HackVAN, Vancouver’s big API hackday, takes place this Saturday! If you have any skill or interest in writing apps that make use of publicly available APIs or have ideas on how to turn APIs into applications, you should come down and participate! Here are the quick details:

• When: Saturday, August 20th, 2011, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
• Where: Mozilla’s Vancouver offices (163 West Hastings Street, Suite 200, Vancouver BC)
• How much? A mere $10 for developers to attend.
• Will I get fed? We’re providing breakfast and lunch.
• How do I register? Visit the HackVAN registration site.

The APIses

The HackVAN organizers have rounded up a number of APIs that you can use at HackVAN. The idea is to write an application that uses at least one of these APIs and have it working by the end of the day. David Underwood (Developer Advocate) and Yours Truly (Joey deVilla, Platform Evangelist) will be there as representatives of Shopify and the Shopify API.

If you’d like to find out more about the Shopify API, check out our API documentation. It’s a RESTful (or as I like to say, “RESTafarian”) API and quite easy to use. I also wrote a series of articles on getting started with the API:

• Part 1: Getting started – What are Shopify apps, and how do I get started with the API?
• Part 2: Exploring the API – A quick look at what you can do and a primer on REST
• Part 3: More exploration –  Getting information about items in a shop, and adding new ones
• Part 4: Change is good – Modifying items in a shop
• Part 5: Deleting items

If you want to see what’s possible with the Shopify API, take a look at our App Store, where developers who’ve built Shopify apps can sell them and where Shopify shopowners can buy and install them, extending the capabilities of their shops.

Ours isn’t the only HackVAN API. Our API buddies include:

• Context.io: An email API that makes it possible to capture conversations, collaborations and document exchanges in the flow of email so you can harness them for CRM, project managements and other activities where email is the “paper trail”. Here’s their API.
• Freshbooks: If you’re a consultant, indie or small business that provides services and bills people for them, Freshbooks makes sending those bills easy. Here’s their API, and here are some implementation examples.
• Idee: Best described in three words — awesome image search. They’re providing two APIs: Piximilar, a search-by-color API, and PixMatch, a search-for-similar-images API.
• Twilio: Great for building voice- and text-messaging-based apps. Here are their APIs, and here’s their API project gallery.
• YellowAPI: Local search for Canadian businesses and other things. Great for those “where’s the nearest X?” apps. Here’s their API.

The Prizes

Write an app that we deem worthy and you could win of these:

First prize is a MacBook Air. 11″ diagonally, really skinny, 1.6GHz dual-core Intel i5 Processor, 4 GB RAM, and 128GB mass storage. It’s an amazing and incredibly portable development machine. My friend Andrew Burke uses this as his main machine, where he does Rails and iOS development on it.

Second prize: iPad 2. The 16GB WiFi model. My iPad is my “second screen”, notetaking device, ebook reader and favorite portable gaming machine. This one’s being provided by Shopify.

Third prize: Amazon Kindle 3G. Free 3G, built-in wifi and space for 3,500 books.

And there will be more prizes, too! If you want a shot at these prizes, come on down on Saturday and participate in HackVAN — register now!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

I’m off to Vancouver! I’ll be there from Wednesday afternoon to Monday afternoon, primarily to catch HackVAN. Want to catch up? Drop me a line or tweet!

Creative Commons photo by Casey Yee.

This week, a number of Shopifolks will be in Vancouver. If you see us, come say hi!

Tobi and Harley at the GROW Conference

Tobias Lütke, our CEO, and Harley Finkelstein, our CPO (Chief Platform Officer) will be attending the sold-out GROW Conference 2011, which will be taking place at the Vancouver Convention Centre’s West Building (the media building for the Olympics) from Wednesday, August 17th through Friday, August 19th. This is the must-attend conference for Canadian startups and entrepreneurs. I’ll leave it to my friend David Crow to describe it:

The Grow Conference is a unique three-day conference that brings together the top minds in business, entrepreneurship, technology, and capital to inspire and engage the next generation of disruptive entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter if your business is on or offline, the next-gen entrepreneur knows where their customers are and how to engage them. Today’s entrepreneurs are creating new opportunities, disrupting age-old markets, leveraging technology on their path to being tomorrow’s leaders. The Grow Conference is bringing the best minds of Silicon Valley and Canada together to share lessons learned and inspire action. Be part of this entrepreneurial revolution as we work together to drive innovation for the future. GROW is more than a conference, it’s a movement.

All the tickets that were made available online are sold out. For you super-procrastinators with some money to burn, there will be a very limited number of tickets at the door available at the door for US$595.

David and Joey at HackVAN

David Underwood, Developer Advocate, and Yours Truly (Joey deVilla, Platform Evangelist) will be sneaking into the GROW Conference after-party, but the real reason we’ll be there will be for the HackVAN Hack Day taking place at the Mozilla offices (163 West Hastings, Suite 200, Vancouver) on Saturday, August 20th. HackDays are events that are being held across Canada where developers get together, and working either in teams or solo, build cool applications in a day using publicly available APIs. If you’re a developer of any level of experience, from just starting out to guru-level, come out, make new friends and connections and get a chance at winning some cool prizes (up for grabs: a MacBook Air, iPad 2 and Kindle).

Registration for this event is a mere $10 — register now, and we’ll see you on Saturday!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Our friends at Imaginet are hosting two-hour events in Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary where they’ll show Visual Studio developers how to get up to speed with all the goodies that have packed into Visual Studio 2010. Here’s what they’ll cover:

What’s new in Team Foundation Server 2010

Learn about important updates and enhancements to Team Foundation Server in the 2010 release.  Understand key components such as: Branches as a first class citizen, Branch visualization, and Change set history visualization.  See how using Team Project Collections can improve manageability and scalability.  Imaginet will demonstrate hierarchical work items and typed work item relationships as well as improvements to Team Build including features such as Buddy Builds and Gated Check In.

Testing Tools & Rich Developer-Tester Interaction with Visual Studio 2010

Imaginet will demonstrate the new testing tools in Visual Studio 2010 and how the generalist tester is now brought into the full Microsoft ALM platform.  The new Test Professional product is a purpose-built tool for test professionals to plan, execute and manage testing of your web, Windows Forms or WFP application.  See how the rich defect reporting including IntelliTrace and other information about the execution and system under test, helps eliminate the “I can’t reproduce the bug” response from development.  Test Lab Management can also assist in streamlining the setup and teardown of test labs for test.

These events are free, and they’ll be taking place in the following cities on the following dates:

City	When	Where
Vancouver (click here to register)	Monday, October 25	Fairmont Waterfront Hotel Malaspina Room 900 Canada Place Way
Calgary (click here to register)	Monday, November 8	Met Centre Grand Lecture Hall 333 Fourth Avenue SW
Edmonton (click here to register)	Tuesday, November 9	Shaw Conference Centre Salon 12 9797 Jasper Avenue

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Creative Commons photo by Jason V. Click the photo to see it on its original page.

Don’t forget that this Saturday, September 25th, is the first SharePoint Saturday in Vancouver!

It’s a FREE public event, and it’s a chance for people in the Vancouver area to dive into SharePoint. It promises to be an educational, informative and lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals and MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics.

For more details, see my earlier blog entry on SharePoint Saturday Vancouver as well as the SharePoint Saturday Vancouver site and the registration page.

Thanks to Yaroslav Pentsarskyy for letting me know about this event!

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.

Who is David Crow?

David Crow is probably the most recognizable face in the Toronto startup tech scene, and rightfully so. Without the effort he’s put into events like DemoCamp and other gatherings where techies, entrepreneurs, social media types and anyone else who wants to build “World 2.0”, we wouldn’t have anywhere near as active or as interesting a tech scene as we do (and not just in Toronto, but across Canada as well).

My current job at Microsoft, as well as the previous two, grew out of opportunities created by David’s hard work, either directly or indirectly. I suppose I owe him a couple of drinks!

5 Questions

David is my coworker at Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team and also one of the Windows Phone 7 Champs. Karim Kanji caught up with him and did a quick “5 Questions” interview, featuring these questions:

1. What motivates you to do what you do on a daily basis?
2. Do you have any success start-up tips for people wanting to create a name for themselves in your industry?
3. In your opinion why is Toronto a hotbed for cool tech start-ups?
4. What’s your favourite tech toy and social media site and why?
5. Who would you say are Toronto’s social media/tech stars and why?

Check out the article at TechVibes!

David’s in Vancouver This Coming Week

David’s going to be in Vancouver from Monday, August 16th, through Friday, August 20th to attend the Grow Conference on Thursday and Friday, which is aimed at startup techies, entrepreneurs, idea people and investors. “If you’re a startup, an investor or a service provider in Canada,” wrote David, “you should be at this event.”

He’s going to be in the downtown area and available to meet up in the earlier part of the week. If you want to find out more about BizSpark, pick his brain about startups and product/market fit, you can catch up with him at Bootup Labs (where he’ll be working from). To find out more his trip to Vancouver and how to catch up with him, check out this blog entry.

Vancouver photo taken by JamesZ_Flickr and licenced under Creative Commons.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Today, Tuesday August 3rd, is your last chance to register for TechDays Vancouver at the early bird price of CAD$349.99 (plus taxes). The deadline is tonight at 12:00 midnight Eastern (that’s 9:00 p.m. Pacific); once this passes, the registration fee for TechDays jumps up to its regular price, which is almost twice the early bird price.

If I were a gangsta rapper (and it in fantasies, it’s one of a dozen of interesting things I do on the side), I’d say “Don’t procrastinate, registrate!”

But seriously: this year’s TechDays is a big all-out production that brings together content from the big conferences like TechEd, MIX and PDC, hooks up local heroes to present and augment it, and serves it all up close to home at a very affordable price (especially affordable at the early bird rate). It’s also a chance to get to know both us and your peers in the tech community.

Once again, “Don’t procrastinate, registrate!”. Register for TechDays Vancouver now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re planning on TechDays Vancouver, your window for the early bird price of CDN$349.99 plus tax expires on Tuesday, August 3rd. After that, the price jumps up to almost twice that. Save yourself some money by not procrastinating – register for TechDays Vancouver now!

Remember the TechDays formula:

Want to know more about the sessions at this year’s TechDays? Take a look at our sessions page.

Once again, register for TechDays Vancouver before the early bird price expires!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Windows Phone 7 is coming soon, and we’re holding a couple of full-day workshops to show you its underlying architecture, walk you through its development frameworks, show you how to build apps with Visual Studio Express and sell them in the Marketplace, and then hold a codefest – and yes, it’s free-as-in-beer to attend!

We’re holding two of these workshops, which Yours Truly along with Paul Laberge and Jamie Wakeam will be co-hosting:

• In Mississauga, Ontario (at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters) next Wednesday, June 23rd
• In Richmond, British Columbia (at the Microsoft Development Centre) next Friday, June 25th

Here’s the agenda:

Want in on these workshops? As I said earlier, they’re free – just click the links below to sign up:

• Click here to register for the Mississauga Windows Phone 7 workshop (Wednesday, June 23)
• Click here to register for the Richmond Windows Phone 7 workshop (Friday, June 25)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

For the TechDays conference’s stops in Vancouver and Toronto, Microsoft hired Vancouver-based photog extraordinaire Kris Krug to take photos of the Developer and Platform Evangelism team, which includes Yours Truly. The photos were taken during the conference, which meant that most of us were wearing the official TechDays shirts, which were colour-coded to match the conference track in which we were leading or participating. The track that I lead is Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, and its colour is orange. Luckily the folks who made the shirts had a pretty snappy shade of orange (the label refers to the colour as “Spark”) that I can rock.

Most of our photo shoot was on the promenade outside the Vancouver Convention Centre, looking out over the water. He just had me play tunes on the accordion while he shot photos, so they’re all pretty candid shots. Here’s one of the photos that Kris took of me.

There are more of me and the rest of the DPE team in Kris’ Flickr photoset.

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

Vancouver Convention Centre, as seen from the Fairmont Hotel across the street

Yesterday marked Day 2 of the TechDays Vancouver 2009 conference. The track that I’m in charge of is the most broad one: Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform. With such a wide array of topics that I could cover, I decided to focus on four areas that I and the people I surveyed thought would be both important and interesting:

• Rich (Internet) Applications
• The “Software” half of “Software + Services”, namely client applications on computers and other devices
• ASP.NET MVC, the model-view-controller web app framework that I like to call “Rails That Scales”
• The “Services” half of “Software + Services”: services accessible via the internet

Day 1 was about the first two, and Day 2 covered MVC and Services.

The morning featured two ASP.NET MVC sessions. First, Charles Nurse of DotNetNuke presented Introduction to ASP.NET MVC, which was aimed at ASP.NET developers looking to make the leap from WebForms or to see what MVC is all about. Daniel Flippance of Habaneros provided a great follow-up presentation with SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications, which matched two great topics – our new web application framework and the SOLID principles of object-oriented design (which I covered back in July with this article).

Charles Nurse and Daniel Flippance

The afternoon was all about services. We started with Phil Bolduc presenting Building RESTful Services with WCF, which covers two topics that Microsoft developers are just starting to pick up. After that came Ho Yan Leung, whose session was Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint. As you can see in his photo below, you can find Windows 7 and Microsoft platform development in places you wouldn’t expect:

Ho Yan Leung

(Phil: I got sidetracked during your presentation and didn’t get a chance to snap your photo. My apologies!)

After the final session, we cleared out the presentation halls, gathered for a post-conference meeting to discuss what went right, what went wrong and what we should do at the next stop on the TechDays tour, which is Toronto on the 29th and 30th. We packed the demo machines in their nigh-indestructible flight cases:

The red, green and blue machines are Dell Netbooks. They’re cute, but my stance on netbooks remains unchanged.
The really nice machines are the copper-coloured 16 gig “Dell-a-saurus” machines in the middle row.

We marked the end of TechDays Vancouver 2009 with strong drink and flaming teppanyaki:

[This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.]

Last night’s Demo Ignite Camp was a success. We got a decent-sized crowd, a bunch of great presnetations on all sorts of projects by Vancouver-area techies and hopefully inspired the local nerds to get together and do "show-and-tell" events more often.

Demo Ignite Camp came about thanks to a couple of lucky circumstances. First and foremost, Vancouver is lucky enough to have a guy like Boris Mann, who is a technologist, entrepreneur and David Crow’s West Coast evil twin. He was able to rally the local techies to come out to a gathering on short notice on a week packed full of techie-oriented events (including "Launch Party" this Wednesday, which we’ll be attending).

The other lucky break comes as a result of the TechDays Vancouver conference. TechDays is a two-day conference, and we booked the Vancouver Convention Centre for it. We had no evening events, which meant that the conference halls were going to be empty and unused on the first night of the conference. We decided to make the space available for some kind of free community event; I thought of hosting a DemoCamp-style event and immediately thought of getting Boris’ help.

Last night’s presentations – all which of were quite good — were:

1. Clamato — Hot Smalltalk on JavaScript action by Avi Bryant
2. TransitDB – Carson Lam’s online guide for Vancouver Transit users that won the PHP FTW contest earlier this year
3. RestfulX Framework – Dima Berastau’s framework for bringing Rails-esque goodness and RESTfulness to Adobe Flex and AIR development
4. PhoneGap and Ayogo’s use of it for iPhone Game Development
5. Joyent’s Smart – Joyent’s cloud platform
6. Walruz — Ruby framework for managing complex authorization policies

We didn’t have time to get around to Mobify’s presentation, so I’m going to make up for it by writing an article about them and give them lots of link love (I’ll be emailing you guys soon!).

Once the presentations wrapped up, we took the attendees to the Lions Pub where we pulled out the Microsoft American Express corporate card and bought a round for everyone.

And now, the photos, courtesy of John Bristowe. You can check them out in the slideshow below or view them on Flickr:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Vancouver’s got some great people doing some very interesting tech work, and we’d like to make sure that it gets nurtured with events like Demo Ignite Camp and other community-building gatherings. If there’s anything we can do to help – because a healthy tech ecosystem, regardless of the technology is also good for Microsoft – please let us know! Drop me a line in the comments or email me!

I’d like to thank Boris Mann for helping put this event together, Barnaby Jeans and Damir Bersinic for offering up the space, Angie Lim, Nik Garkusha and Arun Kirupananthan for providing the during- and after-refreshments – but most importantly, the presenters and attendees!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Two out of three of this afternoon’s sessions in my track at the TechDays conference – Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform — were presented by Anthony Vranic, an independent consultant who used to be a Microsoft developer evangelist. His sessions:

• Building Modular Applications Using Silverlight and WPF
• Optimizing Your Apps for the Windows 7 User Experience

Next up were Anthony Bartolo and Mark Arteaga, who were there to present the session Taking Your Application on the Road with Windows Mobile Software, in which they showed us things that people think Windows Mobile can’t do.

Yup, that’s The Beatles: Rock Band beside Anthony – this was a session where you could leave with a prize! They gave away XBox games to people who answered skill- and mobile market knowledge-testing questions correctly.

They gave The Beatles: Rock Band to the person working on the most interesting Windows Mobile app, as judged by audience applause. It went to the gentleman in the photo below on the right, who wrote a currency exchange application that watches exchange markets for the ideal time and buys foreign currencies then. He uses it to send money home to New Zealand within taking a bath on the exchange rate.

As I write this, it’s 5:45 p.m. Pacific, which means that the next event, Demo Ignite Camp, is just over an hour away.