It’s hard to believe, but the seven-city cross-Canada tour known as TechDays 2009 is over. We had the last one – TechDays Winnipeg – on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week. Here are some photos I shot during the event.

The Day Before TechDays Winnipeg

Of all the TechDays venues, I would have to hand the “swankiest speaker prep room” award to the Winnipeg Convention Centre, with its wood panelling, private washrooms, loads of closet space, plentiful tables, very comfortable leatherette couches and all-round 1980s styling. I can imagine a young Flock of Seagulls or Duran Duran hanging out here after a show, entertaining groupies:

During the holidays, many people like to decorate their storefront and home windows with fake spray-on frost. In Winnipeg, where the temperatures were hovering around –35 degrees C (-31 degrees F), you don’t need that stuff – they’ve got the real thing! Here are the side doors on the ground floor of the Winnipeg Convention Centre:

Here’s a closer look:

And just for kicks, an even closer one.

I must tip my hat to the people of Winnipeg for toughing out those kinds of temperatures, year after year.

The Convention Centre had a secret stash of Christmas trees, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice:

One of the perks of being a TechDays Track Lead is that nobody asks questions when you rearrange the signs for an art shot:

Day 1

John Bristowe, track lead for the green-shirted Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices track, just had another baby, so he was tied up with Dad duties (congrats, John and Fiona!). I donned a green shirt took over as acting track lead for his track and recruited D’Arcy Lussier to host my track, the orange-shirted Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track.

The first speaker for Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices was Jeremy Wiebe, who presented the very popular Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio session:

How popular was it? Popular enough that people were overflowing out of the rows:

…and we even had to drag in some extra chairs to create a new row at the back:

This was an attentive crowd. There were a lot of “I didn’t know you could do that in Visual Studio!”-type reactions.

The second session of the day was given by Dylan Smith: Test-Driven Development Techniques:

Once again, a good crowd.

During lunch, my coworker, IT pro evangelist Rick Claus and I did a presentation on some of the new features in Office 2010, with me showing off some of the new graphics goodness in PowerPoint 2010:

The sessions resumed in the afternoon with Uwe Schmitz talking about Patterns for the Rest of Us. I was a bit surprised at how few hands went up when I asked how many people had read or even attempted to read Design Patterns by the “Gang of Four”.

Most of Uwe’s audience was in the same room as he was:

But one guy, whose back was made sore by the conference room chairs, took a clever approach. We broadcast all sessions’ projections and audio on a monitor outside every room, so he took one of the comfy chairs in the hallway outside and set himself up for some living room-style viewing:

I told him that with his sunglasses and the way he was seated, he reminded me of the old ads for Maxell tapes from the 1980s:

After Uwe was Dave Harris, who presented A Strategic Comparison of Data Access Technologies from Microsoft:

Day 2

The outside temperature improved for the second day: it became a relatively balmy –20 degrees C (-4 degrees F). What a difference 15 degrees makes!

The first session was Practical Web Testing and was delivered by the team of Tyler Doerksen and Robert Regnier:

I stepped out to drop in on the track which I had put together, my orange-shirted Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track. While the Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices track typically had big draws on Day 1, Day 2 is when the Platform track brought in the crowds:

The session was the popular Introducing ASP.NET MVC, and in Winnipeg, it was delivered by Kelly Cassidy:

An unfortunate set of circumstances speaker shortages and cancellations means that Rick had to deliver all the presentations for day 2 of his track, Servers, Security and Management. That’s 300 minutes in total behind the lectern. It’s quite fortunate that he knows his stuff and that his theatre training makes him an excellent presenter:

Meanwhile, back at the green track, Aaron Kowall presented Better Software Change and Configuration Management Using TFS:

During his session, he presented a very important truth: Build automation is not just merely pressing “F5”:

At lunch, Rick hosted a demo showdown between me (representing developers) and my coworker, IT Pro Evangelist Rodney Buike, trying to determine who could do the better Windows 7 demos. I won, thanks in part to my demo of the most obscure Windows features: the Private Character Editor.

Joel Semeniuk needs no introduction. I simply told the audience that “Joel has forgotten more about Team System than I will ever learn. Besides, what I know about Team System can be summarized in the two words ‘jack’ and ‘poop’.” Here’s Joel in action, presenting Metrics That Matter: Using Team System for Process Improvement:

I love this shot of Joel – he looks like a general addressing his own private banana republic:

A closer look:

The most popular afternoon snack was served between the third and fourth sessions of Day 2: Canada’s favourite snack – donuts!

My SD card corrupted the photos of the last speaker of the day, Steve Porter, who did a fine job presenting his session, Database Change Management with Team System. My apologies, Steve!

And finally, to make up for the fact that I did not properly capture D’Arcy Lussier’s hair — an asset in which he takes great pride — in yesterday’s video interview, I now present a close-up shot of his coiff:

My thanks to everyone at TechDays Winnipeg – attendees, speakers, staff and organizers – for making it an great way to close out the tour!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

At long last, we come to the last city in TechDays’ seven-city conference tour: Winnipeg! The combination of venue availability and perhaps a little masochism puts me and my coworkers in a city notorious for brutal winters in mid-December. Take a look at the weather forecast for the days I will be there:

(If you’re American, the high for Monday translates to –9 degrees F; the low is –26 degrees F. There’s a reason the city has the nickname “Winterpeg”.)

Fortunately, we were given our official TechDays-branded winter jackets at the Ottawa conference last week, and when they’re worn with the fleece lining, they’re incredibly warm. In fact, I found myself boiling in my jacket in Ottawa’s just-below-freezing temperatures when I wore it with the lining, which means that it should keep me toasty in Winnipeg’s deep freeze. Still, I’m glad that the walking route from the hotel to the conference venue can be done mostly indoors, with the notable exception of one street crossing.

In spite of the temperatures, I’m looking forward to the trip to Winnipeg later today. See you there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The TechDays conferences that we’ve been holding across Canada span two days and have no evening events. This means that the venues are “lying fallow”, with plenty of A/V, presentation and demo equipment doing nothing on the evening of the first day. That seemed like a waste.

“Why not,” we thought, “open up our venues to community events on the evenings of Day 1?”

We were able to do this in four out of the seven TechDays cities this year:

• We had Demo Ignite Camp in Vancouver in September
• followed by Failcamp Toronto 3 in Toronto, also in September
• and then Career Demo Camp in Montreal a couple of weeks ago
• and just this past week, we had Demo Night in Canada in Ottawa.

We put together each event with local people in order to make sure that each one had its own “local flavour” and fit the needs of the local audience. For Ottawa, we decided to approach two very different groups: the Ottawa IT Community, which comprises a number of .NET user groups, and Startup Ottawa, who are the Ottawa analogue of DemoCamp Toronto.

The event had two hosts: Glenn Schmelzle, from Startup Ottawa:

and Colin Melia, representing Ottawa IT Community:

The first presentation of the evening was This is My Language by Charles Wiebe and John Hansen, who showed us their programming language, Jetfire, which is built on top of the .NET Dynamic Language Runtime:

Next up were Scott Lake:

…and Craig Fitzpatrick:

…who presented Swix, their social media marketing metrics system. It looks both useful and beautiful (its UI shows the sort of rich interfaces you can build with jQuery), and Christian Beauclair and I both agreed that we could make us of it in our developer evangelism work.

After the Swix presentation came Islam Gomaa, who took us into the land of enterprise IT by talking about implementing ISO 27001 security:

The event went smoothly thanks to Christian, who once again provided invaluable assistance by helping the presenters get their machines hooked up to our A/V setup quickly:

Scott Annan talked about Techdrifters, a system for road warriors, cafe coders and people who work in coworking spaces to find an interact with each other. I must admit that it’s a topic close to my heart:

Jean-Rene Roy did the final presentation, a look at Microsoft’s Sync Framework – nope, not the car audio system, but the file synchronization system that bears the same name:

With the presentations wrapped up, we made our way to the Clock Tower brew pub on Clarence Street, where we enjoyed good conversation and a few drinks, including a round bought on my corporate card.

I’d like to thank Colin Melia, Scott Lake and Glenn Schmelzle for providing all the local help in getting Demo Night in Canada together, the presenters and the attendees who made it out to the event, in spite of all the snow. Let’s do this again soon!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Annoyances Beyond Our Control

No matter how much planning you put into a conference, there will always be things that you just have to roll with. For starters, when you’ve got an event in December in Canada, there’s always a chance that the first major snowstorm of the year will happen on the very same day.

Here’s what the parking lot of the Hampton Inn Conference Centre looked like at 7:00 a.m. on Wednesday, Day 1 of TechDays Ottawa:

Here’s a look at Coventry Road, on which the Conference Centre is located. Even at 7:00 a.m., it’s already pretty busy, thanks to the combination of snow and “In too early, out too early” working style of government towns. The building in the background is the RCMP headquarters:

In addition to the snowstorm, there was another little problem that fell outside of our contingency planning. I’ll let the video below explain:

Someone in the crew of workers in the garage accidentally knocked out a sprinkler valve, setting off the fire alarms. The staff did the right thing by leading an orderly evacuation of the centre…and into the snowstorm. Luckily, we found out that there was no fire very quickly and the evacuees didn’t have to stand outside for longer than a couple of minutes.

With the annoyances out of the way, it was time for Day 1 to start in earnest.

Day 1

The first speaker in the track for which I am lead, Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, was Colin Melia, who did the What’s New in Silverlight 3 session:

He spoke to a packed room and an attentive crowd:

With the first sessions safely under way, Damir and I made a quick run to get some cables, a replacement keyboard and some much-needed Starbucks. I decided to shoot some video during our run:

Next up was Peter Henry, whose session was Expression Blend for Developers:

The lunch session featured Rick Claus (in the hat, on the right) acting as referee between Pierre Roman (representing IT pros in the Montreal Canadiens jersey) and Christian Beauclair (representing developers in the Ottawa Senators jersey) having a showdown to see who can do the better Windows 7 demos. Christian, as the representative of developers, won handily:

According to the feedback forms, the lunchtime demo showdown was a popular event:

The afternoon sessions featured Daniel Crenna (shown in the photo below) on Building Composite Applications with WPF and Silverlight, followed by Colin Melia talking about Optimizing Your Applications for the Windows 7 User Experience:

The day closed with a set of bonus sessions. Rodney Buike and I did one on IIS/PHP interoperability. Rodney’s been promising revenge on me since I farted during our session in Calgary, nearly messing up his concentration and forcing him to stifle his laughter.

I’m still getting static about that incident. I swear, you “cut the cheese” once on stage, and you’re branded for life…

Day 2

I’m pleased to see that ASP.NET MVC has turned out to be a very popular topic at this conference. The demand for the MVC sessions is such that we’ve been switching to a larger room for them:

The first session, Introducing ASP.NET MVC, was given by Maxime Rouiller, who once again wowed everyone with his snazzy Alienware laptop (which I featured in an earlier blog entry):

Daniel Crenna’s session covered the SOLID principles as applied to ASP.NET MVC:

“Dependency injection”: you’d better get used to that phrase:

Here are Christian and Rick, preparing to do some announcements over lunch:

I really enjoyed Mario Cardinal’s rendition of the Building RESTful Applications with WCF:

My original plan was to just catch the first ten minutes of his presentation, but I got drawn into it. Just another ten minutes, I thought to myself, and in that ten minutes, he and I did a little back-and-forth about open source and Microsoft approaches to protocols, after which I thought Okay, maybe another ten minutes. Christian, with whom I was supposed to catch up and take care of some stuff, ended up phoning me to remind me that I couldn’t stay for all of Mario’s session.

The final session was Francis Beaudet’s, which was on Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any good shots from that session.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Ottawa was the sixth of the seven cities in the TechDays cross-Canada tour. We’ve settled into a pretty good groove and the setup process for the conference has become second nature; I’m sure that we can all do it in our sleep now.

The Hampton Inn Conference Centre is a pretty nice venue, with lots of balconies for overhead shots like this one:

Here’s one of the larger rooms, which met with Christian Beauclair’s approval:

This is one of the smaller lecture halls, featuring a more classroom-like setting, as seen from the lectern. You can see:

• The presentation machine, a laptop with a large screen on which the PowerPoint presentations are run. The large screen makes it easy to read any speaker notes.
• The “confidence monitor”, which shows the speaker what’s being displayed on the big screen. That way, you know what the audience sees without having to break eye contact with them.
• The countdown timer, which displays the time remaining for the presentation, along with three lights: “Go on”, “Wrap up” and “Enough already”.

Here’s the dining hall, where breakfast and lunch are served. In the far corner, you can see the Windows 7 lounge:

Here are IT Pro Evangelists Rick Claus and Rodney Buike, along with speaker Steve Syfuhs, getting ready to set up the internet access stations:

…and here are the fruits of their labour. It’s our dream to be able to provide wifi access to attendees, but with conference venues typically asking for hundreds of dollars per wifi user per day, it’s prohibitively expensive. We’d rather keep the cost of admission to TechDays low – a mere $299 for early-bird registrants – which is why we decided to provide internet access at the conference this way:

Here are Christian and Rick setting up the Windows 7 Lounge. In case it was unclear, they’ve taken steps to let you know that they indeed are geeks:

Every TechDays attendee gets a “lunchbox” full of swag, literature and promo material. Here’s the stack of lunchboxes behind the registration desk:

One of the ways we show our appreciation for the TechDays speakers is by taking them out to a nice dinner. In Ottawa, the speaker dinner was at In Fusion Bistro in Glebe, where the food and service were fantastic. I had the squash and maple soup to start, the rack of lamb for dinner and the chocolate-and-berry empanada for dessert – it was one of my favourite meals of the tour. Thanks to Rick for choosing this restaurant!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re a techie in the Ottawa area and want to meet fellow techies and see what projects they’re working on and what tech they’re using, you’ll want to check out Demo Night in Canada, which takes place this Wednesday night at 7:00 at the Hampton Inn Conference Centre (200 Coventry Road). It’ll be an evening of demos and presentations by Ottawa-area developers, organized by Ottawa IT Community and Startup Ottawa.

It’s also a chance to get your geek party on! After the demos, we’re heading down to the Market to have a little celebration.

Come to Demo Night in Canada! It’s free to attend – all you have to do is register.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Last week, I was in Montreal, this week I’m in Ottawa. Once again, I’ll be road-tripping with my coworker, Damir Bersinic, IT Pro Evangelist and supreme field commander for the TechDays Canada cross-country conference. Watch this space for reports from both Ottawa and the road!

If you’re on the Toronto-Ottawa route and would like to join us for a coffee, let us know, either via email or in the comments!

Day 2 of Techdays Montreal began with the A/V techs (and yes, me) ooh-ing and ahh-ing at presenter Maxime Rouiller’s Alienware laptop, He showed us the utility for controlling its backlighting colours:

Once set up, the Building for the Microsoft-Based Platorm track’s acting host Laurent Duveau introduced Maxime, who then presented Introducing ASP.NET MVC.

Maxime will present the same session in Ottawa, so if you’re there, you too can get a look at that Alienware. Wonder what it would take to get Microsoft to assign me one of those babies.

Continuing the morning’s ASP.NET MVC theme, Simon Laroche took to the lectern:

Simon presented SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications, which used the refactoring of an ASP.NET MVC application to demonstrate the SOLID principles of object-oriented design in action:

Next came lunch, once again held on Centre Mont-Royal’s fourth floor:

Here are Developer Evangelist Christian Beauclair and IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus preparing for the lunchtime presentation:

And here they are doing that presentation, in which they show off some of the new features in Office 2010. I rather the like the goodies in PowerPoint 2010:

In the meantime, some of the attendees hung out in the Windows 7 lounge, trying out the touchscreen machines and playing games – including the indie hit I MAED A GAME WITH Z0MB1ES!!!1 – on the XBox 360:

Mario Cardinal led the first session of the afternoon:

His presentation was on Building RESTful Applications Using WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). Mario knows his stuff, and as a seasoned presenter, had no problem crossing the stage and doing part of his delivery far away from the lectern and any speaker’s notes:

Mario will also present the same session at TechDays Ottawa.

Some of the staff saw me walking around with Rick’s DSLR camera and asked me to take their picture. I was happy to do so – TechDays doesn’t happen without their help:

One nice thing about Centre Mont-Royal is that there’s plenty of “hanging out” space. If you’re not spending at least a little time in these spaces between sessions, getting to know the other techies in your community, you’re not getting all you can out of TechDays:

The final session in my track had Francis Beaudet speaking:

He presented Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint:

Day 2 wrapped up at 4:00 p.m., at which point we quickly dismantled the machines we’d set up on Tuesday and packed them up for shipping to Techdays Ottawa. Some of the team stayed to do the end-of-conference review, which Christian and I had to run to catch the Microsoft open source cocktail party at the W, which I’ll cover in the next blog entry.

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.

With the setup complete, TechDays Montreal was ready to begin, which it did on Wednesday. Like TechDays Halifax, Techdays Montreal sold out weeks before its date. Here’s what the registration line looked like at 7:45 a.m.:

We members of the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) team arrived at 7:00 a.m., but the TelAV A/V guys (I keep saying that their motto should be “To Serve and Project”) had been there at least an hour before, making sure that the displays and sound were working perfectly:

The speakers were asked to show up at 8:00 a.m. in order to be briefed on the day’s proceedings, double-check their demo setups and make sure that they were familiar with the audiovisual equipment.

TechDays Montreal, being the only TechDays held in the province of Quebec, required extra work to support both English and Français. Attendees could request radio headsets which they could use to tune into simultaneous translations of the sessions, which were provided by translators located in booths near the rear of every presentation room:

All the presentation slides were translated into French, and we showed both the English and French slides at each presentation, with the French slides on the left screen and the English slides on the right. Each slide deck ran on its own PowerPoint machine and was advanced using a “clicker” that advanced the slides on both machines simultaneously:

With the exception of my start-of-day introductory mini-session, all the sessions in my track, Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, were done in French. As track lead, I normally play the role of host in my track, but my rather limited command of the French language just wasn’t up to the task. I was very fortunate that one of my presenters, Laurent Duveau (pictured below by the lectern) was able to act as host. He did an excellent job MCing and introducing the speakers.

Laurent was also the first presenter of the day. He did the What’s New in Silverlight 3 session:

The second session of the day was Expression Blend for Developers, which was presented by Louis-Philippe Pinsoneault. The two photos below show Laurent on the left and Louis-Philippe on the right:

Here’s Laurent introducing Louis-Philippe:

Just down the hall, Dan Nerenberg presented at the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010: The Next Generation session:

Dan presented to a packed room:

Then came lunch, which took place in the large room on Centre Mont-Royal’s fourth floor:

The lunch highlight was a demo showdown in which we asked the question “Who can do better Windows 7 demos – developers or IT pros?” Christian Beauclair represented the developers and Pierre Roman represented the IT Pros; both got four chances to do 60-second demos of various features in Windows 7.

Here’s Pierre setting up before the showdown:

The winner was determined by audience applause, and Christian (and thus the developers) won.

In addition to the sessions, attendees could also visit the Windows 7 lounge, and area set up with Windows 7-equipped touchscreen computers and an XBox 360, where they could take Windows 7 and its multitouch features or XBox 360 indie games for a spin:

Day 1 of TechDays included a bonus session at the end of the day. Rodney Buike and I did a presentation in which we talked about PHP on Windows, the Web Platform Installer (WPI) and the Expression Web tools. In another room, Anthony Bartolo and Mark Arteaga, did their presentation on developing for Windows Mobile:

Although TechDays’ Day 1 had ended, it wasn’t the end of the day for some of us – we had Career Demo Camp that evening, which I’ll cover in the next article.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays is no small undertaking: it’s a seven-city two-day conference tour with over 40 sessions featuring content from the TechEd North America 2009 conference and delivered by local and “imported” speakers (we try to get local speakers) to hundreds of developers and IT pros in each city. Montreal was the fifth stop on the tour, and I thought I’d show you some behind-the-scenes stuff that took place on Tuesday, the day before TechDays Montreal took place.

Keep in mind that what you’re seeing here is the setup for the conference’s technical content and only a small portion of what goes on to make TechDays happen. In a later entry, I’ll show you photos of that many other people who make Techdays run smoothly: the event coordinators, A/V team, benue staff, and Windows lounge volunteers.

Tuesday started with a hearty breakfast at Dunn’s, which I enjoyed with my coworkers Rick Claus, Pierre Roman, Christian Beauclair and my road trip buddy Damir Bersinic. 

With hunger satisfied, it was time to make our way to the Centre Mont-Royal to transform the place into TechDays Montreal. Here’s one of the smaller rooms, just after the A/V setup and before the chairs were rolled in:

TechDays Montreal was sold out, so we had to provide overflow seating outside the rooms, just in case. At Techdays, we place a large monitor outside every room with a live feed to the audio and video from the presentation.

Here’s one of the larger theatres. Some of our sessions could easily pack one of these rooms.

It meets with Christian’s approval:

We TechDays organizers aren’t just a bunch of pretty faces: we move our own gear (and remember, we need enough computers and ancillary equipment to support over 40 tech demos!). So it was off to the loading dock to get the demo machines – assuming we survive the cargo elevator ride. Here’s a photo of Pierre learning why dangling clothing and cargo elevators where you have direct exposure to the elevator shaft don’t mix:

“Sixteen years at the company and I still don’t have any roadies! I wonder if Ballmer has to lug his own demo gear….”

“Why’d this thing get so heavy all of a sudden?”

The answer, of course, is Pierre:

Conference wifi is a very expensive proposition, with many venues asking for hundreds of dollars per user. In order to keep the cost of TechDays affordable (early bird registration is under $300, which is a steal). we decided to forgo the conference wifi and provide internet kiosks instead. The kiosks were Dell laptops, which we had to initialize with clean copies of Windows 7 with both French and English settings.

To make setup simpler, we laid out the machines in a row and worked on them in assembly line fashion, each one of us performing a specific task to set up the machine. I was step 1: boot up, delete old virtual hard drive, and copy new virtual hard drive from the appropriate USB key…

to various machines, starting with these ones…

…after which I moved on to these machines…

…and then these machines:

…and of course, there’s the matter of setting up the machines that would be used in the presentations.

I had to duck out of the setup room for a little bit to record the Developer Night in Canada podcast with John Bristowe – we were doing an interview with the folks at Habanero Consulting Group:

Dell is our hardware sponsor, and they provided an assortment of computers, from the netbooks, which were used as secondary PowerPoint machines, to the copper-coloured “Dellasaurus” machines, big honking laptops with serious horsepower for sever demos:

Here’s Pierre doing some setup with Christian shoulder-surfing:

Here’s Rick, who can sometimes kill technology by just looking at it, pleased that his setup works:

And finally, a photo of the last two machines to be set up: the rig for the lunchtime demos:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Ford Flex

Here’s the Ford Flex that we drove to TechDays Montreal, parked in front of my building:

Here’s the interior, as seen from the front passenger-side door:

Here’s the back of the Flex, with Damir applying (non-permanent) Bing and Windows 7 stickers to the windows:

Here’s the magnetic bumper sticker we affixed to the back of the Flex:

Here’s the Sync console:

We have lift-off! Here’s Damir getting us out to the open road:

The open road at last!

Little Boxes

Here’s a video featuring some pre-fab houses being moved on the highway to their final destination. It inspires a quick discussion about how we might want to travel down to the TechEd 2010 conference in New Orleans:

Big Apple Videos

Here I am, marvelling at the Big Apple’s pie selection, while looking for people to show Bing in action (I was using a Rogers stick for internet access, which worked quite well).

I was wearing my Crazy Go Nuts University (a.k.a. Queen’s University) Science ‘91 jacket while in the restaurant, which a guy in the corner noticed. He turned out to be from the class of Science ‘90 and had never heard of Bing. I walked him through a couple of demos and he was impressed — “I need to show this to my IT guys!” he exclaimed.

Here’s another video – it’s got me and Damir enjoying the Big Apple’s pie and how “cutting the cheese” onstage at a tech conference can have serious (ahem) blowback:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Demo Night in Canada

The “DemoCamp”-style event happening in Ottawa next week (which coincides with TechDays Ottawa) has an official name: Demo Night in Canada! It’ll take place in the Hampton Inn Conference Centre (200 Coventry Road, Ottawa ON)  on Wednesday, December 9th at 7:00 p.m..

Demo Night in Canada is a free-as-in-beer event where the bright lights of the Ottawa tech scene can talk about their favourite technologies and tools or about one of their development projects. It’s also an opportunity for techies in the Ottawa area to meet other members of the community, network, make friends and even strike up a collaboration. It’s all up to you!

The presentations at Demo Night in Canada will be:

1. Scott Lake (SWIX and ThinkSM): The first ever public demo of his new social media metrics app.
2. Jean-Rene Roy (Technologies SoftDesign Inc.): Microsoft’s Sync Framework.
3. Scott Annan (Mercury Grove) Techdrifter, a never-before-demo’ed co-worker discovery tool.
4. Charles Wiebe (TrackerRealm) and John Hansen (Jetfire): "This is My Language", which will showcase Dynamic Language Runtime.
5. Ivan Paramonau (Itteco) Itteco Development Platform.
6. Joël Hébert (Opulent ASP Development) The Boo Programming Language.
7. Islam Gommaa: Implementing ISO 27001 .
8. Mark Stephenson and Kareem Sultan: UnRealDecoy Bot Challenge

Registration for Demo Night in Canada is FREE! All you have to do is sign up at the registration page.

Apres-Demo Night Celebration

Geeks! Beer! Whoo!

After Demo Night in Canada wraps up, everyone attending is invited to the Startup Ottawa holiday party, which will happen in a to-be-determined location somewhere in the Byward Market. There’ll be much merriment and perhaps a pint or two tossed back in celebration.

Want to attend Demo Night in Canada? Click here to register – registration is free!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

In this second video of our Ford Flex road trip from Toronto to Montreal, Damir arrives at my place to pick me up:

(In case you missed the first video, you can watch it here.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

In case you didn’t see yesterday’s blog entries, we spent most of yesterday on a little road trip from Toronto to Montreal. We took nine hours making a journey that normally takes about five, but that’s because we made a number of stops along the way, demonstrating Bing to random passers-by and trying out the Sync technology in a Flex that was lent to us by Ford Canada.

Here are links to yesterday’s blog entries in case you missed them:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: The Blogging Rig
• Part 3: The Big Apple
• Part 4: More Big Apple
• Part 5: Avril Lavigne’s Hometown and My Alma Mater

I did a lot of tweeting from the road as well – go check out what I wrote on my @AccordionGuy twitter page.

Upstream bandwidth wasn’t quite so hot on the road, so it wasn’t possible to post videos yesterday. So I’ll be posting yesterday’s video today.

The Hand-Off

Here’s our boss, John Oxley, Director of Audience Marketing, at Microsoft Canada Headquarters in Mississauga (just outside Toronto), handing the keys to the Ford Flex to Damir with much apprehension:

In the video, John says:

It’s Monday morning and our good friends at Ford Canada and Bing have sponsored my team to go out and highlight technology innovation changes and the impact they’ve had – with Ford Flex, location-based software and Bing – across the country.

I’m about to give this brand new Ford Flex to Joey deVilla and Damir Bersinic to go from here to TechDays in Montreal, to do Coffee and Codes, show it along the way to developers, IT pros and anyone who wants to come by and see how technology has changed.

I’m really excited about the possibilities [but] I’m a little hesitant about giving away the keys to a car…especially to Joey and Damir. But you’ve got to trust your team, and I trust the impact they can have.

You’ll tell me three or four days from now whether this was a good decision or whether it was a lesson that I learned.

Was letting us take a brand new car on a road trip a good idea or a bad one? Let us know in the comments, or email the boss-man directly at john.oxley@microsoft.com.

(Please tell him it was a good idea.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Avril Lavigne’s Hometown

While on the road, we sent out a tweet asking anyone who was near the route we were taking to Montreal if they’d like to catch up with us. We got a message back from our friend Todd Lamothe (who’ll be presenting at TechDays Ottawa next week), who works in Avril Lavigne’s hometown, Napanee, so we decided to catch up with him at the nearby Tim Hortons. What Canadian roadtrip doesn’t include a visit to this venerable Canadian institution?

Checking the Twitter action with Seesmic while enjoying a chicken salad sandwich.

We’re taking the Ford Flex back to Toronto using the same route on Friday – Highway 401 westbound from Montreal to Toronto – so if you’re somewhere on the route and would like to join us for coffee, lunch, an accordion performance, whatever – let me know, either via email or the comments, and we’ll make arrangements!

The Sync has been terribly handy on the trip, functioning as phone dialer, GPS, entertainment system and ever-so-handy, rear-bumper-saving rear-view camera:

My Alma Mater

A stone’s throw east of Napanee is Kingston, home to my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University (a.k.a. Queen’s University). After demonstrating Bing to a couple of students at the John Deutsch University Centre – guys from Science ‘12, who were surprised to see a guy in a Science ‘91 jacket – we made our way to Goodwin Hall, the home of the School of Computing.

I couldn’t visit without getting a shot of me beside the entrance to my former home-away-from home:

Note the Clark Hall Pub logo sketched in chalk, just right of me.
I probably spent as much time there as I did at Goodwin Hall.

When I graduated in 1994, the options for departing undergraduates were considerably more limited than they are today. Most of the jobs seemed to centre around banking or insurance. Wanting to do something that was equal parts techie and creative, I opted for something a little more creative and joined Mackerel, a multimedia company that made interactive apps for floppies and CD-ROM instead.

So when I entered Goodwin Hall and saw the poster below, I exclaimed “Why, oh why wasn’t this program available when I went here?”

We were there to make the first steps in getting both Microsoft and Yours Truly back in touch with the Queen’s School of Computing. A quick glance at the staff list turned out to be very surprising: a lot of the professors who taught me were still there!

This was an unplanned spontaneous thing: I made a mental notes of the professors I new and their office numbers and visited each one. It was pretty late in the afternoon and I was lucky to find two.

The first was Dr. Michael Levison, who ran the department in my final year at Crazy Go Nuts University, when I was president of the Departmental Student Council for Computer Science, whose role was to represent the students in meetings with the faculty. Dr. Levison was responsible for a number of important changes in the department’s direction and one of the department’s most trusted advisors. Of the many things I learned from him, I consider the two most important were:

• That technology should work in the service of people, and not vice versa
• The best teachers are great storytellers

Dr. Michael Levison and me.

The other professor was Dr. Robin Dawes, who taught a number of courses that I took – I’m sure a good chunk of what I know about data structures is his doing – and who also dispensed some very good advice to me as both an individual student and as a student representative. Dr. Dawes has always been a favourite with the students thanks to his breezy lecturing style and his penchant for magic tricks, including the show-stopping “flaming wallet trick”.

Dr. Robin Dawes and me.

When I left their offices, I made sure to say “Thank you…for everything.” The lessons I learned from them about technology, its relation to people and the art of teaching technology have served me very well over the past fifteen years. I am forever in their debt.

I’d like to give back to the school that gave me so much (and yes, I send them a cheque every year already). I’d like to drop by next semester and talk to the students about my experiences as a programmer and tech evangelist, make myself available to them as an “industry resource” and reassure them that even a perma-student like myself can make good in the real world. I’d also love to grab a pint or two at good ol’ Clark Hall Pub.

I’m glad we drove to Montreal rather than flew – otherwise, I wouldn’t have had this chance to catch up with my profs!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Some more photos from the Big Apple! Here’s their pie menu:

The Big Apple is an apple-shaped three-storey building with an observation deck on the roof. Here’s a shot of Damir beside the Big Apple:

Here’s a close-up:

Inside the building is an apple museum. We were all rarin’ to go inside and take photos of the various displays inside the museum, but…

Closed! Look at the disappointment on Damir’s face:

I was even more disappointed (look at my sad mug below). “Ain’t that just like an apple,” I said, “tantalizing promises, but you get denied the moment you get close. Now I know how iPhone developers feel.” (Remember, folks – I kid because I care.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

When people in Toronto and area refer to “The Big Apple”, we’re usually not talking about New York, but the Big Apple in Coburg, Ontario. It’s one of the must-visit stops on that stretch of Highway 401 that spans the Toronto-Montreal corridor: roadside rest stop, mini-amusement park, apple pie facvory, apple museum and giant apple-shaped building with a balcony on top giving a commanding view of the cars whizzing by.

There’s no shortage of interesting signs on the grounds:

Apparently, the Big Apple is about 13,000 kilometres from the city of my birth, Manila:

The place is heaven for people who like pie:

They have a mascot, but no one was running around in the giant apple costume today. Damir and I had to settle for the little statue by the counter:

We arrived in the Ford Flex just before a busload of people, which means that we didn’t have to wait for pie:

More scenes from the Big Apple to follow!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s the blogging setup I’m using from within the Ford Flex as we drive to Montreal: my laptop with a Rogers stick and carte blanche to use as much bandwidth as I need to continually post from the road. Damir’s at the wheel, I’ve got my seat moved all the way back, my own set of climate controls and Raw Dog Comedy on the satellite radio. It’s a surprisingly decent work setup; I could get a fair bit done this way.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Damir at the wheel, looking for an opening on the Don Valley Parkway.

I’m blogging and tweeting from the road today! My coworker Damir Bersinic (IT Pro Evangelist) and I have been loaned a Ford Flex equipped with Microsoft’s Sync and I’ve got my laptop hooked up to a Rogers internet stick. The photo above was taken just before noon, when we were on the Don Valley Parkway, right around Richmond Street.

I’ll be posting quite regularly from the road, so watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.