by Joey deVilla on September 22, 2010
The Ignite Your Coding LinkedIn group is a place for Canadian Developers to find out the latest tech news, see what’s happening in the world of Microsoft and other platforms, make announcements, exchange ideas and get to know other Canadian developers. Although we folks at Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team run the LinkedIn group, it’s open to all, no matter what platform you develop for. It’s a a place for all Canadian developers to connect, network, and learn in order to help them grow and be successful in their careers regardless of the tools or platform they use.
Let me say that again: the Ignite Your Coding LinkedIn group is for all Canadian developers, not just Microsoft ones. (And we’re not too fussy about the “Canadian” part, either.)
For those of you interested in certain niches of development, the Ignite Your Coding Linked group has subgroups as well:
- Mobile Development: for developers and designers building apps for all mobile platforms – not just Windows Phone 7, but also Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, whatever!
- Windows Development: for developers and designers building applications for Windows.
Join Ignite Your Coding, participate and reap the benefits!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Ignite Your Coding,
LinkedIn
by Joey deVilla on April 28, 2010
Say “Uncle”!
This week on the Ignite Your Coding live webcast, we have a very special guest: Robert C. "Uncle Bob" Martin!
His business card may say “Robert C. Martin”, founder and CEO of the Object Mentor consulting firm, but we know and love him as “Uncle Bob”. He’s been coding since the Beatles broke up, and in that four-decade span, he literally wrote the books on agile and extreme programming as well as the letters UML, OOP and C++. Throughout the industry, he’s known as a champion of proper design, test-driven development and just plain writing good code. We’ll chat with Uncle Bob in this one-hour webcast, where we’ll talk about software craftsmanship, why it takes work and why it matters.
What’s Ignite Your Coding About?
Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!
How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?
You’ll need:
How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?
It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Ignite Your Coding,
Robert C. Martin,
Uncle Bob,
webcasts
by Joey deVilla on April 20, 2010
Our guest on Ignite Your Coding this week, Jeff Atwood, has certainly made his mark in the programming world with the Coding Horror blog as well as his project with Joel Spolsky, the online developer forum Stack Overflow (which in turn gave rise to the Server Fault and SuperUser forums). Join me and John Bristowe this Thursday as we chat with Jeff about Coding Horror, Stack Overflow, software development, fake plastic rock, P=NP and whatever topics you, the listener, want covered.
We’ll be chatting with Jeff live this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) online.
What’s Ignite Your Coding About?
Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!
How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?
You’ll need:
How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?
It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.
Who’s Coming Up on Ignite Your Coding?
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Ignite Your Coding,
live,
webcasts
by Joey deVilla on April 14, 2010
This week’s guest on the Ignite Your Coding live webcast needs no introduction: it’s Scott Hanselman, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, whose job is to talk about software development and how to do it right, primarily using The Empire’s tools and technologies. He’s a household name in the minds of .NET developers worldwide, and even when I was deep in the world of open source software, I’d heard of him, what with his blog, the Hanselminutes podcast, his presentations at various Microsoft conferences and (of course) his membership in the elite group known as “The Gang of Foreheads”. His influence in the Microsoft universe is like that of the Illusive Man in the Mass Effect universe.
John Bristowe and I will chat with Scott about a topic near and dear to us: the state of the .NET developer nation. It’s an exciting time to be a .NET developer: we’re a year into Windows 7, a couple of days after the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 4 and Internet Explorer 9 looming in the not-too-distant future and Microsoft making a lot of right moves. I can’t think of a better time to pick Scott’s brain and find out, straight from the source, what’s hot and what’s not in the world of .NET development. We’ll also pick his brain for tips on how to stay on top of your game as a developer in today’s ever-morphing industry.
We’ll be chatting with Scott live this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. (11:00 a.m. Pacific) online.
What’s Ignite Your Coding About?
Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!
How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?
You’ll need:
How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?
It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.
Who’s Coming Up on Ignite Your Coding?
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Ignite Your Coding,
Scott Hanselman
by Joey deVilla on April 5, 2010
Who’s On This Week?
The Ignite Your Coding live webcast returns this Thursday with Richard Campbell. If you’re from the .NET world, chances are that you’ve heard Richard on .NET Rocks! (the online talk show for .NET developers), on RunAs Radio (the online talk show for IT Professionals) or at his many speaking engagements, including those at TechDays. He’s both a Microsoft Regional Director and Most Valuable Professional thanks to his work supporting the Microsoft developer community. For more than 30 years, he’s been helping major organizations design and build applications: Barnes & Noble, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Services, Reuters, Subaru/Isuzu and the U.S. Air Force.
John Bristowe and I will talk with Richard about how he got started in the world of software development, the projects he’s working on and how to deal with issues of scalability and performance. He’s applied that knowledge in building a network appliance that accelerates website performance at the company he co-founded, Strangeloop Networks, and we’ll pick his brain about how to make better, faster, scalable applications.
We’ll be chatting with Richard live this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) online.
What’s Ignite Your Coding About?
Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!
How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?
You’ll need:
How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?
It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.
Who’s Coming Up on Ignite Your Coding?
We’ve got some great guests coming up:
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Ignite Your Coding,
webcasts
by Joey deVilla on March 25, 2010
It’s Thursday, which means that it’s time for another live Ignite Your Coding webcast! Today’s guest is David Laribee, who coaches the product development team at VersionOne, has over a dozen years’ experience building enterprise software and coaching lean/agile teams in many industries. He recently wrote about technical debt in MSDN Magazine, and that’s just one of the topics he’ll cover in our live talk today.
Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!
How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?
You’ll need:
How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?
It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
David Laribee,
Ignite Your Coding
by Joey deVilla on March 24, 2010
Last week, John Bristowe and I interviewed Jeremy Miller — “the Shade Tree Developer” – in a live Ignite Your Coding webcast. Jeremy holds the title of Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, Austin’s coolest ISV, and we talked about open source in the .NET world, StoryTeller, dependency injection and many other topics.
In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.
The recording of our webcast with Jeremy (which took place on March 18th, 2010) is linked below, and we’ll set up RSS, Zune and iTunes feeds shortly.
Direct Download:
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Ignite Your Coding,
Jeremy Miller,
podcasts
by Joey deVilla on March 24, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, my coworker and Ignite Your Coding co-host John Bristowe and I did a live webcast interviewing Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talked about building composite applications, design patterns, dependency injection and why it’s good for you, and other aspects of good object-oriented design as we understand it these days.
Ignite Your Coding is a series of webcasts in which John and I talk to some of the bright lights of the software industry about how they got started, what they’re doing, how they cope with the change that affects our industry constantly and whatever else they want to talk about, all with the goal of informing and inspiring you.
The recording of our webcast with Glenn (which took place on March 10th, 2010) is linked below, and we’ll set up RSS, Zune and iTunes feeds shortly.
Direct Download:
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Glenn Block,
Ignite Your Coding,
podcasts
by Joey deVilla on March 23, 2010
David Laribee on Technical Debt
“Debt” is a term so unpleasant that we don’t even pronounce one of its letters. Technical debt is equally unpleasant in its own way; like the financial kind of debt, it holds you back and haunts you. It’s the hard-to-change, error-prone parts of your code that bog down your project and its maintenance. Ward Cunningham – the guy behind the wiki and contributor to the concept of Extreme Programming – coined this clever metaphor, and it’s the topic of Thursday’s Ignite Your Coding.
Walking us through the topic of technical debt is our guest David Laribee, who’s going to be our technical debt counselor, providing advice on how to pay back technical debt. He coaches the product development team at VersionOne, has over a dozen years’ experience building enterprise software and coaching lean/agile teams in many industries. He’s also a co-organizer of the ALT.NET movement, and was a Microsoft Architecture MVP for 2007 and 2008.
If you’d like to know more about David’s thoughts on technical debt, check out this article of his from the December 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine: Using Agile Techniques to Pay Back Technical Debt.
What’s Ignite Your Coding All About?
In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.
If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask David Questions…
You’ll need:
If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…
We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
David Laribee,
Ignite Your Coding,
technical debt
by Joey deVilla on March 17, 2010
Andy Hunt has been behind some of the biggest ideas in everyday software development in the past decade. From co-authoring the Agile Manifesto and The Pragmatic Programmer to starting The Pragmatic Bookshelf, one of the most influential developer book publishers, to helping bring about the rise of MVC web frameworks, chances are that he’s had some influence on your day-to-day work. In this one-hour webcast, we’ll talk with Andy about the ideas in his latest book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. We’ll discuss why your brain is where software development really happens, how you can refactor your thinking and as he puts it, “just the plain old weirdness that is people”.
You can listen to the recording of the webcast (recorded on March 4, 2010) in a couple of ways:
Direct Download:
Subscribe to the podcast: (so you don’t miss an episode)
As always, if you have questions, comments or suggestions on how to make Ignite Your Coding better, we want to hear from you! Feel free to email either of us – John Bristowe and Joey deVilla.
About Ignite Your Coding
Ignite Your Coding is a series of interviews where Microsoft Canada Developer Evangelists John Bristowe and Joey deVilla talk with some of the brightest lights in the professional programming world about their areas of interest, dealing with the constant change in the industry and their suggestions on how to be a better software developer.
Podcast Participants: Andy Hunt, John Bristowe and Joey deVilla.
Music: Win This Race by picadillyCircus Sound Design, courtesy of iStockphoto.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Andy Hunt,
Ignite Your Coding,
podcasts,
webcasts
by Joey deVilla on March 16, 2010
This week’s Ignite Your Coding podcast features Jeremy Miller, Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. In our one-hour webcast, my co-host John Bristowe and I will discuss a wide range of topics, from newer OSS efforts in the .NET developer community and how they’re trying to reduce friction, AAA-style mocking instead of record/replay mocking, the effective use extension methods for cleaner/readable/easier unit testing, jQuery magic, and many other topics.
In case you were wondering what Ignite Your Coding is all about: It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.
If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Jeremy Questions…
You’ll need:
If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…
We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Ignite Your Coding,
webcasts
by Joey deVilla on March 11, 2010
If it’s Thursday, it must be time for me and my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe to host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast!
This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.
If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…
You’ll need:
If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…
We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
composable applications,
Ignite Your Coding
by Joey deVilla on March 9, 2010
This Thursday, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe and I will host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast, where we’ll interview another high-profile software developer and pass along some of your questions.
This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.
(We don’t have a photo of Glenn Block, but we do have the image to the right, which is the symbol for MEF – that’s Managed Extensibility Framework – which is one of Glenn’s projects. It’s a lucky coincidence that Glenn’s last name is also featured prominently in the image.)
If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…
You’ll need:
If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…
We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!
What’s Ignite Your Coding All About, Anyway?
It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Glenn Block,
Ignite Your Coding,
object-oriented design,
object-oriented programming
by Joey deVilla on March 6, 2010
For those of you who’ve been wondering if we’ll be setting up an RSS feed for recordings of Ignite Your Coding, the answer is “yes”.
Here’s how Ignite Your Coding works:
- On the actual day of the Ignite Your Coding live event, we do the interview live, as implied by the phrase “live event”. From 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. (Eastern) on that day, we chat with our guest and you can listen to it as it happens if you’ve got a Windows machine running the Live Meeting client (available for free from the Live Meeting download page). The Live Meeting client also lets you see what visuals we’re putting up – mostly just information about our guest – and you can also use it to type in questions for us to ask our guest.
- After the live Ignite Your Coding event, we take the recording of the event, do a tiny bit of post-production (adding an intro and outro, checking sound levels and so on) and post the interview in MP3 form, with a link to the recording in an RSS feed so that your favourite podcatching application or system can grab them.
I’ve got my plate full with more than the usual amount of tech evangelism activities, so there’s a team doing all this stuff. Once they tell me where they’re putting the recording and RSS feed, I’ll tell you. I’m told it’ll be soon.
Want to know about the upcoming guests on Ignite Your Coding? Check out the Ignite Your Coding site!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Ignite Your Coding,
podcasts,
RSS
by Joey deVilla on March 2, 2010
Catch the Interview with Andy Hunt This Thursday!
The Ignite Your Coding live webcast series starts this Thursday, March 4th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) with me and John Bristowe interviewing Andy “Pragmatic Programmer” Hunt! Join us as we talk with Andy about how he got into software development, how he became a writer and publisher, his book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning and much more. After we’re done asking our questions, we’ll turn over the interview to you, and you can ask Andy your questions!
If you’d like to catch the live webcast, you’ll need Live Meeting, which you can download here. We’ll also record the webcast and make it available in MP3 form.
Who Else Will Appear on Ignite Your Coding?
Here’s a complete schedule of the Ignite Your Coding webcasts we’ve set up so far. You can find full descriptions of each of the upcoming shows at the Ignite Your Coding site.
Andy Hunt
Pragmatic Programming, Thinking and Learning
|
Thursday, March 4, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)
|
Glenn Block
Composable Applications FTW |
Thursday, March 11, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)
|
Jeremy Miller
Essence versus Ceremony |
Thursday, March 18, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)
|
David Laribee
Agile Techniques for Paying Back Technical Debt |
Thursday, March 25, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)
|
Richard Campbell
Scalability and Performance |
Thursday, April 8, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST, (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)
|
Scott Hanselman
State of the .NET Developer Nation |
Thursday, April 15, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)
|
Jeff Atwood
Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock |
Thursday, April 22, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)
|
Robert C. Martin
A Chat with “Uncle Bob” |
Thursday, April 29, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)
|
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Andy Hunt,
Ignite Your Coding,
webcasts