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EnergizeIT

EnergizeIT 2010: Coming Very Soon!

by Joey deVilla on March 15, 2010

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In a couple of weeks, Microsoft’s Technical Evangelism Team will embark on the EnergizeIT 2010 Tour, a cross-country set of presentation showing what’s possible with Microsoft tools and technology. If you want to know how Visual Studio 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and other Microsoft tools and tech can cut your costs and help your business and organization, you should catch an EnergizeIT event near you. They’re free, and they’re happening in the next few weeks!

Depending on the city, there will be different “flavours” of EnergizeIT events. I’ve written some descriptions below, and if you want the full set of details, check out the EnergizeIT page.

The “From the Client to the Cloud” Full-Day Events (Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal)

City skylines: Vancouver (YVR), Edmonton (YEG), Calgary (YYC), Ottawa (YOW), Toronto (YYZ), Montreal (YUL)

In Canada’s six largest cities, we’ll hold our EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud full-day events, where we’ll cover the Microsoft-based platform in detail. And yes, even though it’s full-day, it’ll still be free!

Please note: The Toronto session is currently booked. You can register, but you’ll end up on the first-come, first served waiting list.

In the morning, we’ll talk about the big picture. We’ll show you a scenario featuring the Microsoft-based platform as seen from different points of view: the customer, the information worker, the developer and the IT professional. You’ll see our latest and greatest as well as our up-and-coming developer goodies: Silverlight, .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. We’ll show you Windows 7 and Azure in action, talk about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and tell you how all of Microsoft’s stuff works together.

Just as the morning session answers the question “What’s the latest technology?”, the afternoon sessions answer the question “How do I get to the latest technology from where I am now?” These sessions, split into two tracks – one on infrastructure management and deployment, one on the development process – will cover what you can do with our tools and technology in a little more depth. They’ll show you what you need to implement what you saw in the morning session and provide a roadmap you can follow to learn more and take action.

For more details about From the Client to the Cloud events or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud page.

The “Community Connection” Evening Events (Many Cities Across Canada)

A scene from EnergizeIT 2009 in Mississauga

We’ll also hold Community Connection events in the evening in many cities across Canada,where we’ll do the “big picture” session (the morning session) of our From the Client to the Cloudevents.

The Community Connection evening events will take place in the following cities:

  • British Columbia: Vancouver, Kelowna and Victoria
  • Alberta: Edmonton and Calgary
  • Saskatchewan: Regina and Saskatoon
  • Manitoba: Winnipeg
  • Ontario: Ottawa, London, Kitchener and Mississauga
  • Quebec: Montreal, Quebec City and Trois-Rivières
  • Atlantic Canada: Halifax, St. John’s, Moncton and Fredericton

For more details about Community Connection or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeITCommunity Connection page.

Office 2010 Installfests (Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Montreal, Mississauga)

Microsoft Office 2010 logoI’ve been using the beta and release candidate versions of Office 2010 in my day-to-day work for the past few months – PowerPoint for my public speaking stuff, Outlook for email, scheduling and get-things-done stuff and OneNote for my copious note-taking. We’d like you to take it for a spin!

Join us at one of our Microsoft Office 2010 Installfests and we’ll hook you up with the latest build of Office, show you some of our favourite features and demonstrate how to get the most out of our productivity suite.

For more details about the Office 2010 Installfests or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Office 2010 Installfest page.

Academic Sessions

We’ll also be passing through a number of colleges across Canada, talking to students about getting ready for the working world and showing them resources that they can use to fire up their careers.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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EnergizeIT: Coming to 20 Cities Across Canada

by Joey deVilla on February 23, 2010

EnergizeIT: Anything is Possible - March/April 2010

Whenever you do anything where money changes hands, from getting cash from the ATM to buying anything – movie tickets, groceries, a new pair of shoes or a new car to booking a flight and hotel room, chances are that there’s some Microsoft technology involved. It could be an SQL Server database, an app written in Visual Studio, a site living on IIS or Azure or a business process powered by SharePoint, and more likely than not, someone was using Office as well. From devices that fit in your pocket to cavernous data centres, the Microsoft platform helps millions of people across a broad spectrum of industries get real work done every day.

Want to know what’s possible with the Microsoft-based platform? Want to know how it all fits together? That’s what the EnergizeIT 2010 tour is for. In March and April, we’re visiting 20 cities across Canada – as far west as Victoria and as far east as St. John’s – to host free local gatherings where we show you how you can take advantage of our tools and technology to drive your business and your career.

EnergizeIT will comprise different sorts of events in different cities, all of which are listed below.

The “From the Client to the Cloud” Full-Day Events
(Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal)

City skylines: Vancouver (YVR), Edmonton (YEG), Calgary (YYC), Ottawa (YOW), Toronto (YYZ), Montreal (YUL)

In Canada’s six largest cities, we’ll hold our EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud full-day events, where we’ll cover the Microsoft-based platform in detail. And yes, even though it’s full-day, it’ll still be free!

In the morning, we’ll talk about the big picture. We’ll show you a scenario featuring the Microsoft-based platform as seen from different points of view: the customer, the information worker, the developer and the IT professional. You’ll see our latest and greatest as well as our up-and-coming developer goodies: Silverlight, .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. We’ll show you Windows 7 and Azure in action, talk about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and tell you how all of Microsoft’s stuff works together.

Just as the morning session answers the question “What’s the latest technology?”, the afternoon sessions answer the question “How do I get to the latest technology from where I am now?” These sessions, split into two tracks – one on infrastructure management and deployment, one on the development process – will cover what you can do with our tools and technology in a little more depth. They’ll show you what you need to implement what you saw in the morning session and provide a roadmap you can follow to learn more and take action.

For more details about From the Client to the Cloud events or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud page.

The “Community Connection” Evening Events
(Many Cities Across Canada)

A scene from EnergizeIT 2009 in Mississauga

We’ll also hold Community Connection events in the evening in many cities across Canada, where we’ll do the “big picture” session (the morning session) of our From the Client to the Cloud events.

The Community Connection evening events will take place in the following cities:

  • British Columbia: Vancouver, Kelowna and Victoria
  • Alberta: Edmonton and Calgary
  • Saskatchewan: Regina and Saskatoon
  • Manitoba: Winnipeg
  • Ontario: Ottawa, London, Kitchener and Mississauga
  • Quebec: Montreal, Quebec City and Trois-Rivières
  • Atlantic Canada: Halifax, St. John’s, Moncton and Fredericton

For more details about Community Connection or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Community Connection page.

Office 2010 Installfests
(Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Montreal, Mississauga)

Microsoft Office 2010 logoI’ve been using the beta and release candidate versions of Office 2010 in my day-to-day work for the past couple of months – PowerPoint for my public speaking stuff, Outlook for email, scheduling and get-things-done stuff and OneNote for my copious note-taking. We’d like you to take it for a spin!

Join us at one of our Microsoft Office 2010 Installfests and we’ll hook you up with the latest build of Office, show you some of our favourite features and demonstrate how to get the most out of our productivity suite.

For more details about the Office 2010 Installfests or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Office 2010 Installfest page.

Academic Sessions

We’ll also be passing through a number of colleges across Canada, talking to students about getting ready for the working world and showing them resources that they can use to fire up their careers.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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

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

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

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Last Night at EnergizeIT Toronto

by Joey deVilla on April 15, 2009

EnergizeIT: Anything is PossibleLast night, EnergizeIT – that’s the cross-Canada tour where we talk to developers, IT Pros, students and faculty about Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Software+Services, cloud computing, architecture and a whole raft of other things that are coming soon from Microsoft – hit downtown Toronto with the “Future of the Platform” presentation aimed at IT Pros and systems administration types. IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus flew in to do the heavy lifitng by presenting solo; I was there for support and to answer developer-specific questions.

Ballet School, on Maitland Street in Toronto

In Canada, the phrase “I’m going to the ballet” tonight is sometimes used as a euphemism for “I’m going to the strip club”. So it was with great amusement when we found out that the venue for the presentation was Canada’s National Ballet School. I’m pretty sure I said “Well, I’m off to the ballet!” a dozen times before making my way to EnergizeIT.

Ballet school main hall interior

The presentation went quite well, with many people asking all sorts of questions about the new features in both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. As with all the other EnergizeIT shows I have attended, many attendees either couldn’t wait to get their hands on the Windows 7 beta DVDs we were handing out or couldn’t stop singing its praises.

I’ll close with this shot of Rick, whom I caught in a perfect moment – it looks like he’s doing the “Head Crusher” routine from The Kids in the Hall:

Rick Claus doing his presentation: "I'm crushing your head!"

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Toronto Area Windows 7 Installfest

by Joey deVilla on April 5, 2009

This article originally appeared in Canadian Developer Connection.

We held a Windows 7 Installfest yesterday as part of the cross-Canada EnergizeIT tour. The idea is pretty simple: invite developers, IT pros and early adopters of all stripes to the Microsoft Canada Headquarters in Mississauga, provide them with DVDs of the Windows 7 beta, walk them through the installation process and show them what the upcoming operating system can do!

room_2

We held two sessions on Saturday, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Both sessions were hosted by IT Pro Evangelist extraordinare Rick Claus, who with his signature Tilley hat and friendly delivery style ran them with great fanfare and high praise from many participants. Rick gave a quick presentation walking the crowd through the basics of the installation process, demonstrated a number of Windows 7 features and covered other topics such as creating a bootable USB stick with a Windows 7 installer.

laptop_1

The event wouldn’t have been possible without the able assistance of our proctors. They were volunteers from the local IT community who believed in Windows 7 so much that they were willing to spend a Saturday morning and afternoon helping people install a beta version on their computers. Thanks, guys – without your help, we would’ve been swamped!

proctors

I was also there for both sessions, helping Rick out as well as doing my own demonstrations showing all kinds of software than ran “right out of the box” on Windows 7, from Visual Studio 2008 and XNA (I showed them my incredibly simple and incredibly dumb prototype for a game based on the move Zardoz), to Far Cry 2 to the music synthesizer/production app FL Studio, which I used to build a hip-hop backbeat on the fly.

room_1

Also present was IT Pro Evangelist Damir Bersinic, who along with Anne Murakami and Cristina Ferreira from our partner company Maritz Canada, made sure that everything ran smoothly, from making sure that the room was set up to signing in the attendees to getting not just enough mini-burgers to feed the crowd, but also enough to haunt Rick’s dreams for the next week.

miniburgers

Most of the people who came brought laptop computers. A couple brought netbooks. Some people who really wanted Windows 7 brought desktop systems, and they weren’t tiny ones, either! Here’s one that got brought in, complete with a decent-sized monitor and webcam! The system was so new that it still had all the feature stickers on it.

desktop_1

The “Flashy Chassis” award goes to this guy, whose pimped-out enclosure got a lot of oohs and ahhs. Speaking as a guy who walks around town and tech conferences with an accordion on his back, I applaud personal expression of all kinds and salute this gentleman with a filet mignon on a flaming sword! I plan to build a gamer/music studio PC rig at some point, and you’d better believe it’s going to be at least this decked out:

desktop_2

Ages ago, a full two years before The Empire hired me, they sent me an Acer Ferrari 1000 as part of program to get prominent Canadian bloggers interested in Vista. I still have it…

ferrari_1

…but it no longer has Vista. Under Windows 7, it feels a little snappier. I plan to use the machine, which is now a couple of years old and whose specs are a bit lower than than developer-grade laptops that The Empire provides me, as a “reality check” device, where I’ll test applications that both Microsoft and I develop.

ferrari_2

I never thought I’d see the day when people would get jazzed about an upcoming Windows operating system, never mind sign up in droves to get their hands on a pre-release version, but that’s just what happened. The room was filled with geek love and techno-lust for Windows 7.

room_3

It was also great to meet new people and make new connections with the tech community at large, and they in turned seemed quite happy to meet some of the actual human faces that make up Microsoft. When we asked the audience if they’d like to see more Saturday events like this, they responded with a resounding “YES!”, and we’re keeping that in mind as we plan events for 2009 and beyond.

All in all, the Toronto Area Windows 7 Installfest was a lot of fun, and from where I stand, it was a great success! Thanks to everyone who attended and helped out!

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Ottawa Coffee and Code on Tuesday!

April 2, 2009

This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.

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

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Road Warrior Office of the Day: London, Ontario

March 25, 2009

This article was originally published in Canadian Developer Connection.
I’m currently in London, Ontario at the Delta Armouries London hotel, where my coworkers Rodney Buike and Qixing Zheng will be doing a presentation for EnergizeIT later tonight. We’re spending the day polishing our presentations and getting the usual administrivial stuff done.
We didn’t want to spend our [...]

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Montreal Coffee and Code: Monday March 16th at Cafe Depot

March 13, 2009

This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.

Montreal is the home to some amazing cafe culture, so it’s only fitting that we hold a Coffee and Code there. As part of Microsoft’s cross-Canada EnergizeIT tour,  we’ll be holding the first Montreal Coffee and Code at the Cafe Depot at 550 Sherbrooke [...]

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EnergizeIT 2009: Coming Soon!

February 23, 2009

It’s been announced on Canadian Developer Connection, but I thought I’d mention it here: we folks at Microsoft Canada are gearing up for the 2009 edition of EnergizeIT, a cross-country tour where we’ll show off our upcoming tools, technology and platforms.

For starters, we’ll be showing off Windows 7. I’ve been running it on [...]

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EnergizeIT: Coming Soon!

February 13, 2009

Before I begin, let me show you the official banner for EnergizeIT, the upcoming cross-Canada expo featuring Microsoft’s up-and-coming technologies:

It’s fine and dandy, but I thought that the image below might better illustrate EnergizeIT’s awesomeness:
The Force is strong in this band! Click the image to see [...]

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