.NET

Manning Deal of the Day: “Natural User Interfaces in .NET” MEAP and Paper Book for $25

by Joey deVilla on May 16, 2011

Cover of "Natural User Interfaces in .NET"It’s a work in progress, but it’s an important one: Manning Publications’ Natural User Interfaces in .NET, written by Joshua Blake. It’s a primer on creating natiral user interfaces — NUIs — using Microsoft technologies such as WPF 4, Surface 2 and Kinect.

Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s description:

Natural User Interfaces in .NET is a hands-on guide that prepares you to create natural user interfaces (NUI) and great multi-touch experiences using the WPF and Silverlight multi-touch APIs. This book starts by introducing natural user interface (NUI) design concepts that everyone needs to know. It then quickly moves to the WPF Touch API and Surface Toolkit guiding the reader through a multitouch NUI application from concept to completion. Along the way, you’ll see where these concepts can be extended to Silverlight via its touch interface.

Today only — that’s May 16, 2011 — you can get the MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) preview PDFs, which are updated regularly and the final print edition of the book for a mere USD$25.00 (that’s $24.23 Canadian)! Just enter dotd0516 in the promotional code box when you check out at Manning’s site.

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Maritime DevCon: June 18th in Moncton

by Joey deVilla on June 3, 2010

martime dev con

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

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

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

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Scenes from Toronto Code Camp 2010

by Joey deVilla on May 2, 2010

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

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

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

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

01 barry gervin keynote

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

02 mark arteaga windows phone 7

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

03 colin bowern jquery

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

04 colin bowern audience

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

05 colin bowern

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

06 colin melia silverlight

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

07 nickolas landry silverlight

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

08 chris dufour

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

09 web not war 1

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

10 web not war 2

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

11 bruce johnson odata

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

12 ryan lunches

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

13 lunches

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

15 todd anglin html5 1

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

16 todd anglin html5 2

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

17 todd anglin html5 3

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

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

18 todd anglin html5 4

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

The future of the Web is HTML5.

19 todd anglin html5 5

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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TWC9: MIX10, Tweets from Your TiVO, Touch UI Gesture Icons and More

by Joey deVilla on March 1, 2010

Get Microsoft Silverlight
Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
MP4, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune format.

imageThis Week on Channel 9, or TWC9 for short, is a weekly digest show hosted by Microsoft’s Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller covering the developer community news they find most interesting after sifting through hundreds of blogs, videos and announcements. It’s aimed primarily at .NET developers, but if you have any geeky tendencies at all, chances are they’ll cover something that appeals to you!

In this week’s episode, they cover the following topics, summarized in the handy-dandy table below:

Topic What it is or why it’s interesting
Mike Swanson’s MIX10 Recap MIX10 is going to be big this year, especially with Windows Phone 7.

Coding4Fun: Tweevo, a free, open source application to have your TiVo tweet what you’re recording

It’s nice to know what your TiVo is doing while you’re at work.
LINQ to SQL Profiler It lets you see the SQL being generated by your LINQ queries.

Silverlight 4’s TCP Sockets Video It’s part of Mike Taulty’s 8-part series on networking with Silverlight.

S. Somasegar’s Key Software Development Trends
(I covered it in this article)		 It’s interesting to see what Microsoft’s brain trust sees as important, and it’s also good to see testing treated as a first-class citizen.

Gesturecons, a set of free icons to describe touch gestures For touch interactions, a picture is worth a thousand words.

System.Uri For URIs, you really should be using System.Uri instead of strings.

Code Project: How to Automate Software Using WPF UI Automation An underused but incredibly handy feature that lets you automate testing an application’s UI.

Mercurial Integration with Visual Studio A step-by-step guide to using CodePlex’s Mercurial integration inside Visual Studio.

How to Use Selenium and NUnit Together Selenium’s a good, free option for web app testing.

60 .NET Libraries Every Developer Should Know What, you’d rather not know?

Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit Dude! Augmented reality!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Visual Studio 2010/.NET Framework 4.0 Beta 2 and Final

by Joey deVilla on October 19, 2009

Microsoft Visual Studio new banner

The Beta: Available Now!

The newest beta, Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 is out! MSDN subscribers can download it right away, while everyone else can get their hands on it on Wednesday, October 21st (and don’t worry, I’ll remind you if you on Wednesday if you have to wait until then).

This new beta features a number of performance improvements and is your last chance to evaluate a pre-release version before we unleash the final version, so download it, take it out for a spin and give us your feedback!

Beta 2 also features the “Go Live” provision for developers who like living on the edge. What this means is that you’re licensed to download the beta and use it to build production software. If you do so, please drop me a line and let me know!

The Final: Available March 22, 2010!

The final version of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 will be available on March 22, 2010. Among the many new features in the final version is the fact that choosing which Visual Studio is right for you will be so much simpler. Instead of the confusing array of Visual Studio versions (I’ve joked about there being so many version that I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a “Visual Studio Tartar Control” or “Visual Studio for LOLcats”), the line has been pared down to three levels: Professional, Premium and Ultimate: 

3 levels of Visual Studio: Professional (with picture of burger), Premium (with picture of burger and fries) and Ultimate (with picture of burger, fries and shake)

Visual Studio can be bought bundled with an MSDN subscription. I recommend getting the subscription , as it gives you first crack at a lot of tools, access to E-Learning and the Special Offers portal for discounts from Microsoft partners, and – most importantly, as far as I’m concerned – a lot of compute time on the Azure cloud platform.

There’s a goodie called the “Ultimate Offer” that’s available for a limited time: buy or renew your MSDN subscription now, and you’ll get the next-level-up version of Visual Studio when we hit the final release date. For example, if you get an MSDN subscription and you have a version of Visual Studio 2008 eligible for upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Professional, you’ll get Visual Studio 2010 Premium in March (and if you’re eligible for upgrade to Premium, you’ll get Ultimate).

What’s in .NET 4?

A lot. To borrow a line from Scott Hanselman, this isn’t “.NET 3.6”, and it’s not just a bunch of features piled onto the current .NET 3.5. This is a .NET that’s been revised based on your feedback. To quote Hanselman again, it’s about “making the Legos the right size”, “about tightening screws as it is about adding new features.”

Some of the goodies in .NET 4, once again courtesy of Hanselman, include:

  • Quicker to Install – A smaller Client Profile with a much smaller initial download (down to 0.8 megs from 2.8) for bootstrapping .NET client apps faster than ever)
  • Side by Side – .NET 4 is a side-by-side release that doesn’t auto-promote, meaning you won’t break existing apps and you can have .NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4 apps on the same machine, happily.
    • Side-by-side CLR support for managed add-ins inside of apps like Explorer or Outlook. Again, new and existing apps in the same process, chillin’.
    • For more details on Application Compatibilty, check out the AppCompat Walkthrough for .NET 4 on MSDN.
  • Dynamic Language Support – The DLR (Dynamic language runtime) ships built-in with .NET 4 so you can mix-and-match your solutions and pick the best language (or languages) amongst C# and VB.NET as well as F#, IronPython and IronRuby. This includes better support for COM (yes, COM! People do use COM and it’s even easier with the new dynamic keyword in C# these days.)
  • More Web Standards Support – Better support for WS-* and REST making interop easier.
  • Plugins Galore – Visual Studio 2010 uses MEF and WPF to enable a whole new world of clean managed extensions as well as an Online Gallery (there’s an extension for that!)
  • Multi-Framework Multi-targeting - You can’t really overestimate how useful this is, but a picture is worth a thousand words. You can code all your apps in all your organization’s frameworks with the same IDE:
    Drop-down menu showing the .NET Frameworks that Visual Studio 2010 can target

    New Look, New Feel for MSDN

    And finally, both Visual Studio and MSDN got a new look. Here’s the new look for MSDN Canada:

    Screenshot of the "new look" MSDN Canada
    The changes are more than skin-deep. MSDN was redesigned to make it easier for you to find what you need, whether it’s tools, downloads, resources, documentation or people. The MSDN library will also get much faster at loading and easier to read, because the “lightweight” look is going to be the standard look:

    Screen shot of the "new look" MSDN Library

    Keep an eye on this blog – I’m going to start covering development with Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming weeks!

    This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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    Who’s Got .NET Framework 3.5?

    by Joey deVilla on October 13, 2009

    Alexander McCabe wanted to know the adoption rates of the various .NET runtimes, from .NET 1.0 up to the current .NET 3.5. He took the data from the logs for the website for his quiz-building software, Question Writer, augmented it by including figures published in Joel Spolsky’s Business of Software forum in March 2008, and turned it into the chart below (click on it to see it at full size):

    Chart showing .NET Runtime Versions Used by Visitors to the Question Writer Site, March 2008 and May 2009 - October 2009

    According to the chart, usage of .NET 3.5 among visitors to the Question Writer site has been growing in leaps and bounds since the spring, from just under 22% in May of this year to the current 52%.

    Naturally, this data comes with all sorts of caveats:

    • The October 2009 data is based on the first 12 days of October.
    • Only Internet Explorer reliably reports .NET version information in the user-agent string.
    • McCabe has a couple of contradictory explanations:
      • IE users may be more likely to have .NET installed because they use Microsoft software.
      • IE users may be less likely to have .NET installed because they may be less likely to install software and therefore might be less likely to have .NET installed.
    • Question Writer uses the .NET runtime and its site’s visitors may have .NET installed.
    • There were a few users using .NET 4.0; McCabe counted them as .NET 3.5 users.

    I should try the same exercise using the logs for Global Nerdy, which has a rather mixed audience of open source, Mac and Microsoft types. I wonder how different the results would be.

    This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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    TechDays: Anthony Vranic on Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience

    by Joey deVilla on September 29, 2009

    Anthony Vranic doing his presentation at TechDays

    My photos from Anthony Vranic’s session at TechDays, Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience, are a bit dark because I used a different camera; my main camera was on video recording duty. I’m including them anyway, because I’m trying to keep a complete record of TechDays.

    Anthony Vranic doing his presentation at TechDays

    The original version of this presentation from TechEd North America is somewhat different – its target audience was C++ developers, and TechDays is more of a managed code audience. Since the original TechEd presentation, Microsoft released the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework, and Anthony added it to his presentation.

    The Windows API Code Pack for .NET gives managed code access to a lot of features, including some new ones introduced in Windows 7, such as:

    • Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars
    • Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers
    • Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects
    • Explorer Browser Control
    • Shell property system
    • Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls
    • Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs
    • Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs — (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
    • Sensor Platform APIs
    • Extended Linguistic Services APIs
    • Power Management APIs
    • Application Restart and Recovery APIs
    • Network List Manager APIs
    • Command Link control and System defined Shell icons
    • Shell Search API support
    • Drag and Drop functionality for Shell objects
    • Support for Direct3D and Direct2D interoperability
    • Support for Typography and Font enumeration DirectWrite APIs

    Anthony Vranic doing his presentation at TechDays

    Watch this blog – I’ll posting some example code for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET in the coming weeks!

    This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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    Windows API Code Pack for .NET Framework Released

    by Joey deVilla on August 12, 2009

    Windows 7 logo and Microsoft .NET logoUntil now, taking advantage of the UI improvements in Windows 7 (and even some features in Vista) took a fair bit of work – there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t available through the .NET Framework. You’d have to either switch to C++ or resort to hacks in order to access these goodies.

    That’s all changed with the newly-released Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework. Written in C# – with some DirectX stuff written in C++ – this library acts as a wrapper that gives managed code access to features including:

    • Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars.
    • Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers.
    • Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects.
    • Explorer Browser Control.
    • Shell property system.
    • Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls.
    • Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs.
    • Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs. (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
    • Sensor Platform APIs
    • Extended Linguistic Services APIs
    • Power Management APIs
    • Application Restart and Recovery APIs
    • Network List Manager APIs
    • Command Link control and System defined Shell icons
    • Shell search API support
    • Drag and drop functionality for Shell objects
    • Support for Direct2D/Direct3D interoperability
    • Support for typography and font enumeration DirectWrite APIs

    The system requirements are:

    We’ll cover the Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework over the next little while in a couple of places – certainly on this blog, as well as at the TechDays 2009 cross-Canada conference in the Optimizing Your Apps for the Windows 7 Experience session.

    Down arrow

    Download Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework (v1.0)

     

    This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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    Edmonton Code Camp 2009: September 26th!

    by Joey deVilla on June 23, 2009

    Edmonton skyline, with North Saskatchewan River in foreground.

    Edmonton is holding a Code Camp on September 26th, 2009! It’s going to take place at Grant MacEwan College’s downtown campus. There’s a call for speakers – if you’ve got a topic that you’d like to present, now’s the time to let them know. You can find out more at the Edmonton Code Camp site and the YEGCodeCamp Twitter account.

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    “Make Web Not War” in Toronto This Wednesday!

    by Joey deVilla on June 8, 2009

    Make Web Not War: Toronto - Wednesday, June 10th

    About Make Web Not War

    If you’re interested in web design and development, you should attend Wednesday’s Make Web Not War conference. It’s being presented by Microsoft Canada and is about the how open source tools like PHP and Microsoft technologies like IIS and SQL Server 2008 can be used together to make great web sites and applications. No matter how much (or how little) Microsoft technology you use in your web development, there’s a lot to see at Make Web Not War!

    Who’s Speaking?

    We’ve got a number of speakers, each talking about some different aspect of the interoperability between Microsoft and open source technologies, as well as their experiences and lessons learned working in the web industry:

    David Crow

    David Crow, Microsoft

    David Crow is an emerging technology and start-up advocate. At Microsoft Canada, he is responsible for helping Canadian start-ups through programs like BizSpark (details at microsoft.com/bizspark). David helps companies understand emerging technology and design practices for creating compelling digital experiences. David focuses on helping companies to extend their customers’ reach with next generation technology for the desktop, digital devices, standards based applications for the Web, and rich media applications. He has been named Toronto’s Best Web and Tech Evangelist for his efforts in DemoCamp, BarCampToronto, Founders & Funders and StartupEmpire.

    Mano Kulasingam

    Mano Kulasingam, Digiflare

    Mano Kulasingam is a founding partner and principal interactive designer /developer with Digiflare, focusing on presentation layer technologies like Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation and SharePoint 2007. He also has several years of experience developing B2B and B2C eCommerce and Content Management Web applications using ASP.NET (2.0 and 3.5) and Visual C#. His design skills include working with the latest professional design tools including Microsoft Expression Studio 2, which has earned him a Microsoft Expression MVP nod. He is a co-founder and host of the Toronto Silverlight User Group.

    Brendan Sera-Shriar

    Brendan Sera-Shriar, PHUG.ca

    Brendan is a prominent member of FlashinTO, PHUG – Open Source Culture, has taught web design at Long Island University Brooklyn campus, and has been a professor at Seneca College in the School of Communication Arts for over 7 years. Brendan currently owns and operates BackSpaceStudios, a web company specializing in WordPress development, social media applications. He is also the founder of PHUG, an open source community for designers and developers with currently over 4000 members, faculty at Seneca College, and organizer for WordCamp Toronto 2009. Brendan has contributed to many open source projects including papervision3D, red5, Firefox, WordPress, and Drupal, just to name a few.

    Stephen Nichols

    Stephen Nichols, Softcom

    Under the brand myhosting.com we offer Shared and Virtual Web Hosting as well as Exchange 2007 and WSS hosting to customers around the world.

    Stephen is Vice President of Sales at Softcom, a Gold certified Microsoft Partner based in Toronto and specializing in transactional hosting with a focus on the SMB market. His key role is to oversee the customer life cycle experience and drive new sales opportunities through the direct, affiliate and partner channels.

    Yann Larivee

    Yann Larivee, PHP Quebec

    Yann Larrivée has been developing web applications for over 7 years and is currently offering PHP consulting services. In the past he has worked in many position from, project manager for a Linux consulting company to web architect for a well know company in the gaming industry. He also founded the PHP Quebec community in 2003 and organizes an international PHP conferences and an IT JobFair.

    Get Windows Server 2008 R2 for Free!

    Windows Server 2008 R2 logo

    Windows Server 2008 R2 is a great server operating system, and this is your chance to take it out for a spin! Bring a machine to the Make Web Not War Installfest – it could be a server, desktop or even a laptop – and we’ll walk you through the process of installing your own free copy (which is good for a year). Space is limited – we’ve only got room for 100 people, so sign up soon!

    See the Utltimate FTW! Throwdown

    The Ultimate FTW! Throwdown was a challenge pitting student developers against professionals to develop a new PHP-on-Windows app or port an existing PHP-on-LAMP app to run on Windows Server with IIS. There were even bonus points for apps that made use of SQL Server as their database!

    We took in a bunch of submissions, and the judges have narrowed it down to two finalists, one student, one professional:

    Dac Chartrand In the professional corner is Dac Chartrand, whose submission is Sux0r, a content-management system incorporating blogging, RSS aggregation, bookmark repository and photo publishing, all with a focus on naive Bayesian categorization and probabilistic content. The extra Bayesian/probabilistic goodies allow Sux0r to auto-categorize its content and users to train it to categorize better.

    Casron Lam His student opponent, Carson Lam, submitted Transit DB, which aims to transform the way commuters interact with public transit information system. The application is Carson’s answer to the question “How can we provide a modern, clean and user-friendly interface for transit data in cities?” The current version covers public transit for the Metro Vancouver region.

    Dac and Carson will be competing for bragging rights and cold hard cash – may the best project win!

    (For more details about the Ultimate FTW! Throwdown, see its page on PHPonWindows.ca.)

    Interact

    Telav audience device

    We don’t want to do all the talking at Make Web Not War, we also want to hear from you!

    That’s why, when you arrive at the event, one of the first things we’ll do is hand you an AVW-TELAV audience response doohickey. It’s a microphone for the Q&A sessions at the end of each presentation, but it’s also an instant audience polling device for quick surveys that we’ll have throughout the day.

    Chill Out

    All work and no play makes you a dull and burned-out web designer or developer, which is why we’ve also got a lounge where you can just hang out, meet the speakers, ask me questions about Microsoft’s web tools and tech and play XBox games.

    Win prizes

    We’ve got all sorts of prizes that you can win throughout the day, from software to books to trainign courses to Zune media players to XBox games to a brand new laptop.

    Get Fed

    Yup, we’re providing breakfast and lunch. You can’t conference on an empty stomach!

    Okay, How Much to Attend?

    Around this much:

    Canadian $10 bill

    Instead of charging a standard admission, we’re charging a “Donate what you can” rate, with all proceeds going to PREVNet.ca, an anti-bullying group. The suggested donation is a mere $10.

    When and Where?

    Once again, Make Web Not War takes place this Wednesday, June 10th and runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m..  It’s happening in Toronto at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management (55 Dundas Street West – that’s Dundas between Bay and Yonge, right by the Best Buy and Canadian Tire). There’s parking aplenty in the area, and it’s right by Dundas Station on the Yonge/University/Spadina subway line.

    Map picture

     

    How Do I Register?

    Visit the Make Web Not War registration page and fill out your details, and we’ll see you there on Wednesday!

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    The “Make Web Not War” Accordion Video

    by Joey deVilla on June 3, 2009

    This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

    The Make Web Not War event in Toronto takes place in exactly one week! We’ve been spreading the word about the event and I thought I’d do my part by helping out with a video, accordion-style:


    MAKE WEB NOT WAR – VIDEO FOUR – TORONTO from The Biz Media on Vimeo.

    There’s only one mistake in the video – “accordion” is misspelled. If you’d like the follow me on Twitter, the correct ID is AccordionGuy, not AccordianGuy.

    For more details about Make Web Not War, see:

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    The “FTW!” Ultimate PHP App Throwdown

    by Joey deVilla on April 19, 2009

    For the Win! For the Web! FTW: Ultimate App Throwdown -- Professionals vs. Students

    This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

    Wait a Minute…Microsoft and PHP?

    You probably wouldn’t be surprised that Microsoft is holding a development contest that pits professional developers against student developers. You might be surprised that Microsoft is holding a development contest where the challenge is to build a PHP application.

    You read that right: PHP. Microsoft’s web server, IIS (Internet Information Services) can run PHP as well as ASP.NET; in fact, it can even run both on the same site at the same time, so you can have apps like WordPress along with your ASP.NET-based apps.

    Think of ASP.NET and PHP running on the same server as the great jam session with Spock and the space hippie from that old Star Trek “hippies in space” episode.

    Spock and a space hippie, jamming on their instrumentsSee? We’re not Herbert!

    Even more unexpected is that the beta for the 2.0 version of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer doesn’t do a “couple-of-clicks” installation of the expected stuff like IIS and SQL Server 2008 Express, it also provides a “couple-of-clicks” installation of PHP and WordPress.

    The FTW! Throwdown

    "Goopymart" comic of a dog holding a trophy: "FTW!"

    That’s “FTW!” as in “For the Win” or “For the Web”, by the way.

    The contest is pretty simple: the idea is to show the best application written in PHP and deployed on Windows. The app can be either:

    • A new application developed by you in PHP and running on IIS in Windows
    • An existing application or framework written in PHP and ported by you to run on IIS in Windows

    That’s right: if you’re pressed for ideas or time to make a new application, it’s all right – you can take a PHP application that already exists, make the necessary changes so that it’ll run on IIS (and hey, for bonus points, make it tie into SQL Server instead of MySQL), and submit that as your contest entry!

    Students vs. Professionals

    Another twist to the FTW! Throwdown is that we’re getting student developers and professional developers to challenge each other. The pros have experience and resources on their side; students have youthful energy and fewer distractions going for them. Not since “Pirates vs. Ninjas” has there been a challenge like this!

    One application developed or ported by students and one application developed or ported by professionals will be chosen from the submissions for the Ultimate Challenge, which will be a final bout at Microsoft’s Make Web, Not War conference. In that last match, it “Two apps enter! One app leaves!”. Simply put, one of the apps – either the student one or the professional one – will be declared the Ultimate Champion.

    As they said in Highlander: “There can be…only one!”

    The Booty

    Stuffed animal prizes at a carnival

    We want to reward the best contestants for their efforts in the FTW! Throwdown, and we plan to do so with some pretty nice prizes, which include:

    • The grand prize: $5000 for the winning entrant.
    • The runner-up prize: $3000 for the runner-up.
    • The SQL Server prize: $3000 for the finalist whose app showcases the best use of PHP with a Microsoft SQL Server database.
    • The PHP/.NET Mash-Up prize: $2000 for the finalist whose app showcases the best of PHP with .NET-based code working together in a single application.
    • The student finalist prize: The student developer who makes it to the last match will also get an interview and resume critique from Microsoft and a $200 Petro-Canada gas card.
    • The professional finalist prize: The professional developer who makes it to the last match will also get a chance for a published case study, enrollment in the MAPS or EMPOWER program and a $200 Petro-Canada gas card.

    Hosting Options

    Naturally, the apps that you submit for the FTW! Throwdown need a place to live. If you don’t already have IIS hosting, our partners at myhosting and RackForce are offering a 60-day free hosting promotion.

    Deadlines and Details

    The deadline for entering the FTW! Throwdown is Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009. Finalists will be announced on Friday, June 5th, 2009, and the main event where the student finalist faces off against the professional finalist happens on Wednesday June 10th, 2009.

    If you’d like to know more about the FTW! Throwdown, visit the FTW! Throwdown site. I’ll be posting regular bulletins about the FTW! Throwdown on this blog, and you can follow the FTW! team on Twitter as the user @PHPOnWindows and the hashtag #FTW09.

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    Colin Bowern at the Metro Toronto .NET User Group: Authentication Alternatives for ASP.NET

    by Joey deVilla on April 12, 2009

    This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

    Slide: Passwords are like pants (with picture of boxer shorts): You shouldn't leave them out where people can see them, you should change them regularly and you shouldn't loan them out to strangers!Click the photo to see it at full size.
    (And yes, he’s using the word “pants” in the British English sense, as in “underpants”.)

    On Thursday evening, I caught Colin Bowern’s presentation, Authentication Alternatives for ASP.NET at the monthly gathering of the Metro Toronto .NET User Group. Here’s the abstract:

    Asking someone to create another username and password is presents risk. Most people use the same password across sites, or worse yet they write it down! The good news is there are smart people thinking about how to solve this problem and for web developers there are easy ways to take advantage of their hard work. In this session we will take a look at the credential management from a user perspective. We will dig into the efforts made in Active Directory, Windows Live ID, OpenID, OAuth, and Facebook Connect and how you can take advantage of them in your application.

    He covered Windows Live ID, OpenID and OAuth. Not only did he show the theory, but he also presented some reasonably easy-to-follow code and showed it in action. Colin’s got a good presentation style; perhaps he picked up a thing or two at the speaker’s workshop we had a week ago as part of EnergizeIT!

    Here’s the “Call to Action” slide from his presentation:

    Colin Bowern's "Call to Action" slide

    …which says:

      1. Stop requiring users to create more identities
      2. Leverage OpenID for authentication – see the DotNetOpenID project at Google Code
      3. Investigate OAuth for delegated resource access
      4. For apps targeting corporate scenarios, read up on the Geneva product set – see items on Channel 9 tagged “identity”

    Afterwards, I joined Colin, Metro Toronto .NET User Group President Graham Marko and a few others for some post-presentation Guinness at the nearby pub The Spotted Dick and told them I’d catch them at the Toronto Code Camp in a couple of weeks.

    Next Presentation: Yours Truly on ASP.NET MVC

    Metro Toronto .Net user Group logo I was invited to present at the Metro Toronto .NET User Group meeting. Graham said I could present on any topic I wanted, so I asked if anyone had done one on ASP.NET MVC yet. No one had, so I figured I’d cover it. I’ve been looking into it casually for the past little bit and I’ll be diving into it over the next month, with my experience using another MVC web framework, Ruby on Rails, as my guide. I promise I’ll be informative and entertaining! You might want to come even if you’re not a .NET developer.

    The next meeting will take place on Thursday, May 28th from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at the North Tower of the Manulife Financial Offices (200 Bloor Street East, on the north side, between Church and Jarvis). Yes, the meetings take place around dinner, but they provide some pizza and pop, and there’s always an opportunity for post-session nachos at the nearby pub.

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    Toronto Code Camp: Saturday, April 25th

    by Joey deVilla on April 10, 2009

    Toronto Code Camp logoWhether you’re an old hand at developing for Microsoft’s platforms or completely new to The Ways of The Empire, you’ll find the upcoming Toronto Code Camp to be a great way to get some deep information on .NET development as well as a way to meet some of the most active and engaged members of the local Microsoft developer community. It takes place at the Manulife Building (200 Bloor Street East, on the north side between Church and Jarvis) and runs from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and registration is free.

    Toronto Code Camp will have 5 tracks in its agenda:

    1. ASP.NET: Covering Active Server Pages technology, which includes Virtual Earth and the new ASP.NET MVC framework, which gives you the goodness of frameworks like Rails and Django and the speed and libraries of .NET. The ASP.NET MVC: Beyond the Basics presentation by Richard Obuhowich is definitely on my own “must-see” list.
    2. Data / Architecture: SQL Server, plus ADO.NET, LINQ and the Microsoft Sync Framework.
    3. .NET Framework: This is a really broad topic, and this year, the sessions will be on building installers with WiX, building extensions to Office and Visual Studio, building SharePoint apps, and a fast introduction to Windows Mobile development by Mark Arteaga that I intend to catch.
    4. Silverlight / WPF: The track for people who want to build rich multimedia interfaces for the web (Silverlight) and Windows (WPF, short for Windows Presentation Foundation). I’m thinking of seeing Robert Burke’s Silverlight from 2 to 3 – or, Silverlight Beyond MIX09 presentation, which is supposed to be PowerPoint-free!
    5. Future / Other: A catch-all track for topics about upcoming developer tools and tech, as well as things that don’t quite fit in the other tracks. There are presentations on the F# programming language (an OCaml-like .NET language), the Azure cloud computing platform, upcoming goodies like the .NET 4.0 framework and VB10 plus a session titled 2D XNA Game Programming for Fun and Profit by Josef Rogosky.

    For more details about all the sessions and when they’ll take place, see the Toronto Code Camp agenda.

    I’m going to be there, attending as both a developer looking to learn as well as a Sith Lord representing the Empire. I’m going to take notes, snap photos and perhaps even shoot a little video; I’m also going to see what I can do about bringing some swag to give away.

    The registrations are coming in fast and furious, so if you want to come, make sure you register now!

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    Tired: DateTime. Wired: DateTimeOffset!

    by Joey deVilla on April 3, 2009

    You’d think that with 10,000 years of date- and time-keeping under our belts, it would be easy to keep track of dates and times in a modern-day database. It’s a little trickier than you might think, according to The Death of DateTime?, an article in Bart Duncan’s SQL Weblog.

    The gist of the article is pretty simple: if you’re using SQL Server 2008 and want to store dates and times unambiguously, use the datetimeoffset type (introduced in SQL Server 2008) rather than the traditional datetime.

    Why? Because datetimeoffset is datetime with these key differences:

    • The time value is stored internally in an unambiguous UTC format
    • The local time zone offset is stored along with the UTC time
    • It is capable of storing more precise times than datetime

    DesktopDuncan recommends that if you’re storing data in SQL Server 2008, you should almost always store date-and-time values in datetimeoffset rather than datetime. It’s a good idea; I’d go even farther and suggest that if you’re programming using .NET 3.5, you should make use of the corresponding DateTimeOffset type instead of DateTime. You can read more about .NET 3.5’s DateTimeOffset type in this entry in Dan Rigsby’s blog titled DateTime vs. DateTimeOffset in .NET.

    When might you want to use datetime? Duncan suggests that you should use it in those rare cases when you want to store time ambiguously. The example he provides is: “if you wanted a column to record the fact that all stores in a chain should open at 8:00am local time (whatever the local time zone may be), you should use datetime.”

    Thanks to Brent Ozar for the link!

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