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.

On Friday, the Stack Overflow DevDays travelling conference, which covers ten cities in North America and Europe in a month, took place in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. The sold-out conference was packed enthusiastic developers from both the Toronto area as well as cities within driving distance as well as a large number of volunteers (in fact, there were too many; the conference typically “overbooks volunteers in anticipation of a drop-off, but every volunteer who signed up showed up!).

It was a fun conference, and I was honoured to be selected as a speaker for the event. It was good meeting Joel again (it’s been a number of years now) and speaking on the same stage with some good local friends (Reg Braithwaite and Greg Wilson) as well as some new ones (Jordan Baker and Ralph Whitbeck).

At the end of the conference, Joel took a show of hands of people who’d attend next year. When nearly all the hands in the audience went up, he said “All right – we’re going to be back here next year!”

For the benefit of all, I’ve posted the slides from all the presentations below:

ASP.NET MVC: Barry Gervin and Joey deVilla

Our presentation followed Joel’s opening keynote and was centred around a live-coding demo in which we built a quick-and-dirty ASP.NET MVC-based clone of RunPee.com, a site that lets you know at what times you can take a bathroom break from a movie in a theatre and not miss any crucial plot points.

I’ll admit it right now: this presentation could’ve been much better, and as the one who gets paid to promote Microsoft’s tools and technologies, I assume full responsibility for this one (Barry’s a great presenter who volunteered and took time out of his extremely busy schedule to do this). Watch this space for a "lessons learned" post, as well as some ASP.NET MVC posts that take the material from the presentation and explain it a little better.

Python: Jordan Baker

Jordan’s presentation was an introduction to Python by way of a walk-through of Peter Norvig’s How to Write a Spelling Corrector exercise, which comprises 21 lines of Python 2.5 but in those few lines, covers a lot of the Python programming language.

jQuery: Ralph Whitbeck

Ralph’s presentation was a walk-through of jQuery’s features, and how it will make your web applications sing. I need to get more familiar with jQuery (I’m far more acquainted with Prototype and Scriptaculous), so Ralph’s was the technology demo that was the most useful to me.

Academic: Greg Wilson

By my own judgement, as well as the judgement of the attendees, Greg Wilson’s presentation was by far the best one of the day. This was sole no-code-at-all presentation of the day, featuring the sort of "let’s change the world" vibe that we strive for at DemoCamp. In it, Greg challenged us to weed out the false or faulty maxims based on poor or no research that are now an accepted part of programming practices, find out what we really know about the practice of software development, and do our best to expand what we do know about programming, with research and rigor, not anecdotes and assumptions. This presentation got a lot of applause, and deservedly so — there’s nothing like a great topic delivered by a great presenter.

Ruby: Reg Braithwaite

Reg Braithwaite’s talk — made up of slides consisting entirely of Ruby code (or Ruby pseudocode, where appropriate) — wasn’t so much about Ruby as it was about metaprogramming, with Ruby examples. Following the quip about a man (one account says it was Winston Churchill) who is chastised by a woman for being drunk who then retorts "Yes, but in the morning, I will be sober and you will still be ugly", he encouraged the audience to "turn ugly problems into drunk ones".

Other Writeups

There are a couple of review of the conference:

• at Meta Stack Overflow
• at Geoffrey Wiseman’s blog, Tech Scene

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m going to be “booth-bunnying” today and tomorrow at the Microsoft area of the Explore Design fair, which bills itself as “North America’s first design education fair for youth”. It’s an event where young people can find out about the creative, technical and career possibilities offered by the field of design. There’s a wide range of design disciplines represented at Explore Design, including:

• Video/game design
• Furniture design
• Architectural design
• Industrial design
• Textile design
• Fashion design
• Interior design
• Graphic design

Explore Design takes place today and tomorrow (Wednesday, October 14th and Thursday, October 15th) at the South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I’m going to be spending most of my booth-bunnying near the XBoxes, where I’ll be talking about XNA and Xbox Live Indie Games.

Depending on the internet access situation at the Convention Centre and how busy it gets at the booth, I’ll be posting dispatches either from Explore Design during the day or in the evening once I get back home. Watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

One of the features at the TechDays cross-country conference is the “Ask the Experts” booth, which is staffed all day by speakers (when they aren’t speaking, naturally) and other local tech experts. They’re there to answer attendee questions about Microsoft tools and technologies, tech trends, the industry in general, the local job scene and so on.

While riffling through the photos I shot over the past couple of weeks, I found these ones I took when I passed the “Ask the Experts” booth at TechDays Toronto and saw the trio of Sean Kearney, Steve Syfuhs and Mitch Garvis. I took one look at them, said “Uh-oh, Trouble Incorporated!”, and snapped these pics. I thought you might enjoy them:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

As I write this, we’re getting into the final session of TechDays Toronto, which in my track – Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform – features SharePoint guru Reza Alirezaei doing his presentation, Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint.

If you ask me the question “What is SharePoint?”, I’d most likely give you a description that sounds like this:

Here’s a more accurate description of what SharePoint is:

Reza’s session takes a look at another aspect of SharePoint: as a platform on which you can build and deploy custom web services that other clients can call upon.

Once his session’s done, TechDays Toronto will wrap up and then the tear-down process begins.

Next stop: Halifax on November 2nd and 3rd!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Right now (at the time of this writing) at the Toronto edition of the TechDays cross-Canada conference, in the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track, is Bruce Johnson – “the speaker so nice, we put him on twice!” – talking to the audience about Building RESTful Applications Using WCF.

REST – as in REpresentational State Transfer – while a big thing for a lot of developers, is still only gaining traction in the Microsoft world, in which a lot of resource access is done with SOAP. Since Microsoft is more about interoperability these days, it’s important to get developers building on the Microsoft platform up to speed with REST and different ways to build RESTful services using Microsoft technologies, whether it’s ASP.NET MVC or Bruce’s area of expertise, WCF, Windows Communications Foundation.

Bruce is playing to a full room, which is a good sign – it’s good to see developers interested in learning new things!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My photos from Anthony Vranic’s session at TechDays, Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience, are a bit dark because I used a different camera; my main camera was on video recording duty. I’m including them anyway, because I’m trying to keep a complete record of TechDays.

The original version of this presentation from TechEd North America is somewhat different – its target audience was C++ developers, and TechDays is more of a managed code audience. Since the original TechEd presentation, Microsoft released the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework, and Anthony added it to his presentation.

The Windows API Code Pack for .NET gives managed code access to a lot of features, including some new ones introduced in Windows 7, such as:

• Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars
• Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers
• Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects
• Explorer Browser Control
• Shell property system
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls
• Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs
• Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs — (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
• Sensor Platform APIs
• Extended Linguistic Services APIs
• Power Management APIs
• Application Restart and Recovery APIs
• Network List Manager APIs
• Command Link control and System defined Shell icons
• Shell Search API support
• Drag and Drop functionality for Shell objects
• Support for Direct3D and Direct2D interoperability
• Support for Typography and Font enumeration DirectWrite APIs

Watch this blog – I’ll posting some example code for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET in the coming weeks!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s because we have the best obscure pop culture references, as seen in Rob Burke’s presentation on Developing Composite Applications with Silverlight and WPF:

(That’s a photo of my manager John Oxley and co-worker Damir Bersinic, used to illustrate heavyweight layer communication in Prism. If you don’t get the pop culture reference, this article on my Accordion Guy blog will help you.)

Here’s Rob Burke, striking his GQ magazine pose, just before his presentation:

And here’s Rob in action:

And here’s Rob answering a lot of additional questions at the end of his session:

Want to know more about building composite applications using Silverlight and WPF? Check out the Composite WPF site on Codeplex and as well as Glenn Bock’s article on building composite applications with WPF.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here are a couple of shots from the Toronto edition of TechDays, taking place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre right now.

The Room

I’m the lead for TechDays’ Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track, which I like to think of as the best damned track in the entire conference. The pre-registration numbers for this track were pretty high, so they gave me room 718A, a large room with a capacity of about 400 or so. The rows near the front of the room have table space for the people who like taking notes with their laptops, while the back rows have more conventional lecture-style seats.

Here’s the room as seen from the back:

And here’s the speaker’s-eye view:

Day 1, Session 1

At the time of this writing, I’ve just finished my opening monologue in which I introduced the track and explained what it’s all about. I handed the stage over to Cory Fowler, who’s doing the What’s New in Silverlight 3 presentation. Here’s a shot of Cory in action:

I like what Cory’s done with the presentation: he took the original presentation from the Microsoft TechEd conference and spiced it up with graphics from the new XBox game Halo 3: ODST, adding his own personal touch.

If you’re interested in finding out what’s new in Silverlight 3, there are a couple of things you can do:

• If you’re in or near Halifax, Calgary, Ottawa, Montreal or Winnipeg, you can still register for TechDays in those cities at the early bird rate of $299.
• Watch this blog! I’ll be posting articles on Silverlight 3 development in the coming weeks.

A Vending Machine We Can’t Refuse

On the 600 level of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre’s South Building, right by the registration booths, are two of these machines:

That’s right, it’s a vending machine that makes kosher hot dogs, on the spot, for the low, low price of five dollars. In spite of the fact that TechDays provides a free lunch, we cannot resist the siren song of this machine (Sizzlelicious!). We’ll be shooting some video around noon of us ordering and tasting a hot dog from this machine. Watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

In planning this year’s TechDays conference, we made some significant changes to the developer tracks: they were reformulated into:

• A “tools and techniques” track, called Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices, for which my friend and fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe is the track lead
• A “technologies” track, called Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, which I lead.

As the track lead for the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track at TechDays Canada 2009 conference, I thought I’d take the time to talk about it and praise its virtues.

Designing the Track

Each track lead has the responsibility of designing his or her track. We pored over all the sessions from TechEd North America 2009, consulted with developers or IT pros for their opinions on what topic they’d like covered and came up with a selection of 8 sessions for each track.

When choosing my sessions, I kept these philosophies in mind:

• TechDays is about current tools, technologies and techniques. That means talking about stuff you can get your hands on and use in production right now: Visual Studio 2008, .NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008, and so on. Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Azure are fascinating tools and tech, but they’re not yet on the market, so they’re not in TechDays. We made a few exceptions for a couple of things that are coming out right around now: version 3.0 of Silverlight and the Expression suite and Windows 7.
• TechDays is about giving the audience the biggest bang for the buck. It’s more than simply taking the content from the TechEd North America conference (which has a steep registration fee and you have to also factor in the costs of flying to and staying in New Orleans) and bringing it close to home with local speakers and a reasonable price tag. It’s also about choosing the content that best serves an an audience that uses Microsoft tools and tech in their day-to-day work. There’s no point in rehashing presentations that the audience has already seen a dozen times before, and neither does it do any good to cover topics that are interesting but impractical. I tried to strike a balance — in choosing the sessions for my track, I kept this question in mind: What sort of things will this audience be using that they aren’t using yet?
• TechDays is more than just throwing random information at the audience. A track needs to be more than just a collection of sessions simply thrown together. It works best if it’s a set of sessions whose topics fit together to form a cohesive whole, almost as if telling a story. While picking out the track’s sessions and arranging them, I tried to set things up in such a way to best show the possibilities that open up when you develop on the Microsoft-based platform. 

The Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform Track

The Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track breaks down into four topic areas, as shown in the diagram below:

The topic areas are:

1. Day 1 morning: Rich UIs
2. Day 1 afternoon: Client Tech
3. Day 2 morning: ASP.NET MVC
4. Day 2 afternoon: Web Services

They’re explained in greater detail below.

Day 1 – Front End: User Interface and Experience

Day 1 of the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform is about building the front end, that layer of our applications with which the user interacts, and about giving the user the best experience possible.

The morning will be an introduction to the latest version – version 3 – of our rich interface technology Silverlight and our rich interface-building tool, Expression Blend. In the afternoon, we’ll shift the focus to building client technology by looking at the PRISM guidelines for building applications with modular Silverlight- and WPF-based front ends and the API code pack for building .NET applications that take advantage of Windows 7’s new UI features.

The tools and technologies covered on Day 1 are:

• Silverlight 3
• Expression Blend 3
• WPF
• Windows 7
• Windows 7 API Code Pack for the .NET Framework
• Windows Mobile

Day 1 Morning: Rich UIs

Track Introduction
Presented by Joey deVilla
9:00 a.m. – 9:15 a,m.

Session 1: What’s New in Silverlight 3
Presented by Cory Fowler
9:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
Rich internet applications just got richer! Silverlight 3 is packed with new features and improvements that your users will notice, from pixel shaders to perspective 3D to animation enhancements to bitmap APIs to HD video. We think you’ll also be impressed by the features for developers, such as the updated style model, data binding improvements, better resource handling, and a tuned-up Web services stack. In this session, we’ll explore new features of Silverlight 3 as we build a Silverlight-based application using Expression Blend 3 and Visual Studio.

Session 2: Expression Blend for Developers
Presented by Barry Gervin
10:50 a.m. = 12:05 a.m.
Not a designer? Overwhelmed by Expression Blend? Not a problem! We’ll show you how to use Expression Blend to create advanced and polished user interfaces for business applications, consumer applications, multimedia projects, games or anything in between. We’ll cover features of Expression Blend from a developer’s perspective and show how it works in tandem with Visual Studio throughout the development process. You’ll learn how to create professional-looking user interfaces and visual elements – even if you don’t think of yourself as an interface designer.

Day One Afternoon: Client Tech

Session 3: Building Modular Applications Using Silverlight and WPF
Presented by Rob Burke
1:10 p.m. – 2:25 p.m.
How do you build extensible and maintainable line-of-business applications in Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)? How do you design and code to handle real-world complexity? Composite Application Guidance (a.k.a. "PRISM") offers guidance, libraries and examples – in small, free-standing, digestible chunks – that you can use to build applications with rich user interfaces that are also easier to maintain and extend. You’ll learn how to compose complex UIs from simpler views, integrate loosely coupled components with "EventAggregator" and "Commands", develop independent modules that can be loaded dynamically, and share code between Silverlight and WPF clients.

Session 4: Optimizing Your Apps for the Windows 7 User Experience
Presented by Anthony Vranic
2:45 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
This session will show you the Windows 7 APIs that will let your applications – and your users – get the full Windows 7 experience. Learn about new extensibility methods to surface your application’s key tasks. Discover how enhancements to the taskbar, Start Menu, thumbnails, desktop elements, the Scenic Ribbon, Federated Search and Internet Explorer 8 provide new ways for you to delight your users and help make them more productive. If you want to give your users the best Windows 7 experience, this session is for you!

Bonus Session: Taking Your Application on the Road with Windows Mobile^® Software
Presented by Mark Arteaga and Anthony Bartolo
4:20 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

As a developer of .NET-based applications, you can extend your desktop software to the Windows Mobile-based platform using the tools available within Visual Studio®, the Windows Mobile SDK and the .NET Compact Framework. This session will give you an overview of how Windows Mobile lets you use your existing infrastructure, business logic, and desktop code on a mobile device to innovate and help solve business problems. We’ll show you how to use the familiar Microsoft .NET Framework and .NET-based programming languages like Visual C#® development tool. You will also learn about new features in Windows Mobile 6.5 such as the Gesture APIs and the Widget Framework and how to use them appropriately. With the launch of Windows Marketplace for Mobile upon us, this session will help you take the next step for application testing and submission.

Day 2 – Back End: Programming Frameworks and Principles

On Day 2, the track moves to the back end, focusing on server-side programming tools and technologies, and even wandering into the area of technique.

The morning’s sessions concern themselves with the new option for developing web applications using ASP.NET: ASP.NET MVC, the alternative framework based on the Model-View-Controller pattern, in the same spirit of such frameworks as Ruby on Rails, Django and CakePHP. The afternoon will be about writing web services using various Microsoft technologies.

The tools, technologies and techniques covered on Day 2 are:

• ASP.NET MVC
• The SOLID principles of object-oriented design
• WCF
• REST (REpresentational State Transfer)
• SharePoint

Day 2 Morning: ASP.NET MVC

Track Introduction
Presented by Joey deVilla
9:00 a.m. – 9:15 a,m.

Session 1: Introducing ASP.NET MVC
Presented by Colin Bowern
9:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. 
You’ve probably heard the buzz about Model-View-Controller (MVC) web frameworks. They’re all the rage because they combine speed, simplicity, control…and fun. ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft’s MVC web framework, and in this session, we’ll talk about the MVC pattern, explain the ideas behind ASP.NET MVC and walk through the process of building an application using this new web framework. We’ll also cover several techniques to get the most out of ASP.NET MVC and deliver web applications quickly and with style.

Session 2: SOLIDify Your Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Applications
Presented by Bruce Johnson
10:50 a.m. – 12:05 a.m.
Object-oriented programming makes it easier to manage complexity, but only if you do it right. The five SOLID principles of class design (one for each letter) help ensure that you’re writing applications that are flexible, comprehensible and maintainable, and we’ll explain and explore them in this session. We’ll start with a brittle ASP.NET MVC application that’s badly in need of refactoring and fix it by applying the SOLID principles. This session is a good follow-up for Introducing ASP.NET MVC, but it’s also good for developers of ASP.NET MVC looking to improve their code – or even if you’re not planning to use ASP.NET MVC. The SOLID principles apply to programming in any object-oriented language or framework.

Day 2 Afternoon: Web Services

Session 3: Building RESTful Services with WCF
Presented by Bruce Johnson
1:10 p.m. – 2:25 p.m.
REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is an architectural style for building services, and it’s the architectural style of the web. It’s been popular outside the world of Microsoft development for a long time, but it’s quickly becoming the de facto standard inside as well. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) makes it simple to build RESTful web services, which are easy to use, simple and flexible. In this session, we’ll cover the basics of REST and the show you how to build REST-based, interoperable web services that can be accessed not just by Microsoft-based web and desktop applications, but anything that can communicate via HTTP from an Ajax client to a feed readers to mobile device to applications written using other languages and frameworks such as PHP, Python/Django or Ruby/Rails.

Session 4: Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint
Presented by Reza Alirezaei
2:45 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
The world gets more service-oriented every day, and with that comes the demand to integrate all kinds of services, including those from SharePoint. This session introduces SharePoint as a developer platform and provides an overview of how you can build and deploy custom services with it. The focus will be on developing ASP.NET and Windows Communication Foundation services for SharePoint as well as building a Silverlight client to consume them.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays Canada 2009 is Microsoft Canada’s cross-country conference that shows you how to make the most of our currently available tools and technologies. A couple of weeks ago, we held the first TechDays 2009 conference in Vancouver, and it went quite well. This week, TechDays makes the second stop of its seven-city tour: Toronto, on Tuesday, September 29th and Wednesday, September 30th.

TechDays takes the content of the excellent-but-expensive TechEd North America conference, takes it to cities across Canada and pairs it with local speakers and makes it available at a very affordable price. It’s a learning conference, a chance to network with people from Microsoft and techies in your area and of course, a swag opportunity with the TechDays 2009 Learning Kit, which comes with $700 worth of stuff, including a TechNet Plus direct subscription.

For the benefit of the 1200 people who will be attending as well as those of your who are curious about the event, I put together this article which will cover the schedule and other details about TechDays Toronto.

Venue

TechDays Toronto takes place at the South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, right by the CN Tower and Rogers Centre (a.k.a. the SkyDome), located at 222 Bremner Boulevard, shown on the map below:

Note that if you enter the Convention Centre via through Front Street, you’re entering the North Building. To get to TechDays Toronto from the North Building, go to the floor above street level and take the walkway/bridge to the South Building. The TechDays sessions will take place on Level 700 of the South Building.

Schedule

TechDays Toronto takes place on Tuesday, September 29th and Wednesday, September 30th. There’s a complimentary breakfast from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. on both days, and the sessions start running at 9:00 a.m.. There’s an introductory session for each track on both days that runs from 9:00 a.m. to 9:15 a.m., where the track leads provide an overview of the day’s sessions.

Each track has two morning sessions spaced out by a 20-minute break, followed by 65-minute break for lunch.

Tuesday is the longer of the two days, as it has three afternoon sessions spaced out by 15-minute breaks; the third session is a bonus session. FailCamp Toronto 3 will take place Tuesday evening.

Wednesday has just two afternoon sessions, spaced out by a 20-minute break and will conclude at 4:00 p.m.

Day 1 (Tuesday, September 29th)

Day 2 (Wednesday, September 30th)

FailCamp Toronto 3

Since we had the venue for two days, it meant that we had these nice large conference rooms available to us on the night of Day 1 of TechDays Toronto. Rather than let them just sit there, we thought it might be fun to put one of them to good use with a community event. We got in touch with Justin Kozuch of Refresh Events and Meghann Millard of Unspace, and thus FailCamp Toronto 3 was born!

FailCamp Toronto 3 is the third FailCamp we’ve held in Toronto. Created by Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy, FailCamp can best be described as a “celebration of failure”. It starts with an opening monologue covering failure in history, followed by a failure free-for-all in which some selected storytellers and audience members are invited to share their stories of failure – and more importantly, the lessons learned from them. We’ll award prizes to the most spectacular stories of failure, and we’ll head to the pub afterwards!

FailCamp Toronto 3 takes place in room 716, South Building, Metro Toronto Convention Centre at 7:00 p.m. on the evening of Tuesday, September 29th. For more information about FailCamp Toronto 3 and to register to attend (it’s free!), see the FailCamp event page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Vancouver Convention Centre, as seen from the Fairmont Hotel across the street

Yesterday marked Day 2 of the TechDays Vancouver 2009 conference. The track that I’m in charge of is the most broad one: Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform. With such a wide array of topics that I could cover, I decided to focus on four areas that I and the people I surveyed thought would be both important and interesting:

• Rich (Internet) Applications
• The “Software” half of “Software + Services”, namely client applications on computers and other devices
• ASP.NET MVC, the model-view-controller web app framework that I like to call “Rails That Scales”
• The “Services” half of “Software + Services”: services accessible via the internet

Day 1 was about the first two, and Day 2 covered MVC and Services.

The morning featured two ASP.NET MVC sessions. First, Charles Nurse of DotNetNuke presented Introduction to ASP.NET MVC, which was aimed at ASP.NET developers looking to make the leap from WebForms or to see what MVC is all about. Daniel Flippance of Habaneros provided a great follow-up presentation with SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications, which matched two great topics – our new web application framework and the SOLID principles of object-oriented design (which I covered back in July with this article).

Charles Nurse and Daniel Flippance

The afternoon was all about services. We started with Phil Bolduc presenting Building RESTful Services with WCF, which covers two topics that Microsoft developers are just starting to pick up. After that came Ho Yan Leung, whose session was Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint. As you can see in his photo below, you can find Windows 7 and Microsoft platform development in places you wouldn’t expect:

Ho Yan Leung

(Phil: I got sidetracked during your presentation and didn’t get a chance to snap your photo. My apologies!)

After the final session, we cleared out the presentation halls, gathered for a post-conference meeting to discuss what went right, what went wrong and what we should do at the next stop on the TechDays tour, which is Toronto on the 29th and 30th. We packed the demo machines in their nigh-indestructible flight cases:

The red, green and blue machines are Dell Netbooks. They’re cute, but my stance on netbooks remains unchanged.
The really nice machines are the copper-coloured 16 gig “Dell-a-saurus” machines in the middle row.

We marked the end of TechDays Vancouver 2009 with strong drink and flaming teppanyaki:

[This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.]

It’s Monday, September 14th, which means that TechDays Canada 2009 has begun! We’re at the Vancouver Convention Centre in beautiful Vangroovy, the first city of sevencities we’re visiting in our tour. We’re travelling across Canada throughout the fall to show off the latest and greatest things that developers and IT pros can do with currently available tools and technologies from Microsoft.

Last year, I was a mere presenter. This year, I’m the lead of the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track whose abstract is below:

Learning key skills to develop rich client and web-based applications on the Microsoft-based platform is what this track is all about. In this track you will learn how to develop rich, interactive and interoperable applications for both the client and the web using our newest tools and frameworks. You’ll learn how to build software that helps to give your users the best experience possible, whether it’s a program running on Windows 7, a website built on ASP.NET MVC or a Silverlight-based rich internet application. You’ll also learn how to build services that can deliver data to almost any platform and internet-enabled device. And finally, you’ll learn how to build these software and services in ways that are modular and maintainable.

Here’s the room in which my track in taking place, as seen at 8:30 this morning (Pacific time, naturally), with a half-hour to go before the sessions began. We were already picking up a decent crowd:

First up was Zaheera Valani of the Silverlight team doing the presentation What’s New in Silverlight 3, where she showed off the features in the latest version of Silverlight. According to the rule of thumb for Microsoft software versions, this should be the version that really catches on, and the early signs indicate that this seems to be the case.

As I write this, my co-worker in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group, Qixing Zheng, is doing the Expression Blend for Developers session. That’s right, it’s not just for UI designers – it’s also a pretty good development tool:

Today is your last chance to register for TechDays Canada 2009’s Vancouver (September 14 – 15) and Toronto (September 29 – 30) conferences at the early bird price of CDN$299. Tomorrow, the price doubles to CDN$599 – that’s the price for procrastination!

I’ve written a lot about TechDays Canada 2009 lately, so I think I’ll close with this video shot by the folks at TechVibes on the last leg of the TechDays Canada 2008 tour: Vancouver. It features my coworkers Rick Claus (IT Pro Evangelist) and Qixing Zheng (User Experience Evangelist) as well as Yours Truly (Developer Evangelist) talking about TechDays:

Techvibes at Microsoft Tech Days 2008 from Techvibes.com on Vimeo.

With the work we’re putting into TechDays, we think it’ll be the conference that offers you the most conference for your hard-earned dollars. It features big-league sessions delivered by local people plus great resources for you to take home (and to work) and supercharge the way you work with technology. You really should register today, while the early bird price is still in effect.

The early bird registration price for TechDays Vancouver (September 14th – 15th) and TechDays Toronto (September 29th – 30th) will disappear after Monday, August 31st. If you want to catch TechDays at the ultra-cheap rate, you should register now!

Here’s a quick graphic recap of what TechDays Canada 2009 is all about:

Rather than asking Canadian developers and IT pros to fly far away to a conference and take a hit on the currency exchange, TechDays Canada 2009 takes the conference to them. We’re taking the sessions and information from conferences like TechEd, updating them with the latest information and bringing them to the following cities:

• Vancouver (September 14 – 15…two weeks away!)
• Toronto (September 29 – 30…a month from now)
• Halifax (November 2 – 3)
• Calgary (November 17 – 18)
• Montreal (December 2 – 3)
• Ottawa (December 9 –10)
• Winnipeg (December 15 – 16)

TechDays Canada 2009 features the following tracks:

• Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform (which happens to be the track I’m in charge of)
• Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices
• Windows Client
• Servers, Security and Management
• Communications and Collaboration

And, as a bonus, we’ve got an extra track for Vancouver and Toronto: Developer Foundations, which contains sessions of a non-platform-specific nature covering best coding practices and good software engineering.

Attendees also get $700 worth of goodies, including a TechNet Plus Direct Subscription (which gets you Windows 7 for free, among other things), access to content from the TechEd conference, the TechDays 2009 Resource DVD, discounts on books and more.

TechDays presentations are given mostly by local people and attended by local people. If you want to get to know and network with developers, IT pros and techies in your area – and believe me, this sort of thing pays off in spades – TechDays Canada 2009 is a great place for it.

If you’re a developer or IT pro and work with the .NET platform – or are even just curious about it – you should be at TechDays Canada 2009. And if you like saving money, you’ll register before the end of Monday, August 31st.

If you want to attend TechDays Vancouver (September 14 – 15) or TechDays Toronto (September 29 – 30) at the early bird rate, you’ve got 3 days left! After Monday, August 31st, you’ll have to pay the full $599. Register now and save!

The Early Bird Price is Going Away Soon

The $299 early bird pricing for TechDays Canada 2009’s Vancouver and Toronto stops will vanish after Monday, August 31st. From September 1st onward, if you want to catch TechDays in Vancouver (Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th) and Toronto (Tuesday, September 29th – Wednesday, September 30th), you’ll have to pay the full price of $599. Why pay double when you don’t have to?

The TechDays Formula

Continuing with this article’s theme of using pictograms to explain things, here’s TechDays in a nutshell, pictorial-style:

 We take presentation sessions that cover getting the most out of current and new Microsoft tools and technologies from big conferences like TechEd, which are typically held in a large city in the southern United States, at a large convention centre, near large hotels and will set you back a couple “large” for registration, transportation and accommodation. TechDays 2009 features over 40 sessions split into these tracks:

• Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform
• Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices
• Windows Client
• Servers, Security and Management
• Communications and Collaboration

We update that content where necessary and find local speakers to present it. We pick out speakers who are either well-versed in the session topic or who are simply bright techies with a thirst for knowledge, a knack for presenting and who have been meaning to get well-versed in that topic. Whenever possible, we try to get someone who lives in the area of the conference city, because TechDays isn’t just about spreading knowledge; it’s also about helping developers make connections with their peers nearby.

We also set up extra events and goodies. Attendees get a one-year subscription to TechNet, which alone is worth more than the price of the early bird registration and gets you access to all kinds of goodies including Windows 7. There’s also all the content from the TechEd conference. You also get the learning kit DVD packed with goodies to help you get the most out of Microsoft’s tools and tech. We’re throwing in some discount codes for books. We’ll also be announcing surprise events in your city – watch this space for details!

And last but not least, don’t underestimate the job-and-employee-seeking opportunities that a gathering like TechDays provides. Events like TechDays are where opportunities happen!

All This for $299

And don’t forget, that’s $299 Canadian, for content from conferences that cost 7 times as much. And with extra goodies such as a TechNet subscription (which costs more than the early bird fee and gets you Windows 7) thrown in. Plus a chance to meet up with your peers as well as us evangelists, whom you should think of as “your people on the inside”. It’s a great deal, and it’s going away after next Monday, so sign up now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

C. Titus Brown delivering his presentation.

Here’s the first of my notes from the Science 2.0 conference, a conference for scientists who want to know how software and the web is changing the way they work. It was held on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 29th at the MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto and attended by 102 people. It was a little different from most of the conferences I attend, where the primary focus is on writing software for its own sake; this one was about writing or using software in the course of doing scientific work.

This entry contains my notes from C. Titus Brown’s presentation, Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects. Here’s the abstract:

The explosion of free and open source development and testing tools offers a wide choice of tools and approaches to scientific programmers.  The increasing diversity of free and fully hosted development sites (providing version control, wiki, issue tracking, etc.) means that most scientific projects no longer need to self-host. I will explore how three different projects (VTK/ITK; Avida; and pygr) have chosen hosting, development, and testing approaches, and discuss the tradeoffs of those choices.  I will particularly focus on issues of reliability and reusability juxtaposed with the mission of the software.

Here’s a quick bio for Titus:

C. Titus Brown studies development biology, bioinformatics and software engineering at Michigan State University, and he has worked in the fields of digital evolution and physical meteorology. A cross-cutting theme of much of his work has been software development for computational science, which has led him to software testing and agile software development practices. He is also a member of Python Software Foundation and the author of several widely-used Python testing toolkits.

• Should you do open source science?
  • Ideological reason: Reproducibility and open communication are supposed to be at the heart of good science
  • Idealistic reason: It’s harder to change the world when you’re trying to do good science and keep your methods secret
  • Pragmatic reason: Maybe having more eyes on your project will help!
• When releasing the code for your scientific project to the public, don’t worry about which open source licence to use – the important thing is to release it!
• If you’re providing a contact address for your code, provide a mailing list address rather than your own
  • It makes it look less “Mickey Mouse” – you don’t seem like one person, but a group
  • It makes it easy to hand off the project
  • Mailing lists are indexed by search engines, making your project more findable
• Take advantage of free open source project hosting

• Distributed version control
  • “You all use version control, right?” (Lots of hands)
  • For me, distributed version control was awesome and life-changing
  • It decouples the developer from the master repository
  • It’s great when you’re working away from an internet connection, such as if you decide to do some coding on airplanes
  • The distributed nature is a mixed mixed blessing
    • One downside is "code bombs", which are effective forks of the project, created when people don’t check in changes often enough
    • Code bombs lead to complicated merges
    • Personal observation: the more junior the developer, the more they feel that their code isn’t “worthy” and they hoard changes until it’s just right. They end up checking in something that’s very hard to merge
  • Distributed version control frees you from permission decisions – you can simply say to people who check out your code "Do what you want. If I like it, I’ll merge it."

• Open source vs. open development
  • Do you want to simply just release the source code, or do you want participation?
    • I think participation is the better of the two
  • Participation comes at a cost, in both support time and attitude
    • There’s always that feeling of loss of control when you make your code open to use and modification by other people
    • Some professors hate it when someone takes their code and does "something wrong" with it
    • You’ll have to answer “annoying questions” about your design decisions
    • Frank ("insulting") discussion of bugs
    • Dealing with code contributions is time-consuming – it takes  time to review them
  • Participation is one of the hallmarks of a good open source project

• Anecdote
• I used to work on the “Project Earthshine” climatology project
  • The idea behind the project was to determine how much of the sunlight hitting the Earth was being reflected away
  • You can measure this be observing the crescent moon: the bright part is lit directly by the sun; the dark part is also lit – by sunlight reflected from the Earth
  • You can measure the Greenhouse Effect this way
  • It’s cheaper than measuring sunlight reflected by the Earth directly via satellite
• I did this work at Big Bear Lake in Califronia, where they hung telescopes to measure this effect at solar observatories
• I went through the the source code of the application they were using, trying to figure out what grad student who worked on it before me did
• It turned out that to get “smooth numbers” in the data, his code applied a correction several times
• His attitude was that there’s no such thing as too many corrections
• "He probably went on to do climate modelling, and we know how that’s going"
• How do we know that our code works?
  • We generally have no idea that our code works, all we do is gain hints
  • And what does "works" mean anyway, in the context of research programming? Does it means that it gives results that your PI expects?
• Two effects of that Project Earthshine experience:
• Nowadays, if I see agreement between 2 sources of data, I think at least one of them must be wrong, if not both
• I also came to a stunning realization that:
  • We don’t teach young scientists how to think about software
  • We don’t teach them to be suspicious of their code
  • We don’t teach them good thought patterns, techniques or processes
  • (Actually, CS folks don’t teach this to their students either)
• Fear is not a sufficient motivator: there are many documented cases where things have gone wrong because of bad code, and they will continue to do so. Famous cases include:
  • Therac-25 – a radiation therapy machine that administered lethal doses of radiation to patients
  • Pfizer Backtracks on Benefiit of Atorvastatin over Simvastatin – the result of a “programming error”
  • A Sign, a Flipped Structure and a Scientific Flameout of Epic Proportions – several scientific papers retracted after a programming error was found
• If you’re throwing out experimental data because of ifs lack of agreement with your software model, that’s not a technical problem, that’s a social problem!

• Automated testing
  • The basic idea behind automated testing is to write test code that runs your main code and verifies that the behaviour is expected
  • Example – regression test
    • Run program with a given set of parameters and record the output
    • At some later time, run the same program with the same parameters and record the output
    • Did the output change in the second run, and if so, do you know why?
    • This is different thing from "is my program correct"
    • If results change unintentionally, you should ask why
  • Example – functional test
    • Read in known data
    • Check that the known data matches your expectations
    • Does you data loading routine work?
    • It works best if you also test with "tricky" data
  • Example – assertions
    • Put "assert parameter >=0" in your code
    • Run it
    • Do I ever pass garbage into this function?
    • You’ll be surprised that things that "should never happen", do happen
    • Follow the classic Cold War motto: “Trust, but verify”
  • Other kinds of automated testing (acceptance testing, GUI testing), but they don’t usually apply to scientists
  • In most cases, you don’t need to use specialized testing tools
  • One exception is a code coverage tool
    • Answers the question “What lines of code are executed?”
    • Helps you discover dead code branches
    • Guide test writing to untested portions of code
  • Continuous integration
    • Have several "build clients" building your software, running tests and reporting back
    • Does my code build and run on Windows?
    • Does my code run under Python 2.4? Debian 3.0? MySQL 4?
    • Answers the question: “Is there a chance in hell that anyone else can use my code?”
  • Automated testing locks down "boring" code (that is, code you understand)
    • Lets you focus on "interesting" code – tricky code or code you don’t understand
    • Freedom to refactor, tinker, modify, for you and others

• If you want to suck people into your open source project:
  • Choose your technology appropriately
  • Write correct software
  • Automated testing can help
• Closed source science is not science
  • If you can’t see the code, it’s not falsifiable, and if it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science!

O’Reilly’s conference on Open Source, OSCON, takes place this week in San Jose, California. One of the events taking place at OSCON is the Open Source Language Roundtable, the abstract for which appears below:

We all have our favorite languages in our tool-belt, but is there a ‘best’ overall language? If anyone can hash that out, it will be the members of this roundtable discussion, some of the stars of the open source language space. This wide-ranging session, hosted and moderated by the O’Reilly Media editorial staff, and broadcast live on the web, will try to identify the best and worst features of each language, and which are best for various types of application development.

The roundtable will me moderated by O’Reilly Media’s James Turner and will cover the following languages, listed below with the corresponding panelist:

• Java: Rod Johnson (SpringSource)
• Perl: Jim Brandt (Perl Foundation)
• PHP: Laura Thomason (Mozilla)
• Python: Alex Martelli (Google)
• Ruby: Brian Ford (Engine Yard)

You can catch this roundtable even if you’re not going to be at OSCON because O’Reilly is webcasting the event. It takes place this Wednesday, July 22nd at 10pm EDT (7 pm Pacific) and is expected to run 90 minutes. It costs nothing to catch the webcast and you’ll even be able to ask the panelists questions via chat, but you’ll need to register.

Summer may just be starting, but we’re already working on on Microsoft’s big conference for the fall, TechDays 2009. It’s our cross-Canada conference for Developers and IT Pros that covers Microsoft tools and technologies that are available right now.

I was a presenter at TechDays 2008, and this year, I’m in charge the Developing for the Windows Platform track, responsible for choosing the sessions and training their speakers.

When and Where

TechDays 2009 takes place in September, November and December. We start with Vancouver and Toronto, the cities with the two largest venues. We leave October open for the AlignIT conferences. Things pick up again in November, when we hit these cities: Halifax, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg.

Here’s are TechDays 2009’s cities and dates:

As a track owner, I will be at all the cities for the week around those dates. My plan is to try to hold a “Coffee and Code” event in each TechDays city during that week, so watch this blog for those announcements.

TechDays 2009 Tracks

TechDays 2009 will have five tracks:

• Developing for the Microsoft Platform (mine!)
• Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices
• Windows Client
• Servers, Security and Management
• Communications and Collaboration

We’re currently in the process of choosing the sessions for each track, which spans the two days of the conference, four 75-minutes sessions per day.

Here are the details for each track:

Who’s Presenting

TechDays isn’t just about technology presentations; it’s also about building up local developer communities. We provide the session topic and presentation materials, but we want you, the developer community, to do the presentations. Whenever possible, we want people from the region to speak: developers and IT pros from Vancouver, Victoria and parts surrounding speaking at TechDays Vancouver, developers and IT pros from in and around Toronto speaking at TechDays Toronto, and so on.

As I write this, we’re contacting developers and IT pros across Canada, asking them if they’d like to present at session at the TechDays conference nearest to them. If you’ve got the presentation skills (and yes, we’ll help you sharpen them, too!) and think you might do a great job presenting at TechDays 2009, drop me a line and we’ll talk.

How Much?

It’s very, very reasonable: the early bird rate is CAD$299 – and that’s for the full two days, five tracks and breakfast and lunch and an opportunity to network with both Microsofties and your local developer community, Even if you’re in a startup living on ramen noodles, TechDays 2009 won’t break your budget.

Find Out More

You can get the full scoop on TechDays 2009 at the TechDays site, techdays.ca.