Nice phone, shame about the name.

As I quipped in an earlier post, the name “Windows Phone 7 Series” is a bit long, and suggests that the people who do Microsoft’s branding get paid by the syllable. This is the sort of left-brain-lopsided mindset that has produced names like “Windows Server 2008 R2”.

My fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe pointed me to this Joy of Tech comic which attempts to ratiocinate the etymology of this unwieldy appellation:

Whenever Microsoft needs to make a radical change in the way they do things, they bring in a hip Asian guy. That’s why they’ve got me shaking things up on Microsoft Canada’s Tech Evangelism Team, and it’s also why Albert Shum is redefining the way Microsoft does mobile phones in his role as the Director of Microsoft’s Mobile Experience Design Team. True to my earlier statement that Canadian techies have been punching well above their weight class since Alexander Graham Bell, Albert studied engineering and architecture at the University of Waterloo.

Here’s a video featuring Albert talking about the design philosophies behind the completely reworked from-the-ground-up Windows Phone 7. It’s featured in the Microsoft News Centre article Windows Phone Designer Seeks the Right Balance.

I like what he says at the end of the video:

What will our users see first? I think hopefully they’ll see themselves in the phone. I think that’s a really key part of how we designed it. It’s really focused on making this phone your phone. We took the idea of making it personal, so that when you look at the start experience, it’s about your content. It’s about your people, it’s your pictures, it’s your music, it’s presented way up there.

My phone is going to be different than your phone, and I think that’s a really key part: that personalized way of navigating the thing that you care about, the things that you want to share, the things you want to listen to, and those are the key moments where we first present that it’s your phone.

If you’re thinking up ideas for applications to write for Windows Phone, keep what Albert says in mind: it’s not about feature lists; it’s all about the user and the user experience.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Sheep Canada and Other Perspectives

Every now and again, I make it a point to pick up some reading material on a field or industry that’s completely unrelated to my own. I find that it both satisfies my curiosity and helps me see things from a completely different perspective. In one particular case, when I found a copy of Sheep Canada lying abandoned on a subway seat, I enjoyed the puzzled and concerned looks from the other passengers as I read the magazine. Not only did I get a little entertainment, but I learned a little bit about what goes into making the lamb chops and sweaters I love.

I also like asking people questions about their work, especially if it’s in field different from my own. It probably stems from the fact that everyone in my immediate family is in medicine; I’m the “black sheep” who went into computer programming. I often chat with my wife and her co-workers at the University of Toronto’s Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies (a fascinating line of work, by the bye), my father-in-law about that branch of the insurance industry that concerns itself with executive benefits, friends who work in the television and movie industries, and so on. I love hearing their stories and find that seeing their perspectives broadens my own.

I’ve even taken on little non-developer side jobs just to get a different perspective. I’ve moved an entire warehouse of high-end dresses, had a fair bit of success as a street musician, gotten ink-stained at an old school print shop and even had a stint as an accordion-playing go-go dancer at a Toronto nightclub.

You Go Hither and I’ll Go Thither

It’s this “wanderlust of the mind” that probably led me, a guy who was actually quite happy in the “develop on the Mac, deploy on Linux” world, to becoming a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft. Each world has its own history, culture, customer base and approach to technology, and each offers lessons to the other. As I’ve said before, technology is a great big smorgasbord, where there are enough seats and dishes for everyone and every taste. Wouldn’t it be a waste if you stuck only with the dishes you knew?

I’ve spent the last year getting reacquainted with the Microsoft development world, and it’s different in many ways. There’s the obvious stuff such as operating systems, programming languages and tools. There’s also the more subtle stuff: conference demographics and what people do in the hallways at conference, the sort of apps that get written, what people do in their spare time and so on.

Don Dodge is experiencing the same thing…just in reverse. Just as I’ve gone from being a Mac guy to running Windows 7 as my primary operating system, he’s crossed over from Windows to the Mac OS and writing about his experiences with the transition in an article titled From MSFT Evangelist to Mac Enthusiast – The Other Side of the Road.

There are some lessons to be learned from Don’s observations, a fact that wasn’t lost on Todd Bishop. In his article on Don’s “switching” experience, he writes:

This sentence, in particular, caught my attention: "After years of defending Microsoft against the Apple fanatics I decided to go to the other side of the road to see for myself," Dodge writes.

Good for him, but the fact that he hadn’t seen the other side of the road as a Microsoft employee is a symptom of a larger problem at the Redmond company. Loyalty to and appreciation for your own products is nice, to a point, but after interacting with people at Microsoft for the better part of the past decade, I’ve never quite understood, logically, why it’s taboo for its employees to use competing products.

…

…think what would happen if Microsoft employees experienced and saw around them, every day, a true reflection of the competitive landscape — including Microsoft products and rival technologies. My hunch is that they’d come away with a better understanding of what motivates specific consumer actions, and how they might be able to get consumers to pick Microsoft products instead.

Todd, you took the words right out of my mouth. It’s right along the lines of my own philosophy, which I wrote about in the article Evangelist, Immigrant and Shaman:

What Microsoft needs badly is a shaman. They need somebody who is situated physically within their culture, but outside it spiritually. This isn’t a person who hates Microsoft, but it’s a person who can actually see it. I can do this for you. Give me a hut in your parking lot. I will eat mushrooms, roll around in your cafeteria, and tell you the Goddamned truth.

It’s the style in which I do my work. Yes, I devote a lot of time and effort to Microsoft’s tools and technologies, but I make sure that they’re not the only things I look at. I try to keep abreast of things like the IDE conventions in XCode, what’s happening in the worlds of the iPhone and Android, non-Microsoft languages and frameworks such as PHP, Python and Django, Ruby and Rails, templating systems like HAML and Sass and the NoSQL movement. Each has lessons (the Microsoft term is “learnings”, which I refuse to use, since I consider it a non-word) that can be incorporated into the Microsoft world, just as I’m sure that we too have lessons to offer to these other worlds. And in the end, we’ll all get better tools and technologies for our work, life and play.

It’s something you should try as well. Try using some tool or technology that you wouldn’t normally use. Hang out with developers from “the other side”. Pick up a copy of Sheep Canada. Broaden your perspective and see what you’ll learn!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s a little hint: if you ever get an invitation to a Microsoft party from High Road Communications – they’re Microsoft Canada’s PR firm – accept it. They’re always in great places, have great tapas and drinks and they always invite interesting people. You’re guaranteed to have fun, and that guarantee is doubled if I’m there.

The W’s “Extreme Wow” Suite

On Thursday, right after the end of Day 2 of TechDays Montreal, my fellow developer evangelist Christian Beauclair and I made our way from Centre Mont-Royal (the TechDays Montreal venue) to the W Hotel. That’s where we were holding a little party to which we invited a number of local open source developers, some of who were at the previous night’s Career Demo Camp Montreal.

Montreal’s W hotel is a building that has undergone a radical personality change. It used to be the Banque du Canada building, the home of one of our federal government’s most stuffy, buttoned-down organizations. W hotels tend to be the exact opposite: everything about them suggests that they were designed by people who usually design nightclubs, what with DJ booths in their lobbies, electronica and funk music piped into every nook and cranny, dimly-lit hallways with lighting straight out of Blade Runner and other little touches that make it seem as if you’ve somehow managed to get into one of those secret clubs in New York City’s Meat Packing District. Simply put, it’s a pretty good place to hold a swanky cocktail party,

Christian and I followed the directions to the “Extreme Wow” suite that High Road had booked for the party. Here’s what we saw when we entered the room:

The suite was located on the top floor of the W. It was one large room with a 20 foot-high ceiling and an equally high set of windows revealing a balcony looking out onto Square Victoria and a good chunk of Montreal’s skyline. I had a sense of deja vu and soon realized that the place reminded me a little bit of Tony Prince’s swanky condo in the videogame The Ballad of Gay Tony, minus the mobsters to whom Tony owed money and wanted him dead.

Near the back of the suite was the bathroom, which in the spirit of open source, was itself open concept and had nothing to hide. Rather than being tucked into a separate room, the shower, tub and sinks were poised on a split level four or five steps above the rest of the room, with the shower stall being a glass-and-brick enclosure in the middle of it all, looking like the monolith from 2001. The tub was recessed into the floor beside it and covered with a sheet of plywood for the party, either in order to prevent people from falling into it or to prevent me from attempting to start a party hot tub:

(Thankfully, the toilet had its own separate “water closet” room, just off to the side.)

The room had been rearranged to better suite a party than overnight guests. The bed had been removed and replaced with a hybrid couch/chaise lounge:

Just about everything in the room could be commanded via the master remote control, which Christian found. It controlled lights, the TV, sound system and even the curtains and skylight blinds (which could be opened and closed via remote-controlled servos):

Here’s a view of Square Victoria from the balcony:

Christian also found a table centrepiece that reminded him of an M.C. Escher image that I had used in my slide presentation at Career Demo Camp Montreal:

For reference, here’s that M.C. Escher piece:

Having checked out the place and taken my first set of photos, I did what I always do in such a setting: I got got a drink from the bar and made myself comfortable.

The Presentations

It wasn’t just cocktails and conversations at the party. We had some presentations as well, starting with Nik Garkusha, part of Microsoft Canada’s Open Source Strategy team. He talked about how Microsoft views open source, as well as the work we’re doing in order to make Microsoft and open source work better together.

I split his presentation into two videos. Here’s the first…

…and here’s the second:

Brendan “Digibomb” Sera-Shriar, developer with Optimal Payments, WordPress evangelist, founder of PHP Toronto and WordCamp Toronto and organizer of WordCamp Montreal, talked about his experience working with The Empire: “They’re actually doing open source!”, his use of Windows and the Windows Platform Installer and how open source and Windows can work together:

Yann Larrivee, developer, founder of PHP Quebec, FooLab and the upcoming ConFoo conference, spoke next. He talked about how he enjoyed Make Web Not War 2009, the importance of “playing well with others” both inside and outside the world of open source and how Microsoft is participating in ConFoo:

Marc Laporte, developer of TikiWiki, and among other things, talked about PHP running under IIS. It’s in French, and if anyone would like to give me a hand translating, I would appreciate it greatly!

The Party

As nice as the photos of the suite above are, the place looks far better when it’s filled with guests:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

On Wednesday, a mere hour or so after the end of Day 1 of TechDays Montreal, came Career Demo Camp Montreal, a community event that combined presentations on job-hunting and career-building with demos of projects by Montreal-area developers.

What’s With All These “Demo” and “Camp” Events and Techdays?

For this year’s edition of TechDays, we decided to try something new. TechDays is a two-day cross-Canada conference taking place in seven cities – Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg – and all the conference events take place during the day. There are no events scheduled for after 5 p.m., which means that on the evening of Day 1, the venues are ours – and unused. Since they’re already set up for presentations and it costs relatively nothing to hire an A/V tech for a few extra hours, we decided to make our venues open to local developer community events. We even lent a hand in helping put the events together.

This year, we opened our space to four such community events:

• Demo Ignite Camp in Vancouver with the help of Boris Mann
• FailCamp Toronto 3 in Toronto with the help of Justin Kozuch (Refresh Events) and Meghann Millard (Unspace)
• Career Demo Camp Montreal with the help of Jean-Luc SansCartier (iWeb) and Yann Larrivee (PHPQuebec/Confoo)
• …and next week’s Demo Night in Canada in Ottawa with the help of Colin Melia (Ottawa .NET Community) and Scott Lake (Startup Ottawa)

The Career Portion

People started milling in at around 6:00 p.m.:

The evening began with Alex Kovalenko, Director of Operations at the tech recruiting company Kovasys. His presentation was all about what smart job hunters do, how to write a good tech resume, and the elements of a successful tech interview.

Alex was joined by a couple of his coworkers at Kovasys for the Q&A session, which included the question “What kind of salary can a PHP developer command in Montreal and Toronto? If I recall correctly, their answer what that in Montreal, they’ve seen a range of CDN$55k for starters to CDN $90k for leads. Salaries are 15% higher in Toronto, but with that comes a commensurate increase in the cost of living.

Next came my presentation, Better Living Through Blogging, in which I talked about how having a blog has improved my life in a number of way, not the least of which was to help land me the last four of my jobs.

Blogs, I argued, were probably the most effective way for you to have control of your online identity and therefore to put your best foot forward to potential employers and customers. Among that stats and opinions I cited in the presentation were:

• 77% of recruiters surveyed by ExecuNet said that they use search engines to check out job candidates.
• According to CareerBuilder.com, 1 in 4 hiring managers say that they use search engines to research potential employees.
• SearchEngineWatch.com reports that there may have been up to 50 million proper-name searches in 2006.
• Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies at Sun: “If someone came looking for a senior-level job and had left no mark on the Internet, I’d see that as a big negative.”

That was followed by a quick presentation by my coworker at Microsoft, Open Source Strategy guy Arun Kirupananthan, who used Dragon Ball Z as a metaphor for Microsoft (as Vegeta) and Open Source (as Goku) and how they can work together and talked about the Make Web Not War conference, which will take place in Montreal in May 2010.

The Demo Portion

The first demo was by Brendan “DigiBomb” Sera-Shriar, who presented WPTouch.

“With a single click,” he said, “WPTouch transforms your Wordpress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with Ajax-based article loading and effects when viewed from an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android or Blackberry.”

Next up: Patrick Lafontaine, MySQL developer and DBA:

His presentation was on how to back up your MySQL databases effectively and for free-as-in-beer.

(I have to give Christian Beauclair kudos for volunteering to be his mic stand. It’s not easy holding a mic in a single position for ten minutes!)

Then came Sylvain Carle of Praized:

Sylvain talked about the Praized API, which lets you harness their “white label” local search platform fro finding people and services in your local community.

After Sylvain came Marc Laporte demoing TikiWiki, a Full-featured open source multilingual all-in-one wiki with content management and groupware features, written in PHP. It’s our plan to make TikiWiki one of the apps included in Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer:

Bruno of DokDok did the next demo. DokDok is a way to share, track and version files of any size, and it’s done using an interface that everyone understands: email.

Then came Marc-André Cournoyer and Gary Haran of Talker. I liked the Ruby pseudocode that they displayed on the big screen:

Talker is a group chat application that is particularly good for collaborative work. I may have to give it a try soon.

Testatoo – I think it’s a pun on “tests à tout”, or “tests for everything” – was the next presentation, which was given by David Avenante.

Here’s a closer look at Testatoo in action:

The final demo was Pierre-Luc Beaudoin’s L’Agenda du Libre du Quebec:

L’Agenda du Libre is an online calendar of Free Software events in Quebec and was implemented in Django in under 30 hours:

The Aftermath

This was the first DemoCamp-style event where the presentations were some presentations were done in English while others were done in French. I felt like a Family Guy character listening to Stewie Griffin during the French presentations: I got the general gist, but missed out on the subtleties. Guess I’m going to have to work on my French!

With the demos done, all that was left to do was to award an XBox 360 Arcade to the presentation that the audience liked most, based on their applause. Marc-Andre and Gary of Talker won, and in a very generous move, decided to donate it to the Salvation Army so that some kids who’d otherwise never get the chance would get a video game console this Christmas. Nicely done, gentlemen!

No DemoCamp-style event is complete without a trip to the pub afterwards, so about 35 of us moseyed down to the 3 Brasseurs on Avenue McGill College and St-Catherine, where Microsoft bought the first round of pitchers.

A few brave souls, Arun and I kept the party going at Benelux where we continued to chat and drink until 2 in the morning, after which I had to scurry back to the hotel in order to get some shut-eye for Day 2 of TechDays Montreal.

I’d like to thank the following people for Career Demo Camp Montreal a success:

• All the presenters, for putting in the time and giving great presentations. It’s not possible without you!
• Jean-Luc San Cartier and Yann Larrivee for helping us put it together on the Montreal community end.
• Christian Beauclair for his invaluable assistance with the A/V setup.
• Matthew the TelAV A/V guy for his work and for staying late.
• TechDays head honcho Damir Bersinic for giving me the latitude to use TechDays’ space for community events.
• Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy team of Nik Garkusha and Arun Kirupananthan for helping to put this thing together on the Microsoft end.

(By the way, if you’ve got an open source project and are wondering what Microsoft can do for you, you’d do well to get in touch with Nik and Arun, shown below!)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I bought a fuzzy “Cat in the Hat”-style raver hat with a Canadian flag pattern on a whim earlier this year, thinking that I’d probably find a pretty good use for it some day. That day, it turns out, was yesterday, where I turned it into what I believe was yesterday’s only Steve Ballmer photo-op with a non-management Microsoft Canada employee:

Photo by Barnaby Jeans.

Yesterday was a busy day at the Harbour Castle Convention Centre, where we had an all-day Steve Ballmer-rama. In the morning, Steve keynoted an event showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010 for the media, key customers and partners. This was followed by an employees-only “town hall” where Steve did a short presentation followed by a Q&A session. On a whim similar to the one that led me to buy it, I took the hat (along with the accordion) along with me.

Following a suggestion from my co-worker Damir, I arrived very early for the town hall, grabbed a seat by the stage and donned the hat. When Steve made his appearance, he did so in classic Ballmer style, running and whooping, high-fiving people as he made his way to the stage. As soon as he saw me, he yelled “Hey!”, put the hat on and posed with me for the photo above.

I’d made a decent splash at Microsoft in my first year, and I’d been wondering if I could match it in my second, which began on Monday. This isn’t a bad start.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

I knew that I might be a little too busy to write an anniversary blog post with my work schedule this week. That’s why I wrote that article last month to mark having worked at Microsoft for 11 months. My schedule was a little less hectic then. Go and read the article if you like – everything that I wrote then still applies today, with the notable exception of a month’s time having passed.

Having said that, I still like celebrating milestones, so I thought I’d mark this day with a quick photo-collage featuring Yours Truly on the job:

As I wrote earlier: “It’s been great so far. I’m going to stick around for a little while.”

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

TechRadar UK is publishing a series of “Windows 7 Week” articles, some of which take a look back at the history of Windows. One of the articles presents a timeline of Windows packaging, from version 1.0 to 7:

…and another is a chronology of Windows’ boot screens:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays Toronto Wraps Up

TechDays Toronto took place last Tuesday and Wednesday, and it was a success! Over 1200 people registered to attend, and based on the attendee comments I’ve received, both face-to-face and online, people found their experience there both valuable and enjoyable.

As much as we hope the attendees learn at TechDays, we learn a lot at TechDays too. By holding events where you get to meet us face-to-face and talk to us, we learn about what you need to boost your knowledge, skills and career. If you have any questions, comments, concerns or suggestions about TechDays, please let us know! Leave a note in the comments or feel free to drop me a line.

When Halifax got added to the cities in TechDays Canada’s cross-country conference tour, there was some concern about how many people would register. It’s the first time we’ve held a conference of this scale and scope in the Maritimes, but it turns out that we needn’t have worried: as of Thursday, every available seat for TechDays Halifax’s venue has been sold.

Thanks for being so enthusiastic, Halifax techies, and we look forward to putting on a worthy event!

TechDays Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg Coming Up

The early bird pricing – that’s $299 Canadian – is still available for the other TechDays Canada cities:

• Calgary (November 17-18)
• Montreal (December 2-3)
• Ottawa (December 9-10)
• Winnipeg (December 15-16)

With over forty intermediate- to expert-level sessions covering Windows 7, SharePoint, ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server, Expression Blend, Windows Server 2008 R2, WCF, Visual Studio, Hyper-V, System Center, Silverlight and more, TechDays Canada is your chance to learn about how to make the most of the Microsoft tools and technologies that are available right now. Register today!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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

The Room

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

Here’s the room as seen from the back:

And here’s the speaker’s-eye view:

Day 1, Session 1

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

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

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

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

A Vending Machine We Can’t Refuse

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

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What is WebsiteSpark?

If you run or work at a small web design or development firm, WebsiteSpark might be for you! WebsiteSpark is Microsoft’s new global program who goal is to help small web companies succeed.

What Do You Get When You Join WebsiteSpark?

What do you get with WebsiteSpark? I put together a little graphic that explains it pretty quickly:

• Visibility: By being showcased in the WebsiteSpark marketplace as well as through opportunities creating through The Empire’s marketing and business networking programs.
• Support: You’ll get hooked up with an entire ecosystem of Microsoft support, network and hosting partners, and web developers and designers so you have a wide range of technical and business resources.
• Tools: Full-on access to full versions of current Microsoft web tools and technologies, such as the goodies listed below:

What You Get	What It Is
	Silverlight For building rich internet applications that can do multimedia, access data from the web and can also be run on the desktop.
	Expression A suite of tools for building websites, user interfaces for Silverlight and desktop applications, making web and application graphics, encoding video and building prototype applications in a hurry. You get: - 1 user licence for Expression Studio - Up to 2 user licences for Expression Web
	SQL Server Web Edition  Microsoft’s database platform for data needs of all sizes, from the simplest web form to full-on enterprise applications. You get a 4-processor licence of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition.
	Windows Server 2008 (and 2008 R2 when it becomes available) A server that’s both powerful and easy to maintain, featuring the IIS 7 web server and the Web Platform Installer, which makes it easy to install and upgrade popular web applications. You get a 4-processor licence of Windows Server 2008 (and for 2008 R2 when it comes out).
	Visual Studio Professional The IDE (integrated development environment) that has it all. You get up to 3 user licences of Visual Studio Pro.

Are You Eligible to Join WebsiteSpark? Answer These 2 Questions.

If you can answer “yes” to the two questions below, you are!

1. Is your company a professional service firm whose primary business is providing Web development and design services for its clients?
2. Does your company have 10 or fewer people, including owners and employees?

Once you join WebsiteSpark, there’s a simple obligation: in order to continue participating in WebsiteSpark, you must deploy a new public, internet-accessible website developed using the tools and tech given to you by WebsiteSpark within 6 months of joining.

You can stay in WebsiteSpark for up to 3 years. On the first and second anniversary of your initial enrollment, you must update it – that is, confirm your company hasn’t gone public or its ownership hasn’t changed.

I Don’t Have a Fee-For-Service Web Shop, I Have a Startup. Can I Get in on This?

No, but we have a program for you – it’s called BizSpark.

I’m a Student and Have Limited Money, and It’s for Books and Beer. Can I Get in on This?

Dude, we have something just for you! It’s called DreamSpark.

How Do You Find Out More?

The details about the program are at the WebsiteSpark site. Check it out, and if it’s right for you, sign up!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

While Kris Krug was taking photos of me for TechDays, his assistant Danielle was holding up a light reflector and remarking that I seemed to really love my job. I hadn’t yet told her that I really loved my job; I was just doing my thing, running my track of the conference, chatting up the attendees and missing most of the lunch break to play accordion and pose for a photo shoot. I’d been up since before sunrise on the morning of the first day of the first of seven conferences where I’m acting as track lead for the first time and she knew it – it’s hard to fake enthusiasm under those circumstances. I was “on” because I love my job.

As I write this — September 20th — it’s been exactly eleven months since my first day as a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. I suppose I could have waited another month for the traditional anniversary to talk about my time with The Empire, and were I a little less enthusiastic about my job, I probably would have done just that. But I can’t wait, so why bother?

It hasn’t even been a year since I got laid off from my last job: that anniversary doesn’t happen until September 24th – this Thursday. The insult-added-to-injury of getting laid off on my own wedding anniversary (they didn’t know, but the layoff was still worse for it) makes the event a little more memorable. It also gave me the choice of viewing the days to follow as a trial or an adventure. You already know which one I chose.

Thanks to the help and referrals of a lot of a readers of both The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and Global Nerdy, I had a job interview or job-search-related meeting on nearly every day of the three weeks between my getting laid off and my signing the offer letter from Microsoft. These meetings were all quite different: I had a great interview with a great small company, an interview with a company that I thought would be great but turned out to be scatterbrained, and even an interview with a company I expected to be a Mickey Mouse outfit but turned out to have surprising depth. I also had interviews with Microsoft: six of them, in fact.

I have to admit that I had some concerns about joining The Empire. After all, for the previous 6 years, I’d been using Python and PHP, and then working my way into becoming a Rubyist. I used open source tools to write software and either Mac OS X or Ubuntu in my day to day work. I was deep in the culture and the scene of the “I work on a Mac and deploy onto Linux” crowd. Could I work for Microsoft? And could I work in an office park out in the burbs?

(The last time I interviewed for a job in an office park in the burbs, this happened.)

You already know the answer, but you might not know the reasoning behind the answer. “It’s the money!” is everyone’s first guess, and it’s a good one – just not the right one. Yes, a company like Microsoft would be able to give its workers decent salaries. It certainly played a factor in my decision, but a couple of the other potential jobs were offering roughly the same number of ducats. However, if money were the primary factor in my career choices, I’d have gone for one of the programming jobs at a bank or insurance company that were available to me right out of school instead of starting at $12.50 an hour at a CD-ROM company run by art school grads. But I suspect that you wouldn’t be reading this blog – probably because I’d be neck deep in a mid-life crisis.

For starters, the job isn’t out in the burbs. In fact, I haven’t worked in a situation as flexible as this one since I was a self-employed consultant. The field people in Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) team are classified as mobile workers and most work out of their home offices, with occasional visits to the office for meetings. I split my time between the home office, cafes (where I’m surprisingly productive), the Hacklab (a “hackerspace” in Kensington Market to which I have 24/7 access) and the Microsoft office out in the burbs, where I show up to gain access to the most important network: not the corporate one, but face-to-face contact with my non-remote coworkers in various departments.

Another perk of the job: considerably more control over my own destiny than one might expect. A Microsoft evangelist’s role is pretty broadly defined, specifying the what of what we do. The how part is defined in our commitments, a document where each of us writes how we’ll fulfill our role, on both an individual and team level and then gets agreed upon with our managers. I happen to report to John Oxley, an exceptionally understanding manager, so when I threw away the suggested “hows”, wrote my own from scratch and set a couple of rather ambitious goals, he approved them.

I wouldn’t have joined Microsoft had I not seen the signs of some course corrections, the cumulative effect of which I like to refer to as “The Sea Change”. There are lots of factors, including an increasing willingness to “play well with others” – embracing standards, an emphasis on interoperability, participation in community events, the hires of unlikely people including my friend David Crow, and a lot of good tech, ranging from great developer tools to platforms like Silverlight and XNA, to the then-upcoming technologies like “Red Dog” (which became Azure) and ASP.NET MVC (still in beta back then) to the fact that they were starting to look at what an open source approach could do for them. Yes, the company still is a bit hung up on desktop computing and its old  approaches – it’s hard to walk away from the goose the laid the golden egg for two decades – but there are signs that change is afoot.

Finally, there’s the challenge. Evangelizing at Microsoft means reaching out to a larger body of developers and techies than I ever could anywhere else, working with a platform than spans embedded systems to high-performance machines to data centers spread throughout the world – and doing so for a company facing the challenges of its size, its competitors and its own past.

To put it a little more simply: Any fool can evangelize Apple or Google. It takes a rock star, ninja and Jedi master all rolled into one to be an evangelist for Microsoft. It’s not that there’s nothing from Microsoft to evangelize – it’s just that there are lot of factors that make the job something that not just anyone can do.

I view my job as so much more than winning techies’ hearts and minds on behalf of The Empire. It’s about making big changes: changing the company, the culture of high tech, the field of software development and yes, the world. It’s a bold, audacious, chutzpah-riffic set of goals and it won’t be easy – but the most rewarding work rarely is.

So here I am, eleven months later. The work has been exciting, rewarding and challenging. I believe I’d started to make my mark on the company and hopefully someday, the industry. Every day, I get the opportunity to do the things I love to do: write code, talk to people and come up with new ideas, often in the surroundings of my choosing. I feel like equal parts Don Draper and Don Box!

It’s been great so far. I’m going stick around for a little while.

I can’t close this article without a few thank-yous:

• To my manager John Oxley, for hiring me, trusting that I would temper my wacky ideas with solid judgement, giving me the freedom to operate in the way that lets me work my magic and for making sure the higher-ups were aware of my work.
• To David Crow, for being one of the guys to recommend to DPE that they hire me as soon as he heard I’d been laid off.
• To my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe, for mentoring me through my freshman year at Microsoft and for being the other guy to recommend to DPE that they hire me.
• To my former VP Mark Relph, for his support.
• To the rest of my team, who are too numerous to name, but whom I hold in the highest esteem.
• To the other groups within The Empire with whom I work: CSI/Interoperability, Windows Phone, Open Source and our event organizers Maritz – I hope to keep on working with you folks!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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

The Early Bird Price is Going Away Soon

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

The TechDays Formula

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

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

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

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

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

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

All This for $299

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

While I do hope and believe that Microsoft can get their mobile strategy right, there are days when I worry that Windows Mobile 7 is going to be like this:

Windows 7 Released to Manufacturing

It’s been announced on the Windows Blog: Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing!

Brandon LeBlanc explained that “RTM” happens only after it’s been signed off. One of the release candidate builds becomes a contender for release to manufacturing after it goes through significant testing and passes all the validation tests for RTM including having all languages for that build completed. Build 7600 crossed all those hurdles and got signed off today.

The beta and release candidate period for “Seven” was quite unusual. Rather than hand it out to a closed group of beta testers, it was made available for download and I was given piles and piles of DVD-ROMs to hand out like candy. And strangely enough, people were asking for it. At the EnergizeIT installfests this spring, we played to packed rooms of people who took time out of their Saturday mornings and schlepped to Mississauga to install the beta. Even people with Macs, who ran it under Boot Camp or Parallels. It’s unusual for an operating system in beta – especially one from The Empire – to be in such demand.

I’ve been using the beta since January and the release candidate for the past few weeks as my primary operating systems with nary a hitch, glitch or blue screen. I’m looking forward to getting the final version of Windows 7, which will be the first of many new goodies coming from The Empire over the coming months,

If you’re a developer with an MSDN subscription or an IT pro with a TechNet subscription, you’ll be able to download the English Windows 7 RTM on August 6th, with other language versions on October 1st. Windows 7 will go on sale to the general public on October 22nd.

Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 was also released to manufacturing today. As they state in the Windows Server Division Weblog, the simultaneous release is no coincidence but a design goal. “R2”, as I prefer to call it, boasts a lot of features such as Hyper-V, Live Migration, File Classification Infrastructure, an improved Active Directory, Pervasive PowerShell, IIS 7.5, server scalability, DirectAccess, BranchCache and improved Remote Desktop.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re a developer looking for a job – or if you already have a job and are looking for a better one – you’ll want to check out Microsoft’s new Thrive for Developers, which describes itself as a one-stop community hub for advancing your career, enhancing your skills and connecting with your community. Having stuff like this has always been important, but it’s even more so in the middle of what I like to refer to as “The Econopocalypse”.

Some of the features on Thrive for Developers are:

• Driving Your Career: A 32-week screencast series that takes a look at some skills that developers need to thrive in the current climate. The fact that they’re called “soft skills” suggest that many people don’t think much of them, but if you’ve seen my own personal example (laid off by a startup last September, invited to a dozen interview, hired by Microsoft three weeks later) or read books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, you know that soft skills are valuable and anything but “soft”. Screencast Brian Prince will cover things like quick learning techniques, building consensus and the oft-difficult task of communicating with those pesky carbon-based lifeforms.
• Connecting with Your Community: There’s a whole section that makes it easy to meet with other developers in your area or across North America, whether you want to find a job, join a user group, attend a developer gathering or catch a “nerd dinner”.
• Developing in a Downturn: A lively 10-week podcast with stories, insights and real-world lessons from developers in all sorts of work environments – from small companies to multinationals – who share their top recession survival strategies.
• Enhance Your Skills: Interactive lab sessions and resources covering both web development and Windows client application development.

Whether you’re looking to get into the game or stay on top of yours, Thrive for Developers is a great resource worth checking out.

(Click the image to get the story.)

I’m happy to see that the anonymous blogger at Mini-Microsoft is seeing the same “sea change” that I was betting on when I first joined not quite nine months ago. I agonized over the decision all through the interview process (six interviews over the period of a week), pored over articles, books and reports about the company and had phone, email and IM conversations with every Microsoftie I knew, all in an attempt to “read the tea leaves” and see if the company was sailing towards the future or stagnating in the Doldrums. While I saw some serious challenges (including a few that could induce serious facepalms), I saw opportunities to match. And with that, I signed my offer letter back in October, bought my red travel-sized accordion that same afternoon and declared myself a Sith Lord.

The painful-but-necessary process of correcting the company’s course is nowhere near done, but signs like the ones mentioned in the article are not only good news; they’re necessary. It’s like seeing that first drop in the numbers on the scale when starting a diet: while there’s still still a long way to go, it shows that you’re actually heading in the right direction, which encourages you to keep going. Just as vanishing love handles and better-fitting clothes the good signs that a dieter watches for, things like Windows 7, Bing, Silverlight and moves towards interoperability and open source are the good signs that I’ve been watching for. But yes, while we’re turning the corner, we have to watch out, ‘cause Steve Jobs might be waiting ‘round the bend, shovel in hand.

As with many companies and organizations, we’re at the start of a new fiscal year at Microsoft. Like the calendar new year, there was some looking back (as in my annual review, where it was concluded I rocked in my Rookie Year), but there was also looking forward, in the form of setting goals, on personal, team and company-wide levels. My big goal this year to contribute to that “sea change” that both the Mini-Microsoft blogger and I see, and in the process change the Microsoft, the tech world – and hey, why not the whole world? – for the better.

Don’t forget that Silverlight on the Silver Screen, ObjectSharp’s free seminar on Silverlight 3, Expression and SketchFlow takes place in Toronto this Thursday at the Scotiabank Theatre. If you’d like to learn more about the rich-UI applications that you can build with Silverlight 3 and Expression and how quickly you can design and prototype user interfaces and interactions using SketchFlow, you’re going to want to catch this event. For more details about this event, see my earlier article on Silverlight on the Silver Screen and the Silverlight on the Silver Screen official site.