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

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

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

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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

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

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

F# (pronounced “eff sharp”) is multi-paradigm .NET programming language that supports both imperative object-oriented and functional programming styles. It’s a dialect of the ML programming language and very close to OCaml. Used as a functional programming language, F# gives you expressive power that’s tricky to duplicate in your run-of-the-mill imperative programming languages. As a .NET programming language, you can integrate modules written in F# into C# and Visual Basic projects, with F# doing the data-crunching, and C# or VB handling the user interface.

Justin Lee talked to me about starting a Toronto F# study group a couple of weeks ago at Toronto CodeCamp, and he’s holding the first meeting this Thursday, May 7th at 6:00 p.m. at the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina Avenue). He says that in this first meeting, he wants to start talking about the study group itself and cover a few simple “getting started with F#” exercises.

There’s nothing like a taking up a new programming language to stretch your brain, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that functional programming concepts are the future. The F# Study Group is an opportunity to get started, and the Dark Horse is a pretty nice setting with great coffee.

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

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

What is Coffee and Code, Anyway?

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

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

Me at Tequila Bookworm, November 1998.

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

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

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

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

Coffee and Code has grown beyond just me holding them:

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

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

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

The Wifi Situation at Dark Horse

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

I didn’t find out until just now, but David Janes is holding a Coffee and iPhone session this afternoon from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Dark Horse Cafe on Spadina. Check it out if you’re in the area – it’s a good topic, and it’s happening in a gorgeous location!

This Friday’s Toronto Coffee and Code will take place at the Spadina branch of the Dark Horse Cafe, which opened just this week. The original Dark Horse Cafe, located in Accordion City’s East End, is a much-loved, much-praised cafe known for friendly service, excellent coffee and tasty snacks. This second branch is larger and in a more central location: the Robertson Building  in the Queen/Spadina area, where Chinatown meets the warehouse district housing the city’s tech startup and “Creative Class” crowds.

Here are the details:

• What: Coffee and Code
• When: Friday, April 17th from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
• Where: Dark Horse Cafe, 215 Spadina Avenue (at Sullivan Street)

Here’s a sneak peek at the newly-opened cafe. Here’s the exterior:

…but inside, it’s a big, bright and beautiful space. Here’s the first thing you see when you walk in: their wide, welcoming coffee bar.

The cafe is split into two levels: a lower level at the front of the cafe and an upper level in the back. Here’s a view of the lower level, as seen from the north end:

Rather than fill the lower level with many small tables, the folks at the Dark Horse decided to use two ginormous tables, each of which can accommodate a dozen people quite handily. Here’s the square table at the north end of the room:

And here’s the rectangular table at the south end:

A small staircase to the left of the coffee bar leads you to the upper level located in the back. It’s more living room-like, with many small coffee tables and couches and chairs spread throughout:

Here’s a view of the coffee bar from the upper level:

Their selection was a bit limited on their first day: they didn’t have chocolate for mochas, nor ice for iced coffees, and the panini presses still had the plastic wrap on them; that’s all forgivable for the first couple of days. They did have an interesting-looking selection of pastries, and the peanut butter cream brownie I had was worth killing for (I suspect that the Ginger Ninja would absolutely love it).

It’s a gorgeous place with a lot of promise; my only real complaint is that it wasn’t around when I lived in the neighbourhood. I’m looking to hanging out there often.