There is no shortage of developer conferences in Canada’s “MTV” cities, where MTV stands for Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. That’s not surprising given their population densities, but they’re not the only place where developers live.

We do what we can to cover the country, and we also do what we can to help other people make sure that Canadian developers get the sort of face-time, up-close-and-personal, you-had-to-be-there experience that only conferences provide, as nice as doing stuff over the interney is. That’s why we’re happy to hear that Winnipeg’s own D’Arcy Lussier is holding another Prairie Developer Conference, a.k.a. Prairie Dev Con, this summer on Monday, June 13 and Tuesday, June 14 in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Prairie Dev Con will feature multiple tracks with sessions hosted by Canadian developers covering all sorts of topics in different styles, from lectures to panel discussions to chalk talks to hands-on coding sessions. If you’re based in the Canadian prairies or always wanted to visit, you’ll want to catch this conference!

Better still, you might want to speak at this conference. They’re currently looking for sessions in the following general areas:

• Microsoft tools and technologies
• Java tools and technologies
• Ruby tools and technologies
• Mobile development
• Agile development
• Developer fundamentals

The conference will cover two nights’ accommodations for selected out-of-town presenters. All presenters will be treated to the speaker dinner which take place on the evening of Monday, June 13. Travel costs are the responsibility of the speaker.

The deadline for speaker submissions is January 14th! If you’d like to speak at Prairie Dev Con, download the speaker submissions form and send it to D’Arcy as soon as you can!

The are also sponsorship opportunities! They have a multi-tiered sponsorship model, as well as track, prize and booth sponsorships.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

“Want a job? Learn SharePoint!” said the article in O’Reilly Radar last year. The U.S. and Canadian federal governments, banks, businesses and all manner of organizations with lots of people, projects and collaboration love SharePoint and are looking for developers. The natural follow-up to “Want a job? Learn SharePoint!” is Want to learn SharePoint? Come to SharePoint Saturday!

SharePoint Saturday takes place on Saturday, November 13th at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters in Mississauga (1950 Meadowvale Blvd., just off Mississauga Road, just north of Highway 401 and just south of Highway 407). It’s your chance to meet architects, developers, and other professionals who work with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and 2007 and learn about it. SharePoint Saturday will be an educational, informative and lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals and MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint topics. Better still, SharePoint Saturday is FREE (you should register to attend), open to the public and your chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

For more information about SharePoint Saturday, visit the SharePoint Saturday site. To register, visit their registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s going to be a busy week for Yours Truly…

Monday: Windows Phone Deployment Clinic

On Monday, I’ll be helping out at the Windows Phone Deployment Clinic at Microsoft Canada HQ in Mississauga (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, off Mississauga Road, north of Highway 401), where you can book some time to test your apps on a real Windows Phone 7 device. If you’ve got an app and you’re going to be in the area, drop me a line and book an appointment!

(By the bye, that thing I’m standing beside in the photo above is a promo device known colloquially as the “Big-Ass Phone”.)

Tuesday: AndroidTO and TechDays Setup

On Tuesday, I’ll be spending some time at the AndroidTO conference, a gathering of Android developers, where I’ll be minding the Windows Phone 7 booth. Yes, that’s right, Microsoft is a gold sponsor at an Android conference. Why? Because:

• We feel that if you’re an Android developer, go ahead an build Android apps, but expand your market reach by developing for Windows Phone 7 too! The programming languages and layout markup are similar.
• If you’re an Android developer, what’s the best OS for doing development? We think it’s Windows 7, which is a great environment for Java. Loads of great Java dev tools run on Windows, and we don’t consider Java to be deprecated.

AndroidTO takes place at the Polish Combatants Hall (206 Beverley Street, just south of College), is free-as-in-beer, and is alas, completely booked solid.

I’ll also be doing some setup for TechDays Toronto, which takes place on Wednesday and Thursday.

Wednesday: TechDays Toronto and Go DEVMental

Wednesday brings with it TechDays, Microsoft Canada’s cross-country tech conference: two days of great sessions for developers and IT pros who are building stuff with the Microsoft stack. I’m the guy who picked the content for both developer tracks, “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” and “Optimizing the Development Process”. I strove for the best mix of both technology-specific stuff like Mark Arteaga’s Windows Phone 7 sessions and Kate Gregory’s Windows API Code Pack presentation as well as practice-of-programming sessions such as “Top 10 Mistakes in Unit Testing” and “Branching and Merging Strategies”. TechDays will occupy me from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m..

From 7 p.m. on, it’ll be Go DEVMental, the student event where we’ll show university and college students what’s possible with Microsoft’s web and mobile platforms. I’ll be doing a presentation on getting starting with game development for Windows Phone with an amusing little live-coded game called “BieberSmash”, starring the bubblegum pop idol of the moment. Go DEVMental is free and open to post-secondary students – just bring your student ID! You’ll get all sorts of goodies, including a DreamSpark token and Visual Studio 2010 Pro.

Both TechDays and GoDEVMental take place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre’s South Building (222 Bremner Boulevard, right beside the CN Tower).

Thursday: TechDays, Day 2

Thursday means another full day of the TechDays conference, to be followed by some very strong whiskey-based drinks.

Friday: Coffee and Code

I’ll be running a Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code this Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Timothy’s at 225 Front Street West (in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre building). I’ll be hanging out at the cafe, working on Windows Phone 7 code on both the emulator and real Windows Phone devices. Want to learn more about Windows Phone 7, see a real-live phone, play some games or test your code? Come on down!

Saturday: ACSE Conference

University of Toronto computer science prof Steve Engels invited me to speak in front of a group of high school teachers at the ACSE (Association for Computer Studies Educators) Conference taking place on Saturday. I’m going to be showing them programming for high school students on Windows Phone as well as with the Kodu game development environment.

…and Sunday?

Well, it won’t be all sleep. I’ll have to pack for my Monday flight to TechDays Halifax!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Creative Commons photo by Jason V. Click the photo to see it on its original page.

Don’t forget that this Saturday, September 25th, is the first SharePoint Saturday in Vancouver!

It’s a FREE public event, and it’s a chance for people in the Vancouver area to dive into SharePoint. It promises to be an educational, informative and lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals and MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics.

For more details, see my earlier blog entry on SharePoint Saturday Vancouver as well as the SharePoint Saturday Vancouver site and the registration page.

Thanks to Yaroslav Pentsarskyy for letting me know about this event!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Don’t forget that a Samedi .NET event is taking place this Saturday, September 25th in Montreal: Introduction au B.I., or as they say en Anglais, Introduction to B.I.. As in Business Intelligence. For the full details, see my earlier blog entry and the event’s registration page. It won’t cost you much to attend; admission to the event is under $10.

Thanks to La Communauté .NET Montreal for putting on the event and to Microsoft Canada Regional Director Guy Barrette, my go-to guy for keeping me in the loop on Montreal geek events!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Day 0 (The Day Before)

TechDays typically happens on a Tuesday and a Wednesday; we usually arrive on the Sunday or Monday in order to prepare the venue, our speakers and our own presentations. The afternoon of Day 0 is usually spent setting up the computers in each of the track rooms and in the Collaboration Lounge and “Ask the Experts” areas.

Here’s Christian Beauclair taking a tour of the facilities on the afternoon before TechDays.

I usually see Samantha Wong at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters in Mississauga, but last week she was with us at TechDays Vancouver, minding the table for the WebsiteSpark program, which gives free development tools available to eligible fee-for-service web design shops.

We made the TechDays venue available to CloudCamp on the evening of Day 0. The Vancouver one was quite well-attended. John Bristowe, pictured below with the camera, took some photos of the crowd:

We’re usually quite busy with other things on the evenings of Day 1 and Day 2, so we hold the speaker dinner on the evening of Day 0. We took the speakers to Town Hall, where they got a chance to hang out with us over food and drinks and play with the new Windows Phone 7 devices. Morten Rand-Hendriksen seemed particularly delighted to take WP7 out for a spin:

Day 1

Here’s track host Miguel Carrasco delivering a short introductory presentation for “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” track the at the start of Day 1. We have introductory presentations on both days; they ease the audience into the day and tell them what to expect from each track.

Also presenting in the “Three Screens and the Cloud” track was Aaron Kowall:

Both developer tracks were well attended. Here are some scenes from the other developer track, “Optimizing the Development Process”:

Day 2

We’ve always got extra goodies to give away at TechDays. This year’s bonus prize was a special Halo Reach edition of the Xbox 360, and Lowell Picklyk was the lucky winner. Here he is, being presented the prize by Barnaby Jeans:

Here’s Anthony Vranic talking about some of the new goodies in ASP.NET 4 WebForms:

And here are Aaron Kowall and Miguel Carrasco watching Anthony:

In addition to the usual developer and IT pro tracks, we added a new track to TechDays: the Local Flavours track. Unlike the other tracks, whose content comes from other big Microsoft conferences such as TechEd North America, MIX and PDC, Local Flavours’ presentations are the creations of developers and IT pros in each city.

In Vancouver, the last Local Flavours session was a special treat: a recording of a DotNetRocks show with DotNetRocks stars Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin interviewing Pete LePage, Senior Product Manager for Internet Explorer. IE9 Beta had been released earlier that day, so it was the perfect time to interview him.

Here are Richard, Carl and Pete being introduced to the audience by John Bristowe:

Day 2 Evening

After the end of TechDays, we tore down the computer setups in the session rooms, “Ask the Experts” area and Collaboration Lounge and packed them for shipping to Edmonton, the next TechDays city (TechDays Edmonton takes place on October 5th and 6th).

The day wasn’t over yet: we changed out of our TechDays clothes, dressed up a little and made our way to Glowball Grill in Vancouver’s Yaletown district for an IE9 blogger night, where 604-area tech bloggers, tech press and other notable nerds were shown IE9 in action.

Here’s Arnaud Gabaudan, the consumer lead for Internet Explorer, welcoming the crowd:

John Bristowe waits “in the wings” to do his presentation after Arnaud’s introduction:

And we’re off! Here’s John’s grand tour of the new, faster, more standards-compliant beta of IE9:

And tucked off to the side were those of us in the bar. We still had a pretty good view of the presentation, plus we had easy access to drinks!

Don’t worry, John; I’m paying attention – I just pay better attention when I’m enjoying a Bloody Caesar:

Day 3 (The Day After)

We held a Coffee and Code on the day after TechDays at the Take 5 Cafe at Granville and West Hastings, a stone’s throw from our hotel, and the site of the foundings of a couple of Vancouver tech groups and startups. I started Coffee and Code at the beginning of 2009 as a way for Microsoft to be better in touch with and more accessible to developers, it’s been going strong ever since.

The faces I know in the pictures above and below, from left to right:

• Boris Mann (blue jacket)
• Chris Nicol (red shirt)
• Christian Beauclair (blue shirt)
• Morten Rand-Hendriksen (green plaid shirt, far back)
• John Bristowe (black t-shirt, seated farthest back)
• Anthony Bartolo (rightmost blue shirt)
• Mark Arteaga (rightmost in the white shirt)

We will be holding Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code events in all TechDays cities. Watch this blog for announcements about the locations of upcoming Coffee and Codes!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

For the past couple of years, we’ve held TechDays Vancouver at Vancouver Convention Centre’s East Building, but this year, we got to hold it at the brand new West Building. If you followed the Olympics, you might have caught a glimpse of it in the coverage; it served as the media centre during the event.

The place is huge, covering 111,000 square metres (about 1.2 million square feet). The building and surrounding walkways cover a total project area of 57,000 square metres (14 acres) over land and 32,000 square metres (8 acres) over water. The indoor carpeting is colour-coded brown in those parts that are over land and blue over those parts that are over water.

The building is one of the greenest convention centres in the world. Among its certifications and designations are:

• LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum, which meant that it scored 80 or more points out of a possible 100 in a green building system that measures buildings for energy efficiency, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, indoor environmental quality and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.
• A “GO GREEN” certificate from BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association) for industry-approved environmental best practices in building management.
• A designation as a PowerSmart convention centre by BC Hydro, British Columbia’s power company.

The building is topped with a 24,000 square metre (6 acres) “green roof” – the largest one in Canada and the largest non-industrial one in North America – housing 400,000 native plants and 60,000 bees. Irrigation for the roof is provided by treating the “blackwater” from the building.

There’s a great “log cabin” smell to the place as soon as you walk in. It comes from the walls, which are made of wood from trees that have fallen on their own rather than ones that were felled. Photos don’t do it justice:

The place is huge. There were city block-esque distances to cover between the farthest rooms. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – programming is a sedentary job, and a little moving around is probably just what the doctor ordered.

Being by the water, there are some great views that most cities’ convention centres simply can’t offer:

And hey, mountains and ocean make a great backdrop against which to play Kinect games on the Xbox 360!

While we nerds are famous for enjoying the great indoors, it would be a waste not to enjoy the promenades surrounding the centre, with their views of the scenery and a piece of outdoor art named Digital Orca, the pixelated killer whale statue just outside the Centre:

Believe it or not, you might be familiar with some of the other work done by the artist behind Digital Orca – it’s Douglas Coupland, who in addition to doing industrial design, fashion design and sculpting, is also a writer. You might have heard or even read his stuff: Generation X, Microserfs, JPod, and many other books.

Looking past Digital Orca to the northwest, you get this view:

And looking south towards the city, you see this:

Here’s a view from the second floor windows facing north – a lovely thing to see during a between-session break:

Turn your gaze slightly to the left and you’ll see this:

Take a closer look at that island on the left: it’s a Chevron station. I was half-tempted to swim up to it and ask to use their bathroom:

The sessions were programmers were in rooms on the second floor, opposite windows that faced east and provided a view of the Vancouver Convention Centre’s East Building. It’s where the Pan Pacific Hotel is and where the cruise ships are moored. On Day 1, we were treated to a view of a Princess Cruises ship – yes, that’s “Princess” as in Love Boat:

On Day 2, we saw a Holland America ship set sail:

All in all, I enjoyed working in and looking out of our first TechDays venue of the year.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Hello from Vancouver! I’m here at the first stop of TechDays, Microsoft’ Canada’s 8-city cross-country conference series for developers and IT pros. It’s a gorgeous, sunny and almost cloudless day, a nice change from the gloomy weather we had this weekend.

The sunshine is perfect for our new TechDays Vancouver venue, the Vancouver Convention Centre’s new west building, whose glass walls provide a spectacular view of the harbour, as seen below:

We’ve been here since 7 a.m., and the conference centre crew were here even earlier. The crowd started arriving around 8, with much of them arriving about 8:30. A little hint, folks: an early arrival means you get registered quickly, and you get enough time to enjoy a free breakfast to boot!

With the clock approaching nine came the scramble for the session rooms. Vancouver Convention Centre’s West Building is a huge place, and out attendees are going to get a fair bit of exercise getting from session to session. C’mon, people, it’s good for your cardiovascular systems!

Here’s Miguel Carrasco from Imaginet delivering the opening talk for the “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” track:

And in the “Optimizing the Development Process” track, here’s Bruce Johnston talking about real-world patterns for cloud computing:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Why Work the Room?

If you’re attending TechDays in Vancouver, Mobile Innovation Week in Toronto, or any other conference anywhere else, you should keep in mind that while we spend a lot of energy on the presentations and sessions, the opportunity to meet and talk to the other people there is just as important. I’ve observed that some of the most important things I’ve learned at conferences didn’t happen at the presentation, but in the hallways, conversing with the other attendees. This observation is so common that it’s given rise to “unconferences” like BarCamp, whose purpose is to invert the order of things so that the conference is more “hallway” than “lecture theatre”.

It’s especially important to talk to people you don’t know or who are outside your usual circle. Books like The Tipping Point classify acquaintances with such people as “weak ties”, but don’t let the word “weak” make you think they’re unimportant. As people outside your usual circle, they have access to a lot of information that you don’t. That’s why most people get jobs through someone they know, and of those cases, most of the references came from a weak tie. The sorts of opportunities that come about because of this sort of relationship led sociologist Mark Granovetter to coin the phrase “the strength of weak ties”.

The best way to make weak ties at a conference is to work the room. If the phrase sounds like sleazy marketing-speak and fills your head with images of popped collars and wearing too much body spray, relax. Working the room means being an active participant in a social event and contributing to it so that it’s better for both you and everyone else. Think of it as good social citizenship.

9 Ways to Work the Room

Here are some bits of advice for working the room at TechDays, culled from a mix of Susan RoAne’s advice in her books How to Work a Room and Face to Face: How to Reclaim the Personal Touch in a Digital World, Larry Chiang’s article in GigaOm on the topic and my own experiences working the room (which in turn led me to this job and is why you’re reading this blog entry).

1. Be more of a host and less of a guest. No, you don’t have to worry about scheduling and who’s running the AV rig. By “being a host”, I mean doing some of things that hosts do, such as introducing people, saying “hello” to wallflowers and generally making people feel more comfortable. Being graceful to everyone is not only good karma, but it’s a good way to promote yourself. It worked out really well for me; for example, I came to the first DemoCamp as a guest, but by the third one, I was one of the people officially hosting the event.
2. Beware of “rock piles”. Rock piles are groups of people huddled together in a closed formation. It sends the signal “go away”. If you find yourself in one, try to position yourself to open up the formation.
3. Beware of “hotboxing”. I’ve heard this term used in counter-culture settings, but in this case “hotboxing” means to square your shoulders front-and-center to the person you’re talking to. It’s a one-on-one version of the rock pile, and it excludes others from joining in. Once again, the cure for hotboxing is to change where you’re standing to allow more people to join in.
4. Put your coat and bag down. Carrying them is a non-verbal cue that you’re about to leave. If you’re going to stay and chat, put them down. When you’re about to leave, take your coat and bag and start saying your goodbyes.
5. Show and tell. We’re geeks, and nothing attracts our eyes like shiny, interesting pieces of tech and machinery. It’s why I carry my accordion around; I think of it as a device that converts curiosity into opportunity (and music as well). I’ll be doing the same with my Windows Phone 7 device as well! Got a particularly funky laptop, netbook, smartphone or new device you just got from ThinkGeek? Got a neat project that you’ve been working on? Whatever it is, park yourself someplace comfortable in the hallway, show it off and start a conversation!
6. Save the email, tweets and texts for later, unless they’re important. They’ll draw your attention away from the room and also send the message “go away”.
7. Mentor. If you’ve got skills in a specific area, share your knowledge. Larry Chiang from GigaOm says that “It transitions nicely from the what-do-you-do-for-work question. It also adds some substance to party conversations and clearly brands you as a person.”
8. Be mentored. You came to TechDays to learn, and as I said earlier, learning goes beyond the sessions. One bit of advice is to try and learn three new things at every event.
9. Play “conversation bingo”. If there are certain topics that you’d like to learn about at TechDays, say Silverlight, test-driven development, REST, and so on, put them in a list (mental, electronic or paper) of “bingo” words. As you converse at the conference, cross off any of those topics that you cover off the list. This trick forces you to become a more active listener and will help you towards your learning goals. Yelling “BINGO!” when you’ve crossed the last item on the list can be done at your discretion.

I’ll see you at TechDays and Mobile Innovation Week, where I’ll be doing all of the above!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re in Montreal on September 25th and want to learn about developing BI applications – that’s BI as in “Business Intelligence” — La Communauté .NET Montreal’s Samedi.NET event, Introduction au BI, is exactly what you need.

Here’s what the event site says:

La Communauté .NET vous propose une journée de formation complète sur le B.I. Le but de la journée est de de faire un tour d’horizon des bases et des techonogies de B.I.  Le public cible est un développeur .NET ou un DBA n’ayant jamais fait de B.I. Le format de la journée est "hands-on" avec une série de démos ayant une suite logique.

And here’s my best shot at translation, courtesy of my high school French classes and youthful dalliances with a Quebecoise or two:

Montreal’s .NET Community will be presenting a day’s worth of information on BI. Its goal is to give you an overview of BI basics and technologies. The intended audience is a .NET developer or a DBA who’s never done BI before. It’ll be a hands-on event featuring a series of demos to illustrate the concepts.

Here’s the schedule – note that it’s subject to change:

The sessions will be presented in a classroom-style amphitheatre to make it easier to take notes. They recommend bringing paper and your favourite writing implement; while you can bring a computer to take notes, they can’t guarantee that electrical outlets will be nearby (bring an extension cord). Note that the event will not have internet access.

To attend the event, you have to be a member of La Communauté .NET Montreal, which you can join via their site. The registration fee for the event is $5 plus service charges, and as the event site says, “$5 c’est pas tellement cher”. (Loosely translated, that means “five bucks ain’t gonna hurt your wallet.”)

Want to find out more? Visit the event site for Introduction au BI.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

GovCamp in Toronto!

First came GovCamp in Ottawa (May 31st – June 1st), and now GovCamp is coming to Toronto! GovCamp is an “Open Government” or “Goverment 2.0” unconference with these two goals:

1. For governments to become more open, transparent, participatory, innovative, efficient and effective
2. For citizens to become more connected to each other around their civic passions in the place they call home

GovCamp Toronto will take place on the evening of Thursday, June 17th and will be an evening where all sorts of people, from private citizens to government officials to representatives of publicly-funded organizations will get together to talk about the intersection of:

• Government transformation
• Social networking software
• Participatory approaches to public engagement
• Open data
• Public service renewal

Is GovCamp the sort of thing you should attend? It is if you’re one of the following:

• A municipal, provincial or federal public servant or a public sector agency employee with an interest in these topics
• A thought leader looking to share and connect with this community
• A member of the community of developers, advocates and practitioners in public engagement, government communications, technology, open data, open government or "Gov 2.0"

Who’ll Be There?

Few people know more about setting up “Government 2.0” unconferences than Toronto’s favourite high-tech policy wonk Mark Kuznicki, and we’re very fortunate to have him as GovCamp Toronto’s MC and facilitator. Mark has been behind a number of similar unconferences, including ChangeCamp, TransitCamp and Metronauts.

There will be a number of special guests including:

• David Eaves, Public Policy Entrepreneur, Open Government Activist and Collaboration Expert
• Dave Wallace, Chief Information Officer, City of Toronto
• Steven Green, Director of Marketing & Communications, Cabinet Office, Government of Ontario
• Chris Moore, Chief Information Officer, City of Edmonton
• Peter MacLeod, Principal, MASSLBP
• Alison Loat, Executive Director, Samara

GovCamp Toronto will be hosted by:

• Omar Rashid, Public Sector, Microsoft Canada
• Julia Stowell, Interoperability Lead, Microsoft Canada

Where, When and What’s Happening

GovCamp Toronto’s venue is nice and also quite central: the Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library (789 Yonge Street, just north of Bloor).

Here’s the agenda:

There are a number of ways to participate:

• You can host a conversation. The conversations at GovCamp Toronto are created by you. We are looking for up to 20 hosts to help convene small group conversations on a variety of topics related to our theme. If you’ve got an idea for a conversation topic, propose one using the online form.
• You can demo your web or mobile application. We’re looking for up to 6 web or mobile app demos that show the value of open public data, demonstrate what is possible in open government, or demonstrate real world application of social tools inside government. If you’ve built such an app, propose a demo using the online form.
• You can join the conversation. You can either:
  • Attend in person – registration is free, and you can register to attend online.
  • Follow the online conversation on Twitter: just look for the #GovCamp hashtag.

Find Out More About GovCamp

There’s lot of information, ideas and reportage from the recent GovCamp in Ottawa at the GovCamp site – be sure to check it out!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re a developer out in the Maritimes, you might want to check out Derek Hatchard’s Maritime Dev Con, which takes place on June 18th in Moncton. It’s a single-afternoon, two-track conference – which means you should be able to take time out to attend it – covering a number of topics including:

• .NET and ASP.NET
• Java
• iPhone development
• Ruby
• Python
• Groovy
• NoSQL and MongoDB
• “Rockstar Estimating Skills”

Maritime Dev Con has a registration fee that won’t hurt your wallet – it’s a mere CAD$19!

I’m a big fan of small, regional gatherings like Maritime Dev Con and its western counterpart Prairie DevCon. Each region has its own specializations and needs that a by-locals, for-locals conference can do a better job of serving, and the smaller size of these conferences allows for more back-and-forth between audience and presenter, and between attendees. Support your local conference!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The business of helping out with the NerdTrain, the Make Web Not War conference, associated activities and participating in a team offsite meeting has kept me a busier than I expected to be – in fact, this has been my first chance to post a blog entry! Stories and pictures are forthcoming, but in the meantime, enjoy this video that explains what I’ve been working on for the past couple of days.

As I write this, the chaos typically associated with getting a conference set up has subsided and I hope to squeeze in a couple of posts later today as well as tomorrow.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team is headed to Montreal this week, where we’ll be getting together for our annual team meeting as well as to help run the Make Web Not War conference on Thursday.

We’re not travelling in the usual way either. We’ve hired out a VIA Rail car to take us and a lot of Make Web Not War attendees to Montreal in style. The car’s rigged with power, wifi, Xboxes, Rock Band, monitors and other goodies to make the five-ish-hour trip even more enjoyable for all that nerdy brainpower on board. The train leaves Toronto on Tuesday morning and returns on Friday – watch this space for reports from the train as well as from Montreal!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s not too late to register for Prairie Dev Con, the prairie developer conference, which takes place in Regina next week on Wednesday, June 2nd and Thursday, June 3rd – in fact, you can still get a discount on the registration fee! Register before next Monday, May 31st, and save 20% off the ticket price.

Winnipeg-based developer D’Arcy Lussier put together Prairie Dev Con with the goal of providing techies in the prairie provinces a developer conference with great content without having to deal with the high cost of travel and hotels. It’s a two-day conference with four tracks:

• Web/Rich Internet Applications
• Development Foundation
• Application Lifecycle Management
• Database/Business Intelligence

with fifty sessions in total.

Donald “Brownfield Application Development in .NET” Belcham will lead a post-conference workshop, Making the Most of Brownfield Application Development, on Friday, June 4th. There’s an additional fee to attend this workshop, which you can attend either as a follow-up to the conference, or on its own (see the registration page for full details).

If you’re a developer in The Prairies and looking for a conference that provides a lot of knowledge but is close by and won’t drain your training budget, register for Prairie Dev Con!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

A quick reminder: if you’re looking for cheap transport to Montreal for MonDev, Montreal’s Open Source Week (which concludes with the Make Web Not War conference), we’ve booked an entire VIA Rail car from Montreal to Toronto! The train car (pictured above) has wifi, power outlets and will be equipped with video monitors, an Xbox or two, a big-ass HP TouchSmart computer and other technological goodies to make the time pass by.

Best of all, if you want to book a trip on this car, we’re subsidizing it. Round-trip tickets are a mere $50 and cover the cost of the ride, a sandwich lunch and drink voucher! The train departs for Montreal on the morning of Tuesday, May 25th and departs back for Toronto on the morning of Friday, May 28th.

For more details, email cdnsol@microsoft.com.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The 2010 Mesh Conference – the fifth one – takes place at Toronto’s MaRS Collaboration Centre on Tuesday, May 18th and Wednesday, May 19th. Its organizers call it “Canada’s Web Conference”, and it is: it’s this country’s premier get-together for creatives, techies and “suits” to share ideas about the internet and how it affects how we work, live and play.

This Year’s Keynote Speakers

This year’s keynote speakers are:

Chris Thorpe, Developer Advocate for the Open Platform at The Guardian

His background as a research scientist and his early involvement in Open Access publishing, makes him fascinated and passionate about what happens when data, content, platforms, identity and pretty much anything opens up. He spends his time at The Guardian working on the best ways to integrate The Guardian’s content, data and APIs with other people’s technology and businesses as part of the drive towards building the distribution and engagement channels of a mutualized newspaper.

Joseph Menn, author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet, Menn’s third book, was published in the US in January 2010 and in the UK in February 2010 by PublicAffairs Books. Part true-life thriller and part expose, it became an immediate bestseller, with Menn interviewed on national television and radio programs in the US, Canada and elsewhere. Menn has spoken at major security conferences on his findings, which include hard evidence that the governments of Russia and China are protecting and directing the behavior of some of the world’s worst cyber-criminals.

Scott Thompson, President of PayPal

Scott Thompson is president of PayPal with overall responsibility for establishing PayPal as the leading global online payment service. Scott previously served as PayPal’s senior vice president and chief technology officer, where he oversaw information technology, product development and architecture for PayPal.

Arvind Rajan, Vice President, International at LinkedIn

Arvind Rajan leads the company’s initiatives in markets outside the United States and Europe. Prior to joining LinkedIn, Arvind was the CEO of Grassroots Enterprise. Also a co-founder of the company, Arvind developed pioneering online grassroots communications programs for a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies, trade associations and nonprofit organizations. Arvind began his career with the Boston Consulting Group, and has held a wide range of leadership positions in emerging growth technology companies.

This Year’s Topics

Mesh will have two days’ worth of sessions covering a number of topics, including:

• Open Government
• Mobile phones and computing
• The Pirate’s Dilemma
• Privacy in the age of Facebook
• Real-time
• Social media in the Olympics, in the newsroom, as used by Médecins Sans Frontières and your business

For more, see the schedule.

Who’s Behind Mesh?

Mesh is a great example of the sort of thing that engaged and enthusiastic communities can create. It wasn’t created by a professional conference-organizing company, software vendor or government program, but by these five individuals known through the Toronto tech scene:

• Mark Evans: Digital marketing and social media consultant, former VP at my old company, b5media, worked with the startups PlanetEye and Blanketware, and former tech journo with the National Post and Globe and Mail.
• Mathew Ingram: Senior writer with GigaOm, former tech journo with the Globe and Mail and supreme tech blogger-about-town.
• Mike McDerment: Runs Freshbooks, one of Toronto’s most successful start-ups.
• Rob Hyndman: If (or more likely, when) I get sued, I’ll haul ass for Rob’s office! Considered by the Toronto tech scene to be its unofficial legal advisor, Rob runs Hyndman | Law, a boutique law firm catering to tech companies.
• Stuart McDonald: Runs Tripharbor/Tripharbour; in a former life, he brought Expedia to Canada.

And of course, there are the sponsors, which includes Microsoft Canada. I’ll be there, representing The Empire along with my coworkers David Crow, Barnaby Jeans and John Oxley.

Get Your Tickets Now!

There’s not much time left before Mesh, and tickets are going quickly. The student tickets are already gone, but a few regular tickets — CAD$539 each – are still available at the registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

MeshU – short for “Mesh University” – takes place on Monday, May 17th at the MaRS Collaboration Centre (101 College Street, just east of University). It’s a series of workshops for web designers, developers and “suits” that takes place the day before the Mesh Conference (“Canada’s Web Conference”) and will feature 12 workshops divided into “Design”, “Development” and “Management” streams delivered by people with real-world startup/tech business experience.

I’ll be there, as both an attendee furiously taking notes (which I’ll post here) as well as a representative of Microsoft Canada and Silverlight, who are MeshU’s event partners.

Keynote: Bill Buxton

Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, human-computer interaction guru extraordinaire and fellow alumnus of Crazy Go Nuts University, will deliver the morning keynote. Every presentation I’ve ever seen him do has always inspired me and given me at least three new ideas, and I expect that this one will be no different. He’s an intelligent, engaging and interesting speaker – don’t miss your chance to see him live!

MeshU Sessions

Here are the MeshU sessions:

• Design Track
  • Principles of Design – Meredith Noble (Usability Matters)
  • [Untitled] – Asa Raskin (Mozilla)
  • [Untitled] – Adrian Belina (Jam3Media)
• Developer Track
  • Data Chemistry – Chris Thorpe (The Guardian)
  • [Untitled] – Diana Clarke (FreshBooks)
  • Scaling Your Tech Teams – Joe Stump (SimpleGeo)
  • Lean Product Development: Learning is the Killer Feature – Dan Martell (FlowTown)
• Management Track
  • The Agony and the Ecstasy: Building and Scaling Inside Sales – Isaac Garcia (Central Desktop)
  • Customer Milestones to Startup Success – Sean Ellis (12in6)
  • How (and Why) to Build a Data Warehouse 101 – Antony Upward (Edward James Consulting)
  • Hiring Mistakes: A How-To Guide – Ben Baldwin (Clearfit.com)

Registering for MeshU

Alas, the $49.00 student tickets for MeshU are sold out. Here’s what remain:

• Regular tickets: CAD$289.00 each
• “Friends of MeshU” sponsorship: CAD$1000 each – with this, you get:
  • 1 regular ticket
  • 1 student ticket
  • Your logo on the MeshU site and at the event
• “Really Good Friends of MeshU” sponsorship: CAD$2000 each — with this, you get:
  • 2 regular tickets
  • 2 student tickets
  • Your logo on the MeshU site and at the event
  • A table at the event

To register for MeshU, go to the MeshU registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The fifth annual Toronto Code Camp took place on Saturday at Seneca College’s Campus at York University. This was the most ambitious one by far, with the number of sessions increased from 25 to a whopping 40, arranged into 8 tracks.

For those of you unfamiliar with Code Camps, they’re software development conferences organized by the .NET community, featuring community-developed material, for the benefit of the community. Code Camps must be free-as-in-beer to attend, and the content and code in its presentations must be shared, free-as-in-speech style. While a number of business and organizations throw in sponsorship money and swag to help cover costs – The Empire included – Code Camps are powered by volunteers. From the organizer to the presenters to the staff, they do it for free, because they love what they do.

Want to see the full-resolution versions of my photos of Toronto Code Camp? I’ve posted them to this Flickr photoset.

The day opened with ObjectSharp’s Barry Gervin delivering the keynote. I was moving swag at the time, so I could catch all of it, the bits I did catch were pretty entertaining. I expect no less from Barry and the rest of the ObjectSharpies, all of who are top-notch presenters:

Perhaps I’m wearing out this phrase from overuse, but let me say it just once more: Mark Arteaga of RedBit Development has forgotten more about mobile phone development that I will ever learn. He did the first session in the mobile track, providing an overview of developing apps for the upcoming Windows Phone 7:

The Empire is quite serious about web development, which is why Internet Explorer’s Big Kahuna Dean Hachamovitch stated very clearly that yes, we believe HTML5 and all the goodies that go along with it are the future. One of those goodies is JavaScript, and nothing turbocharges Javascript quite like jQuery. We love jQuery, and Colin Bowern from ObjectSharp walked a full room through an introductory session:

The “Rule of Two Feet” – that is, go the sessions you find interesting and bail from the ones you don’t – is proof that .NET developers care about web development. Here’s a shot of the jQuery session hall, which was standing room only:

Colin is truly dedicated to the craft; so dedicated, in fact, that he did this presentation even though he was getting married the next day! He’s resourceful too – he used his impeding nuptials as fodder for his presentation, using jQuery to build little mini wedding-planners. Congrats, Colin, on getting married and having a very understanding fiancee!

Colin Melia is a rock star. He did some great presentations and an Azure exercise for Techdays, wrote one of the demo apps we used in EnergizeIT and will be helping out at Make Web Not War. He also played to a very packed room at Code Camp with a session on Silverlight Essentials:

Here’s Infusion’s Nickolas Landry doing a presentation on XNA development. He showed a Space Invaders game with an interesting twist – it was written as a 3D game rather than a 2D one, which opened up some interesting possibilities. I lent him my Xbox 360 controller, which I usually have in my knapsack, which he thought was a little bit weird (Is it? I don’t know any more):

None of this would’ve happened without the dedicated efforts of MVP Chris Dufour, the heart and soul of Toronto Code Camp. Here he is, taking a small breather in the speakers’ lounge:

While wandering the halls of the building, I saw something that I thought looked familiar:

Upon closer inspection, it was indeed a familiar object – a “Make Web Not War” sticker, promoting Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer. As you can see, some puny Jedi attempted to remove the sticker, but his piddly powers were no match for the Dark Side!

Meanwhile, Bruce Johnson from ObjectSharp was showing the room his “OData face”…

…and while that happened, Ryan was in the lunchroom, valiantly guarding the bag lunches prepared for attendees.

Ever wondered what 400 bag lunches look like? Like this:

If there was an award for the best-attended session, we’d have to hand it to Telerik’s Todd Anglin, whose very well-attended presentation on Ajax was followed by an even-better attended presentation on HTML5. This one had people filling every seat, standing at the back and even sitting in the aisles:

Always controversial is the “Flash vs. Silverlight vs. HTML5 – how do they stack up?” question. Here’s Todd’s answer:

Here’s a close-up. Feel free to discuss this in the comments!

Here are the two closing slides from Todd’s presentation. The first was by Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen:

The consumer should be able to decide which technologies they want to use, but a multi-platform world is definitely where the world is headed.

Followed by a quote from Dean Hachamovitch, who agrees with me that:

The future of the Web is HTML5.

I had a great time watching presentations and talking with people at Code Camp. It’s great to see the .NET community getting together like this, and I’d love to do it again. See you next year!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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!):

1. Review your content – the notes, business cards, literature and so on.
2. Act on the quick “now” items.
3. Schedule the “now” items that take more time.
4. Check for information posted online.
5. Complete the tasks from step 3.
6. Follow up with the people who promised to contact. Don’t underestimate the strength of weak ties!
7. Study the materials. It is why you picked them up in the first place, isn’t it?
8. 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.