by Joey deVilla on March 17, 2010
Pictured above: The scene at MIX10 after the Day 2 Keynote.
Whether you’ve just come back home from SxSWi, are heading back home from MIX10 or expect to go to a conference sometime soon, you want to make sure that it was worth the ducats you or your company spent sending you there. It’s one thing to come back from a conference, all inspired to try out the ideas you picked up, test drive the new technologies showcased and stay in touch with the people you met, but it’s an entirely different thing to follow through.
Web Worker Daily has an article titled How to Make a Conference Pay Off that provides these tips on how to get the most out of the conference you just attended after you’ve arrived back home (be sure to read the article for expanded versions of these pointers!):
- Review your content – the notes, business cards, literature and so on.
- Act on the quick “now” items.
- Schedule the “now” items that take more time.
- Check for information posted online.
- Complete the tasks from step 3.
- Follow up with the people who promised to contact. Don’t underestimate the strength of weak ties!
- Study the materials. It is why you picked them up in the first place, isn’t it?
- Write blog posts or articles. Sometimes the best way to cement what you’ve learned is to share what you’ve learned.
Also worth checking out: A Conference Survival Guide for the Web Worker.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
conferences,
Lifehacks
by Joey deVilla on March 16, 2010
by Joey deVilla on March 15, 2010
by Joey deVilla on February 23, 2010
Whenever you do anything where money changes hands, from getting cash from the ATM to buying anything – movie tickets, groceries, a new pair of shoes or a new car to booking a flight and hotel room, chances are that there’s some Microsoft technology involved. It could be an SQL Server database, an app written in Visual Studio, a site living on IIS or Azure or a business process powered by SharePoint, and more likely than not, someone was using Office as well. From devices that fit in your pocket to cavernous data centres, the Microsoft platform helps millions of people across a broad spectrum of industries get real work done every day.
Want to know what’s possible with the Microsoft-based platform? Want to know how it all fits together? That’s what the EnergizeIT 2010 tour is for. In March and April, we’re visiting 20 cities across Canada – as far west as Victoria and as far east as St. John’s – to host free local gatherings where we show you how you can take advantage of our tools and technology to drive your business and your career.
EnergizeIT will comprise different sorts of events in different cities, all of which are listed below.
The “From the Client to the Cloud” Full-Day Events
(Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal)

In Canada’s six largest cities, we’ll hold our EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud full-day events, where we’ll cover the Microsoft-based platform in detail. And yes, even though it’s full-day, it’ll still be free!
In the morning, we’ll talk about the big picture. We’ll show you a scenario featuring the Microsoft-based platform as seen from different points of view: the customer, the information worker, the developer and the IT professional. You’ll see our latest and greatest as well as our up-and-coming developer goodies: Silverlight, .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. We’ll show you Windows 7 and Azure in action, talk about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and tell you how all of Microsoft’s stuff works together.
Just as the morning session answers the question “What’s the latest technology?”, the afternoon sessions answer the question “How do I get to the latest technology from where I am now?” These sessions, split into two tracks – one on infrastructure management and deployment, one on the development process – will cover what you can do with our tools and technology in a little more depth. They’ll show you what you need to implement what you saw in the morning session and provide a roadmap you can follow to learn more and take action.
For more details about From the Client to the Cloud events or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud page.
The “Community Connection” Evening Events
(Many Cities Across Canada)

We’ll also hold Community Connection events in the evening in many cities across Canada, where we’ll do the “big picture” session (the morning session) of our From the Client to the Cloud events.
The Community Connection evening events will take place in the following cities:
- British Columbia: Vancouver, Kelowna and Victoria
- Alberta: Edmonton and Calgary
- Saskatchewan: Regina and Saskatoon
- Manitoba: Winnipeg
- Ontario: Ottawa, London, Kitchener and Mississauga
- Quebec: Montreal, Quebec City and Trois-Rivières
- Atlantic Canada: Halifax, St. John’s, Moncton and Fredericton
For more details about Community Connection or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Community Connection page.
Office 2010 Installfests
(Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Montreal, Mississauga)
I’ve been using the beta and release candidate versions of Office 2010 in my day-to-day work for the past couple of months – PowerPoint for my public speaking stuff, Outlook for email, scheduling and get-things-done stuff and OneNote for my copious note-taking. We’d like you to take it for a spin!
Join us at one of our Microsoft Office 2010 Installfests and we’ll hook you up with the latest build of Office, show you some of our favourite features and demonstrate how to get the most out of our productivity suite.
For more details about the Office 2010 Installfests or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Office 2010 Installfest page.
Academic Sessions
We’ll also be passing through a number of colleges across Canada, talking to students about getting ready for the working world and showing them resources that they can use to fire up their careers.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Canada,
conferences,
EnergizeIT,
tour
by Joey deVilla on February 16, 2010

Are you Canadian and going to the MIX10 Conference?
If you’re going to MIX10, let me know, either in the comments or via email. A number of us from Microsoft Canada will be there and we’d love to catch up with you!
Among the Canadian contingent going to Vegas are:
- Gladstone Grant, Developer and Platform Evangelism Lead
- Allan Hoffman, ISV Group Manager
- Paul Laberge, Web Platform Evangelist
- John Oxley, Director, Audience Marketing and my manager
- Mark Relph, Senior Director, Windows Ecosystem (and former Developer and Platform Evangelism Lead)
- Jamie Wakeam, ISV Architect Evangelist
- Yours Truly, Joey deVilla, Developer Evangelist and guy with accordion
Hope to see you there!
What is MIX10?

MIX10 is the 2010 edition of MIX, Microsoft’s most “right-brained” conference. Its area of focus is on the web and other technologies that aren’t the desktop, which is traditionally where Microsoft “lives”, as well as on design, usability, information architecture and user experience. Silverlight made its first appearance here, under the less-wieldy name of WPF/E (“WPF Everywhere”), as have improved versions of Internet Explorer. Expect some interesting stuff at MIX this year!
Here’s a list of the topics that will be covered at MIX10:
The Full Monty on Windows Phone Development
Glaringly absent from yesterday’s Windows Phone 7 Series announcement made at Mobile World Conference in Barcelona was the “how”: that is, how do you develop apps for Windows Phone 7?
That question will be answered at MIX10 (March 15th – 17th in Las Vegas) in a number of ways.
If you go to MIX10, you will get the following:
- Access to a track dedicated to Windows Phone 7 Series platform
- An introduction to Windows Phone 7 Series’ development platform
- Tutorials on how to work with the Windows Phone 7 Series’ development tools
- A tour of the Windows Phone Marketplace
- And last – but certainly not least — access to the Windows Phone 7 Series developer tools!
The Hallway Opportunity
I’ve always believed that one of the marks of a good conference is the hallway. By “hallway”, I’m talking about the opportunities to meet people in those times and places between and after sessions. There’s something to meeting people in person that you don’t get online; hence the often-used saying “you had to be there”. MIX promises to have good hallway, partly because of the Microsoft teams who’ll be presenting some interesting new stuff and partly because the crowd is going to be a mixed bag of developer types, designer types and the type of people who like to straddle both worlds (I like to think of myself in that category).
Go!
MIX10 takes place at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th. If you register before February 21st, you’ll get a $200 discount off the MIX10 admission fee. Do it now!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
conferences,
MIX10,
Windows Phone