Global Nerdy

As this College Humor video shows, some things are best not shared on the internet.

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

No matter what technology stack you build on, no matter whether you build for web, desktop or mobile., no matter what programming languages or developer tools you use, you should be reading PragPub. Put together by the publishing company behind such gems as The Pragmatic Programmer, Programming Ruby (a.k.a. “The Pickaxe Book”), The Passionate Programmer and Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, it’s a monthly e-magazine covering a wide range of programming topics, all with the intent of making your better developer and helping you make the most of your career.

The February 2011 issue of PragPub is a celebration of Agile’s tenth birthday. Ten years ago this month, 17 software developers of note – including Andy Hunt, one of the founders of The Pragmatic Programmer – got together at a ski resort in Utah, supposedly to discuss lightweight development methods. I am impressed that the end result of their get-together was the Agile Manifesto and the kick-starting of what we now know as Agile Software Development; I would’ve opted for hitting the slopes, turning apres-ski at the chalet into my own private beer commercial and generally turning the entire event into Hot Tub Time Machine. (I suppose that such a smart group of developers could’ve done both, but in a webcast last year, Andy told me and John Bristowe that the gathering was all business.)

To celebrate this occasion, ten of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, Andy Hunt, Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Jon Kern, Ken Schwaber, James Grenning, Arie van Bennekum, Stephen J. Mellor, Ward Cunningham, and Dave Thomas have each written a reflection on the programming movement they started, There’s also an article in which they look back at two years of articles on Agile in PragPub and there’s also a new installment of their regular Way of the Agile Warrior column.

This issue has other articles covering other topics. One I found noteworthy and which you might useful is Refactoring Your Job, an article on not just surviving, but thriving, in these economically precarious times.

Download PragPub! It’s a good, quick read, and it’s free!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

If you’re looking to target the widest array of platforms on the Microsoft stack – desktop, web, phone and the upcoming slate – you’ll want to be versed in Silverlight and C#. For Groundhog Day only (February 2nd), Manning have a deal to help you: you can get two paper books, which come with the ebook versions for USD$50.00:

• Silverlight 4 in Action, written by Microsoft Community Program Manager for Silverlight and WPF
• C# in Depth, written by C# super-MVP (and Stack Overflow C# superstar) Jon Skeet

Want both books in paper and ebook form for $50? Buy both from Manning.com and use the code dotd0202 in the Promotional Code box when you check out.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

There are lots of reasons to give Windows Phone development a try:

• The all-new UI. It’s beautiful, different, it’s useable and useful and people love it after taking it for a psin
• The great phones. I really love my Samsung Focus.
• The development tools. You’ve got Visual Studio (or Visual Studio Express for Phone, which is simply amazing for an IDE that’s being given away for free), and you’ve got not one, but two development frameworks: Silverlight for more “app”-flavoured apps and XNA for games, all built on top of the .NET framework.
• The opportunities. It’s still early in the days of Windows Phone, and it’s still early in the era of smartphones (most North American mobile customers have yet to get their first smartphone) – this is your chance to make a big splash in both the worlds of Windows Phone and smartphones in general.

Now Canadian developers have one more reason to take up Windows Phone 7 development: The Great Canadian Apportunity. It’s your chance to write an app, show it off to developers across Canada and compete for a chance to win prizes including:

• The grand prize: $CDN10,000 in sweet “cash money”
• Travel and registration to Canada’s web and social media conference, the Mesh conference
• A Dell Alienware laptop
• Xboxes and Kinect
• and more!

I’ll be writing regularly about The Great Canadian Apportunity and Windows Phone development over the next few months, but if you want to get started right now, take a look at the site for The Great Canadian Apportunity to get all the details. Time’s a-wasting: get started writing the Great Canadian App!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’ve talked about Smashing Magazine’s Smashing HTML5 and Introducing HTML 5, and now I’m going to talk about a couple of easy reads that should be part of your library: HTML5 for Web Designers and CSS3 for Web Designers, two books published by A Book Apart, the book-publishing wing of the must-read site A List Apart (and seriously, if you build websites and it’s not one of your regular reads, bookmark it now).

HTML5 for Web Designers boils down the opaque and obtuse 900-page HTML5 spec into a clear and easy-to-read 85 pages that capture the intended spirit of the original document without getting bogged down in the minutiae (and oh, is there a lot of it). If you need to get from zero to “getting” HTML5 in the quickest way possible, this is the book for you!

CSS3 for Web Designers is the perfect companion for HTML5 for Web Designers, clearly explaining the styling part of the HTML5/CSS/JavaScript troika, from shadows, gradients and those ever-popular rounded corners to fonts and animations. It’s a slim volume (133 pages), but you’ll still get a lot of mileage out of the material covered within.

Each book is available as:

• Paperback for USD$18.00 plus shipping
• Ebook for USD$9.00 (PDF, ePub and mobi formats)
• Paperback/ebook bundle for USD$23.00 plus shipping

And both books are available as a bundle, and they make an excellent combo. Better still, you save 15% by ordering them as a bundle:

• Paperback bundle of both books for USD$30.00 plus shipping
• Ebook bundle of both books for USD$15.00 (PDF, ePub and mobi formats)
• Paperback/ebook bundle for both books for USD$38.00 plus shipping

Get these books, learn and start cranking out some standards-compliant websites!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

MIX11 is just like the Kinect – you are the controller! MIX, Microsoft’s conference on web and mobile technologies and its most right-brained, designer-friendly gathering, takes place in Las Vegas from April 12th through 14th. They opened the door to session submissions a little while back, and now it’s time to vote for which sessions should take place. As expected, a number of Canadian developers – all of whom have spoken at TechDays and other Canadian developer events – have had their submissions accepted and they now need your support!

Please take a look at the sessions proposed by our Canadian developer friends listed below and vote for them! And vote soon – the voting closes this Friday, February 4th at 3:00 a.m. Eastern (12:00 midnight Pacific).

• Windows Azure Platform as the backend for Windows Phone experiences (Colin Melia)
• On-Premise Data to Cloud to Phone – Connecting with Odata (Colin Melia)
• Getting to grips with MVVM on Windows Phone (Colin Melia)
• 0 to Phone App in 60 Minutes (Colin Melia)
• HTML 5 for .NET Pros (David Wesst)
• Prototype it! SketchFlow in the Real World (David Wesst)
• DotNetNuke (Hadron) – "Not Your Mama’s DotNetNuke" (Charles Nurse)
• Have your Cake and Eat it Too – Using the WebFormsMVP Framework to Develop Testable Web Applications (Charles Nurse)
• Mobile First Design – Laser Focus on User Experience (Miguel Carrasco)
• Building Engaging User Experiences with SharePoint 2010 and Expression Studio (Miguel Carrasco)
• Getting into SharePoint 2010 branding for traditional web developers (Yaroslav Pentsarskyy)
• Achieving total developer-designer harmony with Expression Blend and Silverlight (Francis Beaudet)
• Web Acceptance Testing with ASP.NET MVC (Amir Barylko)
• Identity Bests – Managing User Identity in the new Decade (Steve Syfuhs)
• Working with Dynamic Objects in Silverlight with Strongly-Typed Goodness (Jeremiah Redekop)

Remember, you can save big bucks by registering for MIX early! If you register by February 11th, you’ll save $500 off the registration fee (knocking it down from USD$1395 to USD$895) and receive one free hotel night when you book two or more nights at Mandalay Bay hotel (the MIX conference takes place at Mandalay Bay’s convention center).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

GPS drives a lot a mobile applications, and we’re only just beginning to work out all the possible uses for it. On Windows Phone, you access location information with classes and interfaces provided in the System.Device.Location namespace. Here’s a quick look at its classes:

Writing location-aware apps is pretty simple using GeoCoordinateWatcher, but until now, testing them has been a bit of a chore. There wasn’t a straightforward way to test GPS apps in the emulator; you had to use a phone and actually go to real locations. While you really should do real-world testing of GPS apps by actually going out into the real world, it would be easier (especially in the beginning) if there were some way to test GPS apps in the emulator.

Enter the Windows Phone GPS Emulator! Here’s what Yochay Kiriaty has to say about it in the Windows Phone Developer Blog:

The Windows Phone GPS Emulator (a small WPF application) and one WP7 DLL enable you to debug your application on the Windows Phone emulator or a real device without leaving the comfort of your home or office. Once you’ve completed your testing and debugging, you only need to change a single line of code to switch to the device back to real GPS.

With the GPS Emulator, you can set a location anywhere on the globe by using the map display. Furthermore, you can plan routes with multiple intermediate waypoints, or use Bing services to calculate driving directions between locations. Once you’ve planned a route, you can simulate driving through the pre-defined waypoints along the path.

The recipe includes:

• The Windows GPS Emulator application
• The Windows Phone GPS Emulator Client DLL
• A simple Windows Phone Test client
• A complete end-to-end Windows Phone App using Bings maps (a more complex sample)

Using the GPS Emulator lets you create complex path that you can playback just as if you were driving or walking. Then, you can choose your Windows Phone application and receive the location information form the GPS Emulator just as if you got it via the real GPS.

Here’s a screenshot of the GPS Emulator and Windows Phone Emulator in action:

Want to get started with the GPS Emulator? Head on down to the GPS Emulator page in App Hub and download the recipe, which includes:

• The Windows GPS Emulator application
• The Windows Phone GPS Emulator Client DLL
• A simple Windows Phone Test client
• An end-to-end Windows Phone App using Bing maps (a more complex sample)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.