(Creative Commons photo of the Peace Tower at Night taken by the Poissant Family.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be time for Guelph Coffee and Code. The Guelph edition of this gathering of developers over coffee — or any other beverage of their choice — is hosted by Cory “SyntaxC4” Fowler and takes place every Tuesday in Guelph at the Albion Hotel (49 Norfolk Street, Guelph ON) from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m..

Tonight, our own John Oxley, Director Audience Marketing and Community Evangelism at Microsoft Canada, will be joining in. He’ll be there to get your input about what his team – which includes Yours Truly – can do for the technical community. If you have an idea that you think will help Microsoft help developers, especially at the local levels, come on down and let John know! If you don’t have any such ideas, you can brainstorm with John and come up with some new ones.

Yes, Toronto Coffee and Code returns today! It’s a day when I make myself (and by extension, Microsoft) very accessible by working out of a cafe and answering your questions, getting your opinions and sharing ideas. Once again, it’ll take place at the Dark Horse Cafe at 215 Spadina, near the lights between Dundas and Queen.

I’ve got some stuff to do at Microsoft Canada HQ in the morning, so I’m declaring tomorrow’s schedule to run from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.. I might be there earlier, but I thought I’d give myself extra time in case traffic decides not cooperate. I’ll see you there!

This article also appears in the Coffee and Code blog.

I’m a bit swamped with work and other things, so the Toronto Coffee and Code events are taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks. Worry not, it’s a temporary thing, and in a couple of Fridays – May 29th, to be precise, Coffee and Code will make a triumphant return, all phoenix-like, to the Dark Horse Cafe at 215 Spadina on Friday, May 29th from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m..

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This week, I’m going to have my hands full on Friday with WordCamp Toronto, so I’m moving my Coffee and Code session from Friday to this Thursday, May 7th, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina).

This particular Coffee and Code has a theme: developing and deploying PHP applications on Windows. I’ll be talking about and answering questions about PHP on Windows, the Web Platform Installer (which I recently covered in this article) and the PHP FTW! contest, which pits student developers against professional developers for cash prizes.

Come on down and join me for a coffee! I’m going to see if I can bring some PHP-themed goodies to give away, just in case my scintillating company and Dark Horse’s great coffee aren’t enticements enough for you to drop by.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re in Quebec City, we’ll be hosting a Coffee and Code tomorrow! IT Pro Advisor Pierre Roman provides the details below:

Salut tout le monde,

Rick Claus, Joël Quimper et moi-même serons au Cosmos sur Grande Allée à Québec demain matin de 9:00am a 11 :30am pour un « Coffee & Code ».

Le concept du « Coffee & Code » est de promouvoir les connections avec la communauté des professionnels en Informatique. Ce, à l’aide d’un endroit public, d’une bonne tasse de café et d’un environnent agréable. Nous nous installerons dans l’entrée et nous serons disponible pour jaser de sujets quelconques.

Donc, si tu es intéressé, tu as le temps pour une pause, viens nous voir… Il me fera plaisir de te payer un café.

Les “Coffee & Code” étaient originalement réservés aux développeurs mais nous nous sommes rendus à l’évidence que le concept est bon et les résultats sont remarquables et c’est maintenant ouvert à tous.  Tu veras bien.

A demain!

Yes, I’m holding a Coffee and Code today – Friday, April 24th from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. – at the Dark Horse Cafe at  215 Spadina Avenue (at Sullivan Street). C’mon down!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Today, as part of our EnergizeIT cross-Canada tour, Christian Beauclair, Rick Claus and Pierre Roman are heading out to Halifax. As part of their visit, they’ll be hosting a Coffee and Code event today from 1:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Just Us Cafe at 1678 Barrington Street.

Coffee and Code is your chance to have a nice up-close-and-personal get-together with people from Microsoft, ask questions, let us know what you think and get to know us better. As an added bonus, it’s your chance to install the Windows 7 beta on your laptop: Christian, Rick and Pierre will be bringing installer discs and helping people get the new operating system (which we’ve been using on our production machines since January) installed.

For more details about today’s Coffee and Code and mini-installfest, see this earlier article.

Coffee and Code is Coming to Halifax!

As part of Microsoft’s EnergizeIT cross-Canada tour, we’re holding a Coffee and Code event in Halifax at the Just Us Cafe at 1678 Barrington Street on Monday, April 20th from 1:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m..

Hosting the event will be Developer Advisor Christian Beauclair and IT Pro Advisors Pierre Roman and gool ol’ east coast boy Rick Claus. Whether you’re a developer, IT pro or tech enthusiast, they’ll be happy to chat with you, answer your questions, take your comments, and if you bring your laptop, they’ll even hook you up with a copy of the Windows 7 beta and help you install it.

Windows 7 Mini-Installfest

We’ve been holding Windows 7 Installfests in some pretty large venues across the country, but there’s no reason we can’t hold one at a Coffee and Code event. If you decide that you want to bring your laptop to the Halifax Coffee and Code, please do the following prep to ensure you get the best experience:

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another Coffee and Code here in Accordion City! Today’s Coffee and Code is happening at the new branch of the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina, at Sullivan, which is south of Dundas and north of Queen) between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m..

What is Coffee and Code, Anyway?

It goes back to 1998, when I first tried out “cafe coding”. I shared a consultancy with my friend Adam, where we did a pretty good business writing custom software for small- and medium-sized companies. I was going a little stir-crazy working out of either Adam’s spare room or my home office and just for kicks decided to try working for a day at the Tequila Bookworm cafe on Queen Street West.

Here’s a photo of me at “The ‘Worm” from back then, with my Windows 98-equipped 233 MHz Toshiba Portege laptop sporting a then-respectable 96 megs of RAM. That green box in the foreground is a Jaz Drive, which held 1-gig hard drive cartridges:

Me at Tequila Bookworm, November 1998.

It worked out so well that I started working there at least twice a week. I also found that as a “regular” at the cafe, I started meeting of all sorts of people – not just friends, but potential customers, colleagues, collaborators and business contacts. We exchanged ideas, traded stories, made suggestions on each other’s projects and formed friendships. I’m still in touch with a lot of these people today,

My job at Microsoft Canada – Developer Evangelist – is a “mobile worker” position, since our job is to make connections with software developers wherever they are. Sometimes it’s at our home offices, sometimes it’s at the Microsoft offices, sometimes it’s on the road. As long as the job gets done, where we are is where we work.

So I thought “Why not re-create the situation at Tequila Bookworm?” It might work out even better than last time, since I now had some reasonably widely-read blogs to announce my presence, and since the Toronto tech scene is now considerably more vibrant than it was ten years ago (thanks largely to things like DemoCamp and HackLabTO).

I’ve had about a half-dozen Coffee and Codes so far, and I think the endeavour has proved to be worthwhile. I’ve made connections — new and old — with all sorts of techies, answered questions and taken suggestions, hooked up people with software and other nerds, learned a lot and even given a human face to The Empire. We’ve talked about all sorts of things: the expected “shop talk”, but all sorts of non-techie stuff as well. It’s sort of like the salons of old.

Coffee and Code has grown beyond just me holding them:

• The Microsoft Developer Evangelism team has held these events across the country as part of the EnergizeIT tour,
• David Janes holds “Coffee and iPhone” events here in Toronto,
• Cory Fowler has his regular Coffee and Code nights in Guelph,
• and Denny Cherry wins the long-distance award for holding one in Irvine, California.

The internet is a great and scalable communications medium, but there’s something about meeting face-to-face that it can’t provide; that’s why the saying “You had to be there” exists. That’s what Coffee and Code is all about.

Come to chat, come for coffee, come to hang out and even get some work done. Whatever you come to do, I hope to see you there!

The Wifi Situation at Dark Horse

The Dark Horse opened on Tuesday, and word is that they haven’t got their wifi up and running yet. If you need to catch up on your email and Twitter, I suggest you bring a 3G phone. I hope it doesn’t deter you from dropping in, but I thought you should know.

This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.

Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team is hosting a Coffee and Code in Ottawa next week! They’ll be there for the EnergizeIT cross-Canada tour and they’re holding a Coffee and Code on Tuesday, April 7th from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Bridgehead at 109 Bank Street (at the corner of Bank and Albert).

“Les Bons Gars”, Christian Beauclair, Rick Claus and Pierre Roman will be hosting this event, where he’ll talk about EnergizeIT, the future of Windows from the client to the cloud, the industry in general and anything else!

This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.

Toronto’s Coffee and Code returns next Thursday, April 9th! It’s going to take place at The Roastery at 401 Richmond from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. See you there!