Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and it’ll be going live very soon – expect to hear a number of announcements about it from next week’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC).

I’ll be posting articles showing you how to get into developing on Azure, but if you want to get a head start in the meantime, a good place to go is MSDev, Microsoft’s site that’s packed to the rafters with video training on all sorts of Microsoft platform development topics. There’s a series of training videos covering Azure development, including:

• Windows Azure Overview
• Windows Azure Fundamentals
• Developing a Windows Azure Application
• Microsoft SQL Azure Overview for Developers

…and more videos are on the way.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I have no idea if WIND Mobile is going to be able to deliver what they promise – a mobile phone company that listens to its customers and provides better service than the sad players in the Canadian mobile phone oligarchy – but they’ve got the right ideas and some rather funny videos that perfectly illustrate what the Canadian mobile customer has to contend with.

What if Toronto’s hot dog vendors had a pricing model like Canadian mobile phone companies? Buying a hot dog would be like this:

Canada is the only country in the world where mobile companies lock you into three-year contracts for mobile service, and this situation is illustrated in the video titled Bike Lock:

I always look at the service packages offered by U.S. mobile companies with envy. Here, the mobile companies love nickel-and-diming you:

WIND is a new entrant into the Canadian mobile phone market and a branch of Globalive Communications, who already have a presence in Canada in the form of Yak Communications, an alternative phone and internet provider. They seem to be taking a very “social media” approach to their marketing, what with the “viral” YouTube videos and a “conversational” website in which readers are encourage to actively participate in online discussions.

They look like an interesting company to watch, and hey, if they can get me a better deal than Rogers, I’ll switch.

Recommended Reading

Tom Purves has been one of voices leading the battle cry against Canadian mobile companies for the past couple of years. Back in 2007 at DemoCamp 17, he gave what I consider to be the best ignite presentation ever given at a Toronto DemoCamp, The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks. Here’s the slide deck from that presentation:

He recently revised his presentation for 2009 when he presented it at the FITC mobile conference in September, which mentions WIND mobile:

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

Today is your last chance to register for TechDays Canada 2009’s Vancouver (September 14 – 15) and Toronto (September 29 – 30) conferences at the early bird price of CDN$299. Tomorrow, the price doubles to CDN$599 – that’s the price for procrastination!

I’ve written a lot about TechDays Canada 2009 lately, so I think I’ll close with this video shot by the folks at TechVibes on the last leg of the TechDays Canada 2008 tour: Vancouver. It features my coworkers Rick Claus (IT Pro Evangelist) and Qixing Zheng (User Experience Evangelist) as well as Yours Truly (Developer Evangelist) talking about TechDays:

Techvibes at Microsoft Tech Days 2008 from Techvibes.com on Vimeo.

With the work we’re putting into TechDays, we think it’ll be the conference that offers you the most conference for your hard-earned dollars. It features big-league sessions delivered by local people plus great resources for you to take home (and to work) and supercharge the way you work with technology. You really should register today, while the early bird price is still in effect.

Last month, I posted a video announcing the launch of the Race to Market Challenge, a competition that challenges you to add some Windows Phone applications to our up-and-coming Marketplace and compete for one of four grand prizes: developer editions of a Surface table.

There’s a new video out, and I’m posting it as a little reminder for you would-be mobile developers, Windows Phone is a great way to get in on the ground floor of the world of mobile application development and win prizes at the same time:

I’ll be posting articles about how to access useful data and features on Windows Phone, including the Pocket Outlook Object Model (POOM, which gives you access to things like contact information) and using the GPS to get the user’s location.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

While I do hope and believe that Microsoft can get their mobile strategy right, there are days when I worry that Windows Mobile 7 is going to be like this:

What happens when a girl from a l33t family brings a n00b boy home to meet her parents?

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

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The 2009 edition of the RSA Conference, the biggest and best-known cryptography and information security conference, took place last month in San Francisco. Each year, the conference has a theme based on or relevant to crypto or infosec, and this year’s theme was Edgar Allen Poe (previous themes include the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, the secrets of the Mayans, Mary Queen of Scots and Alan Turing).

The people behind the conference were kind enough to post video of the keynotes, which I found thanks to a pointer from TechNet’s Jeff Jones, author of the Jeff Jones Security Blog. You can click on the links below to watch the videos. Jeff strongly recommends that you do not miss the opening ceremony segment of the “Day 1 Keynotes” video, and I don’t have to tell you that you should catch the closing keynote, featuring Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of the popular nerd television series Mythbusters:

• Day 1 keynotes
• Day 2 keynotes
• Day 3 keynotes
• Day 4 keynote: The Hugh Thompson Show, featuring the music video  “The Security Rap”
• Day 4 keynote: The Mythbusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman

Another internet meme made the big time today – today’s edition of CNN’s “American Morning” ended with anchor Kiran Chetry announcing that they would be “played out” by “Keyboard Cat”. In case you haven’t yet seen them, Keyboard Cat videos all follow the same formula:

• They all have the name “Play Him/Her Out, Keyboard Cat”
• They begin with a segment in which someone humiliates or hurts himself or herself
• They cut to a strange video featuring a cat playing a tune on a cheesy home keyboard

This is my favourite Keyboard Cat video, in which a guy learns an important lesson in nunchuk safety:

This one, featuring a guy whose parents are trying to convince him that it’s bad idea to broadcast his meltdown online, is a close second:

And now, we can find out about the origin of Keyboard Cat and how he turned into an internet meme, thanks to this story in the Los Angeles Times.

When using your company-assigned laptop to make presentations, remember to disable your pornographically-themed screensaver (and yes, the video below is not safe for work):

Here’s a presentation that’s worth watching, regardless of what operating system you use: it’s Bryan Lunduke’s presentation from Linux Fest Northwest – a Linux conference for “Rebel Scum” deep in the heart of The Empire — and it’s titled Linux Sucks, in which he talks about what needs to be fixed in desktop Linux. His Linux laptop helped prove the point at the beginning of the presentation by stubbornly refusing to display anything on the projector and requiring some guy to noodle with the X configs:

(By the bye, hooking up multiple monitors to a Windows 7 machine is dirt easy. The Windows-P key combo toggles between main monitor-only, other monitor-only, mirrored and “extend desktop” modes. The “Linux laptops and projectors” problem is a common one; I remember gently poking presenters at CUSEC trying to get their Linux laptops to display on the projector with “If you were running Win 7, you’d be done by now.”)

I think that this is an important presentation for developers to watch, whether they develop for Windows or the Esteemed Competition, because all operating systems suck, and it’s our job as developers to make them suck less. Linux on the desktop has all sorts of problems because it’s a free-for-all run but a rag-tag fleet of development shops, but Windows has its own problems stemming from all sorts of things, such as having to maintain some kind of backward compatibility for the sake of enterprise installations at Fortune 500 companies.

The lesson to take from this video should be that we should forget the rah-rah boosterism, take a good hard look at the platforms for which we build, and do what we can to make them better. The best platform advocacy is to make the platform suck less.

Here’s a great video inspired by Andy Samberg’s People Getting Punched Out Just Before Eating short film from Saturday Night Live made to promote the Independent Games Festival at the Game Developers Conference 2009:

This article originally appeared in Canadian Developer Connection.

One of the things we saw at the behind-closed-doors, Microsoft-eyes-only TechReady 8 conference was the “2019” concept video shown to us by Business Division President Stephen Elop. Since then, the video’s gone public, with his showing it recently at the Wharton Business Technology Conference and its appearance on Long Zheng;s blog, I Started Something.

The video is a montage of “slices of life” in the year 2019, and shows a vision for how people could be using technology in their everyday life then. Don’t think of this video as an attempt to predict the future; they’re notorious for being hilariously wrong in retrospect. Instead, think of it as inspiration for future projects, a source of ideas for applications and user interfaces and a way to shake loose any assumptions or fixations you might have about how applications should work. As developers, I thought that you might find the video (it’s 5 minutes, 38 seconds in length) an interesting watch, and possibly even the spark that gets you started on your next project.

For those of you who are the type to analyze still frames from your favourite movies, you can see some close-ups of the future user interfaces featured in the video in the PowerPoint deck that Stephen Elop used when he showed this video.

I sometimes refer to people who are incredibility dogmatic about their particular Agile or Extreme Programming methodology as “Agile Nazis”. But what if Agile Nazis literally existed? I think their project meetings would go something like this YouTube remix titled Hitler’s Nightly Build Fails…

(Thanks to Jodi Showers for the link!)

Here’s a fun little claymation video showing called Pointer Fun with Binky that explains C++ pointers “to kids”. Why can’t all programming be taught this way?

My favourite phrase of the moment, thanks to this video, is “Magic Wand of Dereferencing”.

[Found via Being Cellfish.]

Once again, it’s time for my favourite videogame reviewer, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, and his series of smartass videogame reviews, Zero Punctuation. This week, he covers Fallout 3. His verdict:

Yeah, it’s pretty good.

Its 93 rating at Metacritic — which gives it a standing equal to Gears of War 2 – comes from a number of glowing reviews from various sources:

• 1UP
• AceGamez
• D+PAD Magazine
• EuroGamer
• G4 TV
• Game Revolution
• GamePro
• GameShark
• GameSpy
• Official Xbox Magazine
• The Onion (AV Club)
• Yahoo! Games

Here it is, the second trailer of J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek movie, all hellzapoppin’ and complete with an homage to the "chicken run" scene from Rebel Without a Cause.

I’m keeping in mind that it’s the job of the people who produce trailers to make a movie seem more interesting and exciting than it actually might be, but I’m still holding out hope that Abrams has been taking the story-crafting skill he hasn’t been using on the TV series Fringe and pouring it into Trek. I guess we’ll find out in a few months…

I’m meeting up with a lot of interesting new people and catching up with old friends and collegaues here at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008 in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Among the people I ran into was John Lam of the IronRuby project. This was the prefect opportunity for me to conduct my first podcast interview as a Microsoft Developer Evangelist. I asked John to explain IronRuby to people who’d never heard of it and to give us a quick summary of the current state of the project.

My thanks to John Bristowe for suggesting that I conduct the interview and for doing the camera and post-production work!

Oh, how I enjoy Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s game reviews in his video series Zero Punctuation. In this installment, he covers (and savages) Will Wright’s long-awaited game, Spore. Thankfully, he skips complaining about the DRM, which I heard plenty about already. After hearing his review, DRM sounds like the least of the game’s problems…

Some of my coworkers at b5 were all hot-and-bothered about the demo for the XBox 360 game Too Human, so I decided to download it and give it a try. I played it and was generally less than impressed with both the gameplay and especially the storyline (like Assassin’s Creed, the story’s a rather clumsy mish-mash of swords-and-sorcery and sci-fi genres).

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, the fast-trash-talking host of the excellent videogame review show Zero Punctuation agrees with me. He panned the game in his trademark fashion:

This one’s for the Samsung Omnia (a.k.a. the i900):