Creative Commons photo by Angela MacIsaac. Click to see the original.

Seven cities down, one to go. This year has been our biggest TechDays tour, spanning the cities of Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Halifax, Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg and this week, Calgary. Among other things, it’s the city that Developer Evangelist John Bristowe calls home.

All of us are looking forward to seeing everyone there, especially Damir!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Most of the DPE team (including boss-man John Oxley) are in Winnipeg this week to run TechDays. In between my responsibilities as the guy in charge of the developer sessions, I’ve been running around snapping photos and thought I’d share some with you. Here are my pics of the presenters in both developer tracks, "Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” and “Optimizing the Development Process”, with some extra shots of the hallways between sessions.

We had Mike Diehl presenting Real-World Patterns for Cloud Computing:

Meanwhile, in the “Local Flavours” track, D’Arcy Lussier talked about Windows Phone 7 development:

And over in the “Three Screens” room, Kelly Cassidy showed his audience how to Jump into Silverlight and Become Immediately Productive.

For the second session of the day, Mark Arteaga shared his Windows Phone 7 knowledge in the first of a two-part series of sessions on Windows Phone.

And in the back were these troublemakers:

Out in the hallway, Rick Claus and Damir Bersinic chatted with Jason Miller:

Over in the “Optimizing” track, we had Aaron Kowall dropping TFS science on his audience:

Rick and I walked the lunch audience through Windows Phone 7’s features:

After lunch, Miguel Carrasco showed people how to Build Web Sites Fast Using Visual Studio 2010:

Should “Tron Guy” ever retire, I nominate David Wesst to take his place:

Here’s Dylan Smith, talking about Branching and Merging Practices:

Dylan was followed by Bruce Johnson, who covered Getting Your Return on Investment with Microsoft .NET Framework 4

David, who was still wearing the PowerGlove, talking about Windows Azure:

Amir Barylko covered the Top Ten Mistakes in Unit Testing:

And at the same time, my coworker John Bristowe presented Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

We Microsoft Canada evangelist types love a good cause, and we can’t think of a better cause than feeding people, especially during the holiday season. That’s why we’ve had food drop-off boxes at all TechDays events, including TechDays Winnipeg, which takes place tomorrow and Wednesday. Bring a non-perishable food item to TechDays, and we’ll collect it and give it to Winnipeg Harvest, the local food bank.

Better still, we’ll sweeten the deal: if you drop food off at our donation box, we’ll give you the much-in-demand “I Have Standards” IE9 t-shirt! Do some good, and get some swag – that’s a pretty nice deal, isn’t it?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Wikimedia Commons photo courtesy of "Wpg Guy". Click to see the original.

This week, the gang and I will be in Winnipeg for TechDays (Tuesday, December 7th and Wednesday December 8th) to bring the knowledge from TechEd North America 2010, MIX10 and PDC and to catch up with our developer, IT Pro and manager friends.

If you’ve been meaning to meet the “field specialists” on Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, TechDays Winnipeg is the perfect time and place to do so, because all the evangelists will be there:

• Christian Beauclair, ISV Breadth Evangelist based in Ottawa
• Damir Bersinic, Platform Evangelist based in Toronto
• John Bristowe, Developer Evangelist based in Calgary
• Rick Claus, IT Pro Evangelist/Destroyer of Worlds based in Ottawa
• Yours Truly (Joey deVilla), Developer Evangelist based in Toronto
• Frederic Harper, Developer Evangelist based in Montreal
• Ruth Morton, IT Pro Evangelist based in Toronto
• and John Oxley, our manager/cat-herder based in Toronto

We’re also holding a Coffee and Code on Thursday, December 9th at the Second Cup at 100 Osborne Street from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.. Come on down, meet up with me, talk Windows Phone 7 or anything else that comes to mind!

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

We’re in Halifax this week for TechDays! Here’s what we’re up to this week:

• Tuesday, November 2nd, 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.: TechDays, Day 1
• Tuesday, November 2nd, 6:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.: Go DevMental
• Wednesday, November 3rd, 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.: TechDays, Day 2
• Thursday, November 4th, morning: Presentation at Nova Scotia Community College
• Thursday, November 4th, 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.: Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code

Watch this blog for updates and goings-on!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays, Microsoft Canada’s cross-country technical conference for developers and IT pros, heads to Halifax next week! So far, we’ve been to Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto, and now it’s time to head out east.

TechDays Halifax will take place on Tuesday, November 2 and Wednesday, November 3 at the World Trade Centre (1800 Argyle Street). As with TechDays in every other city, there’s a lot going on:

• CloudCamp on Monday, November 1. On the day before TechDays, we’re sharing our venue with the folks behind CloudCamp, the unconference on cloud computing. To find out more about CloudCamp, check out the registration page.
• TechDays proper takes place on Tuesday, November 2 and Wednesday, November 3. We’re talking about 60 sessions on programming, systems administration, Microsoft technologies and “best practices” (I hate the use that term, but I’m at a loss for another phrase that captures its meaning). We take the content from big-ticket conferences like TechEd North America, MIX and PDC, give it to “local heroes” to present, bring it all to a city near you and charge a few hundred (instead of a few thousand) bucks.
• TechDays Gives Back! We’re asking TechDays attendees to bring a non-perishable food item to the conference. All food will go to a local food bank.
• Go DEVMental happens at the TechDays venue on the evening of Tuesday, November 2 – it’s our student event! If you’re a post-secondary student looking to get into web or phone development, you’ll want to catch Go DEVMental, where we’ll show you what’s possible with Microsoft tools and technologies, and you’ll walk away with a DreamSpark membership and fully-functional copies of Visual Studio Professional 2010 and Expression Blend. It doesn’t cost anything to attend; you just have to be a post-secondary student (with the ID to prove it. To attend, register here!
• We’ll be holding a Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code during the afternoon of Thursday, November 4 at Just Us Café on Barrington (1678 Barrington Street) from 2 to 5:30 p.m. Come on down, see Windows Phone 7 devices up close and personal, and if you’ve got an app that you want to test on a real device instead of the emulator, this is your chance!

See you next week!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s going to be a busy week for Yours Truly…

Monday: Windows Phone Deployment Clinic

On Monday, I’ll be helping out at the Windows Phone Deployment Clinic at Microsoft Canada HQ in Mississauga (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, off Mississauga Road, north of Highway 401), where you can book some time to test your apps on a real Windows Phone 7 device. If you’ve got an app and you’re going to be in the area, drop me a line and book an appointment!

(By the bye, that thing I’m standing beside in the photo above is a promo device known colloquially as the “Big-Ass Phone”.)

Tuesday: AndroidTO and TechDays Setup

On Tuesday, I’ll be spending some time at the AndroidTO conference, a gathering of Android developers, where I’ll be minding the Windows Phone 7 booth. Yes, that’s right, Microsoft is a gold sponsor at an Android conference. Why? Because:

• We feel that if you’re an Android developer, go ahead an build Android apps, but expand your market reach by developing for Windows Phone 7 too! The programming languages and layout markup are similar.
• If you’re an Android developer, what’s the best OS for doing development? We think it’s Windows 7, which is a great environment for Java. Loads of great Java dev tools run on Windows, and we don’t consider Java to be deprecated.

AndroidTO takes place at the Polish Combatants Hall (206 Beverley Street, just south of College), is free-as-in-beer, and is alas, completely booked solid.

I’ll also be doing some setup for TechDays Toronto, which takes place on Wednesday and Thursday.

Wednesday: TechDays Toronto and Go DEVMental

Wednesday brings with it TechDays, Microsoft Canada’s cross-country tech conference: two days of great sessions for developers and IT pros who are building stuff with the Microsoft stack. I’m the guy who picked the content for both developer tracks, “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” and “Optimizing the Development Process”. I strove for the best mix of both technology-specific stuff like Mark Arteaga’s Windows Phone 7 sessions and Kate Gregory’s Windows API Code Pack presentation as well as practice-of-programming sessions such as “Top 10 Mistakes in Unit Testing” and “Branching and Merging Strategies”. TechDays will occupy me from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m..

From 7 p.m. on, it’ll be Go DEVMental, the student event where we’ll show university and college students what’s possible with Microsoft’s web and mobile platforms. I’ll be doing a presentation on getting starting with game development for Windows Phone with an amusing little live-coded game called “BieberSmash”, starring the bubblegum pop idol of the moment. Go DEVMental is free and open to post-secondary students – just bring your student ID! You’ll get all sorts of goodies, including a DreamSpark token and Visual Studio 2010 Pro.

Both TechDays and GoDEVMental take place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre’s South Building (222 Bremner Boulevard, right beside the CN Tower).

Thursday: TechDays, Day 2

Thursday means another full day of the TechDays conference, to be followed by some very strong whiskey-based drinks.

Friday: Coffee and Code

I’ll be running a Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code this Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Timothy’s at 225 Front Street West (in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre building). I’ll be hanging out at the cafe, working on Windows Phone 7 code on both the emulator and real Windows Phone devices. Want to learn more about Windows Phone 7, see a real-live phone, play some games or test your code? Come on down!

Saturday: ACSE Conference

University of Toronto computer science prof Steve Engels invited me to speak in front of a group of high school teachers at the ACSE (Association for Computer Studies Educators) Conference taking place on Saturday. I’m going to be showing them programming for high school students on Windows Phone as well as with the Kodu game development environment.

…and Sunday?

Well, it won’t be all sleep. I’ll have to pack for my Monday flight to TechDays Halifax!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s Rick Claus MCing the lunchtime show:

One of the lunchtime demos was a tour of all the goodies in the upcoming Windows Phone 7, which was given by Anthony “The Mobile Situation” Bartolo:

“Windows Phone 7 is HOTT!” You could even hear that he said “HOTT” with two T’s:

And his Windows Phone 7 device naturally had the Jersey Shore soundtrack loaded:

Edmonton is the latest city to be added to the TechDays cross-Canada tour, making for a grand total of 8 cities. Being a new city to the tour and judging by the population, we figured that we should expect about 250 people to attend. The Edmontonian techies stepped up and impressed us by doubling that number! Nicely done!

We love Edmonton’s enthusiasm for Kinect games:

Here’s Anthony again, doing a turbo talk on Windows Phone Marketplace. He announced to the crowd that although the Marketplace registration fee is CAD$120, if you successfully submit 2 apps before the launch date, we’ll refund it. So start writing those apps!

The deep tech discussions continued in the Ask the Experts area today:

And the OnX folks were there as well, providing internet access and raffling off an Xbox 360:

The whiteboards in the Ask the Experts area were a good place to let your skills and services be known:

When we say “Come to the dark side; we’ve got cookies”, we’re not kidding!

There was more than just the Kinect in the Collaboration Lounge, but a whole host of cool machines from our hardware sponsor, Dell. Many of these machines were equipped with touchscreens to show off touch tech and the touch features built into Windows 7:

The woman in the photo below is playing with a Dell Latitude XT2, my touch-equipped road warrior laptop, standard issue for Canadian developer evangelists on the Windows Phone 7 Champs team:

Here’s the XFR – we often say that it’s short for “eXpressly For Rick”, who’s notorious for killing technology. The XFR is the military-grade ruggedized version of the XT2 and can be dropped on the floor repeatedly without conking out.

This is a Dell 19” all-in-one touchscreen-equipped desktop machine:

Anthony Vranic gives us the lowdown on DirectX and accessing it via managed code. I recommend doing it either with the Windows 7 API Code Pack or if you’re doing games, XNA:

The last session of the last day is always a little challenging. The audience is tired and thinking about going home, and you have to do a little extra to get their attention. Luckily, I saved some interesting presentations for that slot, and got two great speakers. In the Optimizing the Development Process track, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe used good ol’ jazz hands to liven up his session on Visual Studio 2010 tips and tricks:

“These are not the droids you’re looking for.”

“Hey fellas! What’s cooler than bein’ cool?”

“ICE COLD!”

In the Developing for the Three Screens and the Cloud track, Todd Anglin, Telerik’s Chief Evangelist, was giving John a run for his money in the Expressive Presenter Hands contest as he talked about ASP.NET MVC:

“Oh, waiter! Cheque, please!”

Here’s Todd getting “gangsta”:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

And now, more photos of the goings-on at TechDays Edmonton! Here are Barnaby Jeans, Damir Bersinic, Dottie Yeates and John Bristowe having a pow-wow early this morning:

Here’s another shot of Michael Schweitzer talking about the .NET 4.0 Framework in the Optimizing the Development Process track:

At the same time in the Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud track, Erik Jensen talked about Visual Studio 2010 and Azure development:

The presence of the Kinect meant that our audience – techies all, a good portion of whom lead rather sedentary lives – got more than their usual dose of exercise:

Pierre Roman and Rodney Buike take a break during the lull in the hallway that takes place when the sessions are taking place:

The Ask the Experts area was busy with attendees catching up with presenters and asking them more in-depth questions:

Here’s Sean Kearney’s presentation on Powershell, which took place this morning:

Adam Crandall presented this morning on web deployment using Visual Studio 2010:

…and Aaron Kowall dropped Entity Framework 4.0 science on the Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud crowd:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Here’s Microsoft’s Kevin Harris doing the Silverlight presentation on Day 1:

After Kevin’s session came what might be the hottest session at TechDays this year – the Windows Phone 7 session. Here’s the crowd in the room a good ten minutes before the session started, with most of the seats already gone:

With a few seats dragged in from other rooms, speaker and long-time Windows Mobile guru Mark Arteaga began his presentation:

Miguel Carrasco of Imaginet was the track host for the Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud track and kept things running smoothly:

…while Mark rocked the WP7 demo:

If you ever need IT pro training, Sean Kearney is your go-to guy. He’s one of the best presenters on the circuit, and delightfully wacky. Just don’t let him have any Red Bull before he goes onstage:

Here’s the crowd at the Team Foundation Server for Everyone session:

Aaron Kowall presented the session:

Edmonton represent! Mack Male of Paramagnus was the track host for the Optimizing the Development Process track:

Meanwhile, in the Collaboration Lounge, the Kinect games continued to draw in curious onlookers:

Here’s Blythe Morrow coaching a guy taking the Kinect driving game for a spin:

We encouraged speakers not to hide out in the speaker prep room and to hang out in open areas like the Collaboration Lounge or the Ask the Experts area, a comfy zone with couches, beanbags and whiteboards. I couldn’t resist drawing a couple of comics. One featured Damir Bersinic, the evangelist in charge of TechDays:

and the other was to let folks know that if they had any questions about Windows Phone 7, they should come to me:

Lunch! Here’s the view from the stage in the “F and B” (Food and Beverage) room:

Along with lunch comes a show – a number of demos of various goodies from the Microsoft platform. Here are Rick Claus, John Bristowe and Rodney Buike setting up for their demos:

Here’s Damir doing his lunch demo:

In case you were wondering who picked the sessions for the developer tracks – Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud and Optimizing the Development Process – it was me, in consultation with a number of prominent developers in the .NET community. One of my very first picks was Branching and Merging Practices. It’s a topic covered fairly often in the open source world, but I feel it needs more discussion in the .NET world. Tommy Lum from Habanero presented:

Miguel did more than just play track host – he also presented! Here he is, talking about how to build web sites more quickly using Visual Studio 2010:

At the same time in the Optimizing the Development Process track, Michael Schweitzer covered getting the most out of .NET Framework 4.0, which is chock full of developer goodies:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Hello from TechDays Edmonton! I’m spending the week in the home of the Oilers, helping run the developer tracks at Microsoft’s cross-Canada tech training conference for developers and IT pros. TechDays takes the content from Microsoft’s big-ticket conferences – TechEd North America, MIX and PDC – gets local heroes to present that content, and brings it all to a city near you at a price in the low hundreds, not the thousands. For the Canadian developer, it’s the conference that delivers the most bang for your buck!

Here’s the venue, the Shaw Conference Centre, as seen on Monday, the day before TechDays, which had some pretty gloomy weather. It’s cleared up since then:

The conference centre has an unusual shape that takes advantage of its location, a hill on the north side of the North Saskatchewan River:

Here’s the view looking straight south:

And here’s the view looking southwest:

The interior of the conference centre reminds me of the domed city in Logan’s Run:

The first session in the Optimizing the Development Process track was Real-World Patterns for Cloud Computing:

Bruce Johnston of Ideaca did the presentation – here are some pics of him in action:

Meanwhile, in the Collaboration Lounge, Anthony “The Mobile Situation” Bartolo, one of my go-to guys for Windows Phone 7, telcos and Jersey Shore, showed us how Kinect Soccer is truly played:

Notice that footwork:

It may look like a blank stare, but don’t let that fool you – he’s simply entering a state of motion-sensing soccer zen

“That was too easy!”

He’s moving faster than the camera can track!

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL! Victory dance!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Deployment Clinic Today in Montreal

Deployment clinics are a little more formal than Coffee and Codes. You can book an exclusive timeslot to deploy and test apps to a Windows Phone 7 device, and there’s one taking place all day at Microsoft’s Montreal office (2000 Avenue McGill College, 4th floor) on the 30th. Email Christian Beauclair to reserve a time slot.

Coffee and Code Today in Toronto

I’ll be at the Starbucks at King and Yonge (4 King Street West) from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with a Windows Phone 7 for you to play with and deploy your apps to. I’ll be at or near the big table in the back — come on down!

Montreal “Speaker Idol” Deadline is Soon!

Compete in Speaker Idol to win a licence of Visual Studio Ultimate and the respect of the Montreal .NET Community! The deadline to subm,it a 200-word abstract and a brief bio for your 10-minute presentation is coming fast (midnight Friday).

TechDays Edmonton is Next Week

TechDays comes to Edmonton next week, taking place on October 5th and 6th, and with it will come CloudCamp Edmonton (October 4th) and Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code Edmonton (October 7th). Watch this blog for more details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Day 0 (The Day Before)

TechDays typically happens on a Tuesday and a Wednesday; we usually arrive on the Sunday or Monday in order to prepare the venue, our speakers and our own presentations. The afternoon of Day 0 is usually spent setting up the computers in each of the track rooms and in the Collaboration Lounge and “Ask the Experts” areas.

Here’s Christian Beauclair taking a tour of the facilities on the afternoon before TechDays.

I usually see Samantha Wong at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters in Mississauga, but last week she was with us at TechDays Vancouver, minding the table for the WebsiteSpark program, which gives free development tools available to eligible fee-for-service web design shops.

We made the TechDays venue available to CloudCamp on the evening of Day 0. The Vancouver one was quite well-attended. John Bristowe, pictured below with the camera, took some photos of the crowd:

We’re usually quite busy with other things on the evenings of Day 1 and Day 2, so we hold the speaker dinner on the evening of Day 0. We took the speakers to Town Hall, where they got a chance to hang out with us over food and drinks and play with the new Windows Phone 7 devices. Morten Rand-Hendriksen seemed particularly delighted to take WP7 out for a spin:

Day 1

Here’s track host Miguel Carrasco delivering a short introductory presentation for “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” track the at the start of Day 1. We have introductory presentations on both days; they ease the audience into the day and tell them what to expect from each track.

Also presenting in the “Three Screens and the Cloud” track was Aaron Kowall:

Both developer tracks were well attended. Here are some scenes from the other developer track, “Optimizing the Development Process”:

Day 2

We’ve always got extra goodies to give away at TechDays. This year’s bonus prize was a special Halo Reach edition of the Xbox 360, and Lowell Picklyk was the lucky winner. Here he is, being presented the prize by Barnaby Jeans:

Here’s Anthony Vranic talking about some of the new goodies in ASP.NET 4 WebForms:

And here are Aaron Kowall and Miguel Carrasco watching Anthony:

In addition to the usual developer and IT pro tracks, we added a new track to TechDays: the Local Flavours track. Unlike the other tracks, whose content comes from other big Microsoft conferences such as TechEd North America, MIX and PDC, Local Flavours’ presentations are the creations of developers and IT pros in each city.

In Vancouver, the last Local Flavours session was a special treat: a recording of a DotNetRocks show with DotNetRocks stars Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin interviewing Pete LePage, Senior Product Manager for Internet Explorer. IE9 Beta had been released earlier that day, so it was the perfect time to interview him.

Here are Richard, Carl and Pete being introduced to the audience by John Bristowe:

Day 2 Evening

After the end of TechDays, we tore down the computer setups in the session rooms, “Ask the Experts” area and Collaboration Lounge and packed them for shipping to Edmonton, the next TechDays city (TechDays Edmonton takes place on October 5th and 6th).

The day wasn’t over yet: we changed out of our TechDays clothes, dressed up a little and made our way to Glowball Grill in Vancouver’s Yaletown district for an IE9 blogger night, where 604-area tech bloggers, tech press and other notable nerds were shown IE9 in action.

Here’s Arnaud Gabaudan, the consumer lead for Internet Explorer, welcoming the crowd:

John Bristowe waits “in the wings” to do his presentation after Arnaud’s introduction:

And we’re off! Here’s John’s grand tour of the new, faster, more standards-compliant beta of IE9:

And tucked off to the side were those of us in the bar. We still had a pretty good view of the presentation, plus we had easy access to drinks!

Don’t worry, John; I’m paying attention – I just pay better attention when I’m enjoying a Bloody Caesar:

Day 3 (The Day After)

We held a Coffee and Code on the day after TechDays at the Take 5 Cafe at Granville and West Hastings, a stone’s throw from our hotel, and the site of the foundings of a couple of Vancouver tech groups and startups. I started Coffee and Code at the beginning of 2009 as a way for Microsoft to be better in touch with and more accessible to developers, it’s been going strong ever since.

The faces I know in the pictures above and below, from left to right:

• Boris Mann (blue jacket)
• Chris Nicol (red shirt)
• Christian Beauclair (blue shirt)
• Morten Rand-Hendriksen (green plaid shirt, far back)
• John Bristowe (black t-shirt, seated farthest back)
• Anthony Bartolo (rightmost blue shirt)
• Mark Arteaga (rightmost in the white shirt)

We will be holding Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code events in all TechDays cities. Watch this blog for announcements about the locations of upcoming Coffee and Codes!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What is Go DevMENTAL?

Since TechDays – Microsoft Canada’s cross-country developer and IT pro conference visiting 8 cities across Canada this fall – is a two-day event, we’ve got the venues for the entire 48-hour period, including evenings. Rather than have the session rooms (which are already set up for an audience, complete with A/V and seating) lie fallow, we decided to put them to good use and hold free community events in the evenings. One of these events is Go DevMENTAL, where we show college and university students what they can build using Microsoft’s tools and technologies and give them a lot of free stuff.

Go DevMENTAL is a two-track conference, with one track devoted to web design and development using WebMatrix, Expression Blend and Silverlight, while the other covers mobile development for Windows Phone 7 using Silverlight and XNA. At the end of the evening, we give the students a token for DreamSpark, our program that gives them free Microsoft development tools and operating systems and a DVD full of goodies so they can start coding right away.

If you’re a college or university student and would like to have an informative and entertaining evening where you learn cool new things, get free cool stuff, connect with industry people and get some help with your career, register for Go DevMental!

Where is Go DevMENTAL?

We’ll be hitting these cities on these dates:

What Happened at Go DevMENTAL Vancouver?

Go DevMENTAL Vancouver took place on Tuesday, September 14th in the West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre, a gorgeous venue (for more, see this entry).

I was helping out with the Phone track, so I only managed to get photos for its sessions. My colleages in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, Christian Beauclair and John Bristowe, took care of the Web track, while Mark Arteaga of Redbit Development and I ran the Phone track.

Here’s Mark setting up for his presentation, as the students and a number of professors milled into the room. We had some drinks and snacks set up in the back; that’s what the line at the back of the room is all about:

And we’re off! Mark did the first presentation, which focused on app development with Silverlight.

By the end of his session, he had a working, skinnable Magic 8-Ball app that responded to the user shaking the phone. The app was flexible enough so that it would be really easy to repurpose it as a fortune cookie app, the Wisdom of Master Yoda app and so on, without having to touch any code.

Mark’s session was followed by a break, which concluded with a quick accordion performance by Yours Truly:

Followed by a quick word from Andrew Gottlieb, a Microsoft recruiter who works the UBC campus looking for the next great Microsofties. If you’re looking for a job at Microsoft and you’re a student in the Vancouver area, you’re going to want to drop him a line.

Then came my presentation, a live-coding exercise in which we start with “File –> New Project…” and in 45 minutes, put together a game in which you get to smack Justin Bieber around. Let it never be said that I let professionalism stand in the way of a good coding presentation‘

Live coding in front of an audience is not for the weak of heart, and you’d better really know your stuff. But when you do it right, it’s fun for both you and the audience.

In these photos, I’m holding up two pieces of paper as a way of explaining collision detection using bounding boxes. It’s not every day you see some goof in an ironic hipster trucker cap talking about videogame fundamentals!

After the student sessions, I made my way to the faculty roundtable where we chatted with the professors about what Microsoft could do for them.

It was great meeting the students and faculty – I had a great time, and also learned a lot from them. I’m looking forward to the upcoming Go DevMENTAL cities. See you there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

For the past couple of years, we’ve held TechDays Vancouver at Vancouver Convention Centre’s East Building, but this year, we got to hold it at the brand new West Building. If you followed the Olympics, you might have caught a glimpse of it in the coverage; it served as the media centre during the event.

The place is huge, covering 111,000 square metres (about 1.2 million square feet). The building and surrounding walkways cover a total project area of 57,000 square metres (14 acres) over land and 32,000 square metres (8 acres) over water. The indoor carpeting is colour-coded brown in those parts that are over land and blue over those parts that are over water.

The building is one of the greenest convention centres in the world. Among its certifications and designations are:

• LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum, which meant that it scored 80 or more points out of a possible 100 in a green building system that measures buildings for energy efficiency, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, indoor environmental quality and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.
• A “GO GREEN” certificate from BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association) for industry-approved environmental best practices in building management.
• A designation as a PowerSmart convention centre by BC Hydro, British Columbia’s power company.

The building is topped with a 24,000 square metre (6 acres) “green roof” – the largest one in Canada and the largest non-industrial one in North America – housing 400,000 native plants and 60,000 bees. Irrigation for the roof is provided by treating the “blackwater” from the building.

There’s a great “log cabin” smell to the place as soon as you walk in. It comes from the walls, which are made of wood from trees that have fallen on their own rather than ones that were felled. Photos don’t do it justice:

The place is huge. There were city block-esque distances to cover between the farthest rooms. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – programming is a sedentary job, and a little moving around is probably just what the doctor ordered.

Being by the water, there are some great views that most cities’ convention centres simply can’t offer:

And hey, mountains and ocean make a great backdrop against which to play Kinect games on the Xbox 360!

While we nerds are famous for enjoying the great indoors, it would be a waste not to enjoy the promenades surrounding the centre, with their views of the scenery and a piece of outdoor art named Digital Orca, the pixelated killer whale statue just outside the Centre:

Believe it or not, you might be familiar with some of the other work done by the artist behind Digital Orca – it’s Douglas Coupland, who in addition to doing industrial design, fashion design and sculpting, is also a writer. You might have heard or even read his stuff: Generation X, Microserfs, JPod, and many other books.

Looking past Digital Orca to the northwest, you get this view:

And looking south towards the city, you see this:

Here’s a view from the second floor windows facing north – a lovely thing to see during a between-session break:

Turn your gaze slightly to the left and you’ll see this:

Take a closer look at that island on the left: it’s a Chevron station. I was half-tempted to swim up to it and ask to use their bathroom:

The sessions were programmers were in rooms on the second floor, opposite windows that faced east and provided a view of the Vancouver Convention Centre’s East Building. It’s where the Pan Pacific Hotel is and where the cruise ships are moored. On Day 1, we were treated to a view of a Princess Cruises ship – yes, that’s “Princess” as in Love Boat:

On Day 2, we saw a Holland America ship set sail:

All in all, I enjoyed working in and looking out of our first TechDays venue of the year.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m sitting in the airport lounge in Vancouver, waiting to board my flight back to Toronto. Some quick updates:

• TechDays Vancouver went very well. Over 800 attendees catching over 60 technical sessions on Microsoft’s platforms, tools and technologies, all taking place in the beautiful West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre. Thanks to the presenters, staff, and especially the attendees!
• Successful community events. Rather than have the TechDays venue lie fallow in the evenings, we put it to good use by opening it up for free community events. On Monday, we hosted CloudCamp, a gathering for people interested in cloud computing, and on Tuesday, we held a mini-conference called GoDevMental, which was aimed at students. We’re holding these events in all TechDays cities, so if you live close by, come and see us!
• Internet Explorer 9 goes beta! Standards-compliant. Hardware accelerated. Clean, minimalist UI. Nifty Windows 7 integration. We’re back in the browser game, people, and we’re playing for keeps. Download the IE9 beta now!
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools go RTM! What happens when you pair a phone with bold new UI and the awesomesauce of Visual Studio? Windows Phone 7, and the developer tools – which include Visual Studio Express for Phone and Expression Blend – have been finalized and are ready for download for free. Download the WP7 Developer tools now!
• I’ll be at FITC Mobile in Toronto on Friday and Saturday. I’ll be minding the booth at the FITC Mobile conference in Toronto this Friday and Saturday. Come say hi, see the dev tools in action, play with a real Windows Phone and find out what we have in store!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

One of the hot topics at this year’s TechDays conference is Windows Phone 7. With a new user interface featuring a design that isn’t all “me too”, a “glance and go” approach that doesn’t have you riffling through pages of apps and not one but two programming models that meet specific (and very different) needs, it’s a very promising mobile platform. No wonder a lot of developers want to get in on the ground floor with WP7.

The buzz about Windows Phone 7 translated into a packed room for Mark Arteaga’s session, the first of a two-part series on WP7 development with Silverlight.

Here’s the room about a minute or so into his session, with all seats taken and the people still filtering in and starting to take “standing room only” spots in the back. The packed room got an intro to WP7 development with Silverlight, input goodies like the virtual keyboard, accelerometer and microphone and APIs to take advantage of internal features like email, phone dialer, contacts and more.

Later this morning (Pacific time), Mark will continue with Part 2 of his session, where he’ll cover the life cycle of apps on Windows Phone, control templates, themes and web services available to Windows Phone.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Hello from Vancouver! I’m here at the first stop of TechDays, Microsoft’ Canada’s 8-city cross-country conference series for developers and IT pros. It’s a gorgeous, sunny and almost cloudless day, a nice change from the gloomy weather we had this weekend.

The sunshine is perfect for our new TechDays Vancouver venue, the Vancouver Convention Centre’s new west building, whose glass walls provide a spectacular view of the harbour, as seen below:

We’ve been here since 7 a.m., and the conference centre crew were here even earlier. The crowd started arriving around 8, with much of them arriving about 8:30. A little hint, folks: an early arrival means you get registered quickly, and you get enough time to enjoy a free breakfast to boot!

With the clock approaching nine came the scramble for the session rooms. Vancouver Convention Centre’s West Building is a huge place, and out attendees are going to get a fair bit of exercise getting from session to session. C’mon, people, it’s good for your cardiovascular systems!

Here’s Miguel Carrasco from Imaginet delivering the opening talk for the “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” track:

And in the “Optimizing the Development Process” track, here’s Bruce Johnston talking about real-world patterns for cloud computing:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

There’s some interesting stuff going on in the Canadian tech world this week, on nearly opposite ends of the country. I’ll be at both, starting in Vancouver from Monday to Thursday, and ending the back back home in Toronto.

TechDays 2010, Vancouver (Tuesday and Wednesday)

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Microsoft Canada will be hosting the TechDays conference in the new West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre. TechDays features content from Microsoft’s biggest (and most expensive) conferences, updated and delivered by local developers and IT pros, all at an incredibly reasonable price – a few hundred dollars, as opposed to a few thousand.

TechDays is your best chance to learn how to make the most of Microsoft’s platforms tools and technologies. It’s also a great way to get to meet your Canadian Microsoft team as well as your fellow techies.

If you’re attending TechDays, come say hi! I’m the guy with the accordion, and I’ll be demoing and working on Windows Phone 7 applications in the Collaboration Lounge.

We’ll be devoting a lot of bandwidth to TechDays this week, and I thought I’d point out something else happing at the same time, a continent away…

Mobile Innovation Week, Toronto (All Week)

If only I could be in two places at the same time! Alas, the complicated business of booking large conferences like TechDays requires us to find venues a year in advance, and certainly well before the dates of this year’s Mobile Innovation Week in Toronto, which takes place all week.

As you’re going to hear me say quite often for the next little while: Canada has always punched above its weight class in tech, and especially when it comes to the phone. After all, this is the home of Alexander Graham Bell, and he has a strong claim to state, as the Windows 7 commercials put it, that the phone was his idea. Since his time, Canada’s been making significant contributions to the telephone, and it’s getting highlighted in Mobile Innovation Week.

Mobile Innovation Week brings together and showcases the leaders in mobile tech, from idea people to developers to designers to institutions, all coming together exchange ideas about the future of mobile. It’s made up of many events, including:

• IN|10: The Interactive Exchange (Sunday – Tuesday)
• MXD 2010: Mobile Experience + Design (Tuesday)
• Mobile Biz Bootcamp (Wednesday)
• Mobile ThinkTank (Wednesday – Thursday)
• Mobile Media World 10 (Thursday – Friday)
• FITC: Flash in the Can (Friday – Saturday)

Windows Phone 7 at FITC on Friday and Saturday

I’m cutting my Vancouver trip short to be at FITC on Friday and Saturday, where I, along with some other Microsoft developers and evangelists, will be minding the Windows Phone 7 booth. We’ll have Windows Phone 7 devices and developer tools for you to try out, and we’d be more than happy to answer your questions!

We’ll also have a presenter there: Mark Arteaga will be doing two presentations on Windows Phone 7 development. If you wanted to learn how to code for this exciting new platform and you’ll be at FITC, don’t miss his sessions.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Time is running out: If you’re thinking about attending TechDays Toronto, you’d better register soon! The CAD$349.99 “early bird” price is in effect, but only until Thursday, September 16th. After that, you have to pay full price to attend, which is nearly double the “early bird” price.

Don’t miss the boat on this deal – register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.