Vancouver

Windows Phone Workshops

by Joey deVilla on June 14, 2010

Windows Phone Workshops / FREE full-day workshops on developing app for Windows Phone 7 / Mississauga ON, Wednesday, June 23 / Richmond BC, Friday, June 25

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:

Time	Session
8:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.	Check-in, registration and refreshments
9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.	Session 1 - Introducing Windows Phone 7 and the user experience - Selling your apps in the Marketplace - The Windows Phone 7 architecture
10:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.	Break
10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.	Session 2 - Building Windows Phone 7 apps with Silverlight
11:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.	Session 3 - Building Windows Phone 7 games with XNA
11:45 a.m. – 12:00 noon	Q&A
12:00 noon – 5:00 p.m.	Lunch, followed by the Coding Challenge Bring your laptops, form a team and try your hand at building a Windows Phone 7 app or game in an afternoon!
5:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.	Coding Challenge Results Teams will present their apps, one will be selected as the Coding Challenge Champ and will a prize, and we’ll wrap up the day.

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tagged as: codefest. Mississauga, mobile, Richmond, Toronto, Vancouver, Windows Phone, workshop

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Slice of Life: Official Photos from Techdays

by Joey deVilla on September 20, 2009

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.

Tagged as: Kris Krug, TechDays, Vancouver

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TechDays Vancouver 2009: Day Two at the “Microsoft Platform” Track

by Joey deVilla on September 16, 2009

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 Track in a Nutshell: MVC and Services for Day 2

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 and his MacBook at TechDays Vancouver 2009 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:

Flight case holding several laptops

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:

Flaming teppanyaki, with Rick Claus saying "Funny, that's exactly what happens when I get my hands on a computer!"

[This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.]

Tagged as: conferences, MVC, services, TechDays 2009, Vancouver

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Scenes from Demo Ignite Camp

by Joey deVilla on September 15, 2009

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:

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

Tagged as: Demo Ignite Camp, Vancouver

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TechDays Vancouver: More Scenes from the “Platform” Track

by Joey deVilla on September 14, 2009

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

Anthony Vranic presenting at TechDays Vancouver 2009

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.

arteaga_bartolo_1

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.

arteaga_bartolo_2

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.

winner

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.

Tagged as: mobile, TechDays, Vancouver, Windows Mobile

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Slice of Life: Striking the “Charlie’s Angels” Pose with Netbooks

by Joey deVilla on September 14, 2009

Yesterday, while setting up for the TechDays conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre, my co-workers Rick Claus (pictured below on the left with the red netbook) and Rodney Buike (pictured below on the right with the blue netbook) and I couldn’t resist playing around with the Dell netbooks that we were using to do PowerPoint donkey-work. John Bristowe, who was doing the photography, suggested striking a Charlie’s Angels-style pose and we were only too happy to oblige:

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Tagged as: goofin' around, slice of life, TechDays, Vancouver

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TechDays Vancouver: Scenes from the “Platform” Track

by Joey deVilla on September 14, 2009

"Welcome" sign at Techdays 2009 Vancouver

It’s Monday, September 14th, which means that TechDays Canada 2009 has begun! We’re at the Vancouver Convention Centre in beautiful Vangroovy, the first city of sevencities we’re visiting in our tour. We’re travelling across Canada throughout the fall to show off the latest and greatest things that developers and IT pros can do with currently available tools and technologies from Microsoft.

"Welcome" sign at TechDays 2009 Vancouver, showing the Vancouver Convention centre behind it.

Last year, I was a mere presenter. This year, I’m the lead of the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track whose abstract is below:

platform_track

Learning key skills to develop rich client and web-based applications on the Microsoft-based platform is what this track is all about. In this track you will learn how to develop rich, interactive and interoperable applications for both the client and the web using our newest tools and frameworks. You’ll learn how to build software that helps to give your users the best experience possible, whether it’s a program running on Windows 7, a website built on ASP.NET MVC or a Silverlight-based rich internet application. You’ll also learn how to build services that can deliver data to almost any platform and internet-enabled device. And finally, you’ll learn how to build these software and services in ways that are modular and maintainable.

Here’s the room in which my track in taking place, as seen at 8:30 this morning (Pacific time, naturally), with a half-hour to go before the sessions began. We were already picking up a decent crowd:

Ballroom A filling up

First up was Zaheera Valani of the Silverlight team doing the presentation What’s New in Silverlight 3, where she showed off the features in the latest version of Silverlight. According to the rule of thumb for Microsoft software versions, this should be the version that really catches on, and the early signs indicate that this seems to be the case.

Zaheera Valani presenting "What's New in Silverlight 3" at TechDays 2009 Vancouver

As I write this, my co-worker in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group, Qixing Zheng, is doing the Expression Blend for Developers session. That’s right, it’s not just for UI designers – it’s also a pretty good development tool:

Qixing Zheng presenting "Expression Blend for Developers" at TechDays 2009 Vancouver

Tagged as: conferences, TechDays 2009, Vancouver

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Demo Ignite Camp in Vancouver: Less Than a Week Away!

by Joey deVilla on September 8, 2009

If you live in Vancouver or are going to be there on Monday night, don’t forget that Demo Ignite Camp, the show-and-tell event for the bright lights of the Vancouver tech scene, is taking place that night at the Vancouver Convention Centre!

For more details, see my earlier post on Demo Ignite Camp or visit its event page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tagged as: Demo Ignite Camp, Vancouver

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TechDays Vancouver’s and Toronto’s “Developer Foundations” Track!!!

by Joey deVilla on September 4, 2009

If you’ve looked at the TechDays Canada 2009 site this week, you might have noticed the addition of a new track: Developer Foundations. At that point, you might have asked yourself these questions:

What’s the Developer Foundations track all about?
Why! Do! The! Session! Descriptions! Have! So! Many! Exclamation! Points?!!!

I’ll answer the question about the exclamation! points! first! It’s because the people in charge of the track, Justice Gray and Peter Ritchie, are really exciting about the opportunity to have a track that they really believe in and have been putting heart, soul and viscera into this project. They’ve done a lot of work under an extremely tight schedule in order to have the track ready in time for TechDays Vancouver and TechDays Toronto. The only way to truly capture the enormity of their task is with…a montage!

While most of TechDays’ tracks concern themselves with Microsoft’s tools and technologies, the Developer Foundations track takes a step back to first principles, concerning itself with how you can be a better coder. It’s about writing elegant, maintainable, working code. You’ll learn techniques that get short shrift or don’t even get mentioned in the Teach Yourself X Over Your Lunch Break books. You’ll probably encounter a lot of exclamation! marks!

There are four sessions in the Developer Foundations track:

S-O-L-I-D: The Five OO Principles That Will Change Your Life Forever: “Can’t believe you just got passed over at the club – again – because you didn’t know real object orientation? Thought that the sure-fire way to third base was knowing how to write a constructor? Thought you had the evening all figured out because you read an example of Cat inheriting from Animal? Think again. Annoyed by all those homely elitist jerks that still score all the time because people say they are OO masters? Well, it’s time to turn the tables and learn object oriented programming the way real men and women do it – the SOLID way!”
Going from 0 to 100 Dollars with the .NET You Never Knew: You’ll learn “How generics can be used for more than just collections, the true power of lambdas and anonymous methods, the ins and outs of LINQ to objects, proper error handling beyond try-catch-finally and the importance of regular bathing.”
Layers, the Secret Language of Architects: “Come to the presentation that will show you how to become “the man”! Seams? Design by contract? Services that aren’t prefixed by “web”? Repositories? Anti-corruption layers? (Gasp!) Domain-Driven Design? Do you know how that guy or girl at your office was able to negotiate foot massages and a daily breakfast buffet into their contract? They knew all of these terms and how to use them to build flexible and maintainable systems – and after attending this presentation so will you!”
Refactoring for Fun and Profit: “Are you ashamed of your application? Does your architecture make you want to go home and weep in the shower? Heck, would it be nice if your application seemed to have architecture? This is the presentation for you! Come see how the art of refactoring can help fix your code, fix your house, and maybe even fix your dog! We’re going to show you how to TAKE CONTROL of your codebase without simply tearing everything down and starting over!”

We added this track in response to a call from developers like Justice and Peter for sessions that cover good programming practices. We’re gauging the response to it – if people attend and give it positive reviews, we’ll make it a regular TechDays track. I’d love to see this happen.

We’re calling this “the track so nice, we’re running it twice!” The sessions in Developer Foundations will run on Day 1 and repeat on Day 2! If you’re a developer attending TechDays Vancouver or TechDays Toronto, you have no excuse for catching at least one of the sessions in this track! And thus ends this article and the exclamation points! Ciao!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tagged as: best practices, fundamentals, TechDays, Toronto, Vancouver

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Your First Warning: Vancouver, September 11 – 18

by Joey deVilla on September 3, 2009

Photo of downtown vancouver at night, captioned: "September 11th - 18th / Vangroovy", with arrow pointing to Fairmont Waterfront hotel

I’m going to be in Vancouver from the afternoon of Friday, September 11th until the morning of Friday, September 18th. I’m there first and foremost to manage the “Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform” track of the TechDays conference, then to meet up with the local tech community, but also to enjoy the city I fondly refer to as “Vangroovy”.

Here’s what I’ll be up to:

Coffee and Code Vancouver: Saturday, September 12th

"Monkey" latte art

My coworker John Bristowe and I will be holding Coffee and Code on Saturday, September 12th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Pacific time, of course) at the Take 5 Cafe on Granville (429 Granville, near Hastings). We’ll be there to talk about TechDays, The Empire and the tech industry in general – but it won’t just be geeky stuff; we’ll provide scintillating conversation about accordions, the Calgary Flames, deep fried snack foods, “Am I metrosexual or not”, life, the universe and everything. I will have the accordion with me, so tunes are definitely on the menu!

You can register for Coffee and Code Vancouver on its event page.

TechDays Vancouver: Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th

TechDays is Microsoft Canada’s cross-Canada tour, where we highlight what you can do with currently-available Microsoft tools and tech that you probably aren’t doing yet. We take the content from the infinitely more expensive TechEd North America conference (admission fee USD$2000), update it, and have local techies present it near you at a price you can afford (CAD$299 if you caught the early bird rate, CAD$599 otherwise). You get great content at a great price, and we get to make contact with tech communities across the country. Think of it as “Geek Global, Spend Local”.

TechDays Vancouver will be happening at the Vancouver Convention Centre, which is also the venue of…

Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14th @ 7:00 p.m.

Since we had the Vancouver Convention Centre booked for two days, it meant that we had these big rooms lying fallow on the first night. I wanted a pajama party for accordion players, but since that idea got nixed, I called on Boris Mann and suggested we hold a DemoCamp-style event. The end result: Demo Ignite Camp!

Thus far, we’ve got 5 out of 8 presentation slots filled:

Joey deVilla’s Ignite Presentation: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
Avi Bryant will demo Clamato, a Smalltalk dialect that operates within the JavaScript runtime.
Dima Berastau will demo RestfulX, a RESTful framework for Flex and AIR applications.
Carson Lam will demo TransitDB, his Vancouver transit information web app, which won the PHP FTW competition earlier this year.
The folks from Ayogo will present their iPhone games built using the PhoneGap cross-mobile-platform framework.

I’m more than happy to drop my Ignite presentation to make room for a demo or Ignite by someone local. I’m already hosting, and Demo Ignite Camp is about the Vancouver tech scene, not me!

For more information, see the Demo Ignite Camp event page.

Launch Party Vancouver, Wednesday, September 16th

My fellow TechDays coordinators and I will be attending Launch Party Vancouver, which is:

…a lively mixer for the city’s brightest entrepreneurs, tech junkies, and bloggers, who are doing it, have done it or want to make their ideas happen here. The goal of the event is to connect BC’s growing community of Internet and new media leaders with investors and other trailblazers across Canada and abroad.

Founded by local entrepreneurs, LPV is not your typical networking event. There are no presentations or panels to be found. But what you will discover are the individuals responsible for making Vancouver one of the greatest start-up cities in Canada. Every event features local, early stage new media companies strutting their stuff and sharing their ideas with the community.

It’s happening at Circa Resto Lounge from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.; tickets are available via EventBrite.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tagged as: Coffee and Code, Demo Ignite Camp, Launch Party, TechDays, travel, Vancouver

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Demo Ignite Camp: Vancouver, September 14th

by Joey deVilla on September 1, 2009

What Is Demo Ignite Camp?

Think of Demo Ignite Camp as an evening of “show and tell” where the bright lights of Vancouver’s high-tech and startup scene get together to present their projects and ideas. It’ll feature two kinds of presentations:

Demo icon (a toy robot) Demos: By “demo”, we mean a demonstration of your software, web application or project in action. It’s the only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen — no slides allowed! The idea is for you to show off your technology in action and inspire us, not give us yet another marketing spiel.

ignite_icon

Ignites: An Ignite presentation on a tech-related topic with some constraints to make it interesting: you’re allowed only 20 slides, and they’re set to automatically advance every 15 seconds. It requires you to keep the text on your slides to a minimum and your presentation to be focused. It’s a true test of your presentation-fu.

Demo Ignite Camp will take place at Vancouver Convention Centre on Monday, September 14th at 7:00 p.m., a little bit after the first day of Microsoft’s TechDays Vancouver conference wraps up.

Demo Ignite Camp @ Vancouver Convention Centre

“Very Nice. How Much?”

Admission is free! As in beer, which we’ll be going out for after Demo Ignite Camp.

Want to Present at Demo Ignite Camp?

Have you got a project you’d like to show as a demo or an idea that you’d like to present as an Ignite? Drop me a line or leave a comment on Demo Ignite Camp’s event page!

Who’s Involved?

So far, we’ve got Avi Bryant booked for one of Demo Ignite Camp’s 8 presentation slots. He’ll be doing a demo and we’re incredibly pleased – he works on some really cool projects, and we of the Toronto DemoCamp crew still consider his demo of DabbleDB to be one of the best demos in our 21-event history. We’re looking forward to seeing his presentation, which I suspect will be on Clamato, which is equal parts Smalltalk, JavaScript and the future.

Demo Ignite Camp wouldn’t even exist without the efforts of the Bee Man:

"Bumblebee Man" from "The Simpsons"

Actually, that’s @bmann, as in Boris Mann, blogger, technologist, entrepreneur and go-to guy for Vancouver’s tech scene:

He’s helping pull this event together in record time and playing the part of co-host, in spite of his very packed schedule.

Microsoft played a part in making Demo Ignite Camp happen: they provided the venue and the AV system free of charge. The Vancouver leg of their conference, TechDays Canada 2009, takes place on Monday, September 14th and Tuesday, September 15th, which means that they had the facility on Monday night, during which nothing was scheduled. The TechDays organizers decided that they’d make the room available for some kind of community event.

I’ll be helping out as well. I’ll be co-hosting, and I was the guy who emailed Boris and said “Hey, dude, if you’ve got the camp, I’ve got the venue.”

Want to Know More?

There are more details on Demo Ignite Camp’s event page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tagged as: Avi Bryant, Boris Mann, Demo Ignite Camp, DemoCamp, TechDays, Vancouver

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The TechDays $299 Deal

by Joey deVilla on August 25, 2009

The Early Bird Price is Going Away Soon

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

The TechDays Formula

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

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

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

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

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

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

All This for $299

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tagged as: Canada, conferences, deals, discounts, Microsoft, TechDays, Toronto, Vancouver

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TechDays’ Developer Foundations Track

by Joey deVilla on August 11, 2009

techdays_developer_foundations_track

Last week, John Oxley announced the addition of a new track to TechDays Vancouver and TechDays Toronto: the Developer Foundations track, whose sessions are devoted to the practices and principles of good coding. While the other tracks will be about Microsoft tools and technologies, Developer Foundations will be about answering a single question: How do I write good code?

How Developer Foundations Came to Be

We added the track in response to calls for it from a number of developers who care about about the state of software development in the .NET community: Donald Belcham (whose upcoming book, Brownfield Application Development in .NET, is worth checking out), Justice Gray and Peter Ritchie. We put out a call for suggestions in a post titled TechDays, Blogs and the Fundamentals, and based on those suggestions, we added the Developer Foundations track to the Vancouver and Toronto stops of the TechDays tour and put Justice and Peter in charge. We’re taking care of the physical logistics like the room and the audiovisual gear, but when it comes to content, Justice and Peter are calling the shots.

How Developer Foundations Will Work

Developer Foundations will be a four-session track, with the same four sessions being held on Day 1 and Day 2 of the Vancouver and Toronto conferences. With the same sessions happening on both days, we’re hoping to make it as easy as possible to catch a Developer Foundations session while still catching all the other great tool- and tech-specific presentations that TechDays is known for. We’re treating the Vancouver and Toronto Developer Foundations sessions as a test run – we’re going to watch this track, take in attendee feedback, make a note of all the lessons we learn and if it’s success, we’ll build on it and make the track a part of TechDays for all cities.

What You Can Do

Justice and Peter have a lot of work ahead of them, what with the TechDays conferences in Vancouver and Toronto taking place next month. If you’ve got suggestions or ideas for what they should cover – perhaps you’re a bit iffy on patterns, exception handling, the use of version control or how to do test-driven development – let them know! If you’re on Twitter, send a tweet to @JusticeGray or @PeterRitchie. You should also feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line; I’ll make sure it gets to them.

The other thing you can do is watch this space! I’ve got all sorts of articles coming up on the topic of good code which you’ll find useful, especially if you’re planning on hitting the Developer Foundations track at TechDays.

The early bird special price – a mere CDN$299 – is going away very, very soon. If you want to catch the great tracks at TechDays, you’d better register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tagged as: conference, developer foundations, fundamentals. good code, TechDays, Toronto, Vancouver

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