(Here’s a post from Frederic Harper, who hasn’t been set up to post on Canadian Developer Connection just yet.)
The first Montreal Web Camp, organized by Microsoft in collaboration with the Montreal .NET Community, will take place at the Microsoft Montreal office (2000 Avenue McGill College) on February 5th 2011 from 9AM to 4:30PM. You are from the Montreal area, understand French (the presentations will be in French but you’ll be able to ask questions in English), are a professional developer or not, and want to learn about MVC, OData, JQuery and meet others passionate Web developers? Join us for this day full of cutting edge Web technologies presented by professionals.
Fred is based in Montreal, where he blogs at A la Base {2} and is known as an open source guy, having worked with its vibrant PHP community with tools and technologies that those of you who eat, breathe and sleep the bash shell will find familiar: PHP, Perl, MySQL and PostgreSQL. That’s not all that different from my own experience, having worked open source from the PHP, Python and Ruby side of things. Also like me, he’s worked the .NET side of the fence, with stuff like ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server and so on. I think his perspective as a newcomer, open sourcer, Montrealer and francophone will be of great value to the team, and judging from the couple of times he’s joined us at TechDays (in Montreal and Winnipeg), I think he’ll fit in just fine.
Fred’s area of concentration is going to be web development. He’s going to be your go-to guy for Windows web technologies of all sorts, and he’s definitely your go-to guy if French is your primary language.
He’s going to be in town later this week to visit Microsoft Canada HQ in Mississauga, where he’ll go through the standard employee “onboarding” procedures, which include getting a security badge (hence the term “blue badge” for Microsoft full-time employees), filling out some TPS reports, getting his assigned gear (one of the best parts of this job – we get lots of toys) and having an exploding tracking chip implanted in his head, near the base of the skull.
(Oh, wait a minute: I think the tracking chip is one of those things we’re not supposed to talk about.)
Anyways: welcome aboard, Fred! I think you’ll like it here.
HTC 7 Surround. This is the one with the slide-out Dolby Surround speakers and a little kickstand so you can use it as a mini video player. The speakers are surprisingly loud and clear and our coworker Anthony “The Mobile Situation” Bartolo used them to great effect at TechDays this year, annoying us with the Jersey Shore soundtrack.
LG Optimus 7. This one’s for people with DLNA-equipped TVs (or in a pinch, a TV with an Xbox hooked up to it) – you can use DLNA to send the pictures and videos on your phone to a nice large screen. It’s great for presentations, vacations slides or even movie-watching.
Bell
There are a number of people who refuse to use on-screen virtual keyboards and like the reassuring feel of a button’s “throw”. If you’re one of these people, Bell’sLG Optimus Quantum is the Windows Phone for you, with a slide-out keyboard. I’ve taken it out for a test drive at the store and it feels pretty nice.
Rogers
I’m on Rogers (as are all Microsoft employees in Ontario – the company pays for our phones and plans), and their Windows Phone is the Samsung Focus. It’s sexy, skinny, much lighter than you’d expect for a device with this kind of horsepower and it sports a bright, crisp 4” Super AMOLED screen, just like the one on the Galaxy S. I end up doing a lot of impromptu demos with this phone, and everyone walks away impressed.
Expansys
If you’re in the market for an unlocked WP7 phone, or perhaps a WP7 phone that the Canadian telcos aren’t carrying, Expansys are the go-to people. If you’ve been to one of the big Microsoft conferences in the US – PDC, TechEd North America and so on – you’ve probably seen their booth. They’re the go-to guys for all sorts of mobile devices, including the hard-to-get ones.
They have a Canadian site, www.expansys.ca, and they’ve got a very extensive selection of Windows Phone 7 devices. Better still, their service is great. When I screwed up my last order and accidentally ordered the European version of a phone that wouldn’t be compatible with HSPA+ over here, a quick email to their service was all it took for them to fix the problem and let me know it was fixed. I salute them with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!
I’d like to wish all my readers a safe and fun holiday season! Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Festivus or anything else, have a fun one, enjoy the downtime, be safe, go work on your favourite side project (even if it’s doing nothing at all) and take a peek here every now and again — you never know what I might sneak in here over the break.
If things get a little too quiet and boring during the holiday downtime and you’re looking for a game, try Pirates Love Daisies. It’s a “tower defense” style game with cute graphics, great sound and very addictive gameplay, and you can play it in a browser that supports the HTML5/CSS/JavaScript troika (often just referred to as the catch-all “HTML5”), which includes the current beta of Internet Explorer 9. In the game, you set up pirates with different combat skills (pistols, swords, cannons and sponges) in strategic locations to defend your patch of daisies from rates, seagulls, crabs, octopi and their boss, the kraken.
If you’re running Internet Explorer 9 or a very fast computer (like my assigned “Dellasaurus” Precision M6500 – a quad-core I7 machine with 16GB of RAM and a 1GB graphics card), try checking the Enable additional effects for IE9 checkbox – it’ll turn on some additional graphic effects in the game, such as clouds and shadows. They’re not necessary for gameplay, but they do spice it up, and you’re going to need a browser that makes use of the GPU (such as IE9) or serious hardware if you want these effects without bogging down the game.
I never thought I’d say this, but Internet Explorer 9 actually looks to be a great browser. It has impressive performance, and seems to be very standards compliant. I would definitely recommend checking it out, you might be surprised.
Microsoft Tech Evangelist Giorgio Sardo also blogged about Pirates Love Daisies. In his post titled Pirates Love Daisies: Lessons Learned, he talks about performance and some things they learned about HTML5 game development along the way, including working with the canvas element, fonts, audio and IE9’s developer tools.
Pirates Love Daisies makes use of the Easel JavaScript library, which “provides a full, hierarchical display list, a core interaction model, and helper classes to make working with Canvas much easier.” Although it’s still in early alpha, it works well enough for Pirates Love Daisies, which uses it to manage and render the game screen.
And finally, where does Pirates Love Daisies live? In the cloud! It’s hosted on Windows Azure as proof that Azure’s not just for line-of-business-y, ecommerce-y web applications (although it works quite well for them).
Comic Sans is probably one of the most misused fonts out there. Originally intended for the comic book-style speech bubbles for “Clippy” and other assistants in Microsoft Office, it got used first for “fun”, “childlike” documents and signs, and then found its way into far less appropriate venues, including those shown in the photos below:
The Comic Sans Criminal site does a great job telling the story of Comic Sans, where people went terribly, terribly wrong with it, what the appropriate uses for Comic Sans are, and it ends with the Comic Sans Pledge:
Check out Comic Sans Criminal! It’s a beautifully-designed site that makes use of some good HTML5 tricks to turn it into an entertaining and gorgeous slideshow, and if it stops you from using Comic Sans inappropriately (or even better, altogether), so much the better!
This book’s so new that I’m not sure the dead-tree version is available yet: it’s Windows Phone 7 Game Development, published by Apress and written by Adam Dawes. I’ve just purchased the ebook version (which you can download right away for USD$34.99), so I’ve only had a chance to do a quick skim.
According to Apress’ site, here’s what you’ll learn from Windows Phone 7 Game Development:
How to get started with Windows Phone 7 development, from setting up the IDE to debugging techniques.
Develop using the free or full versions of Visual Studio 2010.
Master high performance 2D and 3D graphics using the XNA development environment.
Build 2D games using Silverlight and also learn how to publish them to the web.
Find out the best ways to control your games, including using touch screens, keyboards and accelerometers.
Produce high quality music and sound effects from your games.
Masses of example code and working projects, including two example games, "Cosmic Rocks" and "Diamond Lines."
All you need to release your games to the world for fun or to sell.
It’s official: I’m not "The 
Pirates Love Daisies makes use of the 
