Microsoft is the Platinum sponsor of Austin JavaScript’s SxSW party taking place this Sunday. Among other things, they’ll be promoting the IE team’s {Dev:unplugged} competition, where web developers will be challenged to push the limits of a modern browser without plugins – just pure HTML5, baby!
I’ll write more in a later post.
The South by Southwest (SxSW) conference may have started off as a music festival – and it still is; if you want to see up-and-coming bands before anyone else hears about them, this is the place – but it’s grown to include the film and interactive sections. I’ve been told that nowadays, the Interactive part of the conference is larger than Music and Film.
It was at SxSW that Twitter and later, Foursquare, exploded onto the scene, when A-list bloggers started making use of it to find each other and locate the happening parties. I’ve seen some of the best and most inspiring presentations at SxSW, from Kathy Sierra talking about creating apps so great that your users become passionate about them to the creator of the Post Secret talking about building a site that tugs at your heartstrings to Ben Huh explaining how I Can Haz Cheezburger got started, and handing out cheeseburgers to everyone in the audience at the end of the session. I watched the entertaining but cringeworthy keynote with Sarah Lacy interviewing Mark Zuckerburg during which they weren’t clicking. I’ve had amazing between-sessions conversations with developers, designers and “suits” about their projects, technologies that they were excited about and the industry in general. And yes, I may have attended a party of two.
While there’s a lot that you can learn online, there’s a reason the expression “you had to be there” exists. For all the world-shrinking tech that lets us send words, sounds, pictures and videos over great distances and lets us attend meetings just with a headset and webcam, there’s still no substitute for gathering together to tell stories, share ideas and even team up. That’s why we go to great expense to hold events like TechDays and AlignIT as well as smaller gatherings like hackathons and Coffee and Codes. As the “agilistas” will tell you, developing software is as much about talking to people as it is about talking to machines.
That’s one of the reasons I’m at South by Southwest for the next seven days. I’m there to catch up with some of the brightest lights in the world of interactive tech, hear what they have to say, pick their brains and share this knowledge with you. I’ll be filing reports from the conference, taking notes, pictures and video, so you can see what’s going on.
Whenever I can, I’ll also be sharing Canadian developers’ stories. SxSW is one of the big tech conferences, so many Canadian developers and startups make it a point to come here every year to make sure they’re on top of what’s going on in the industry, as well as to be seen and heard. If you have the time and the funds, I recommend coming down to SxSW and experiencing the sessions, the collective brainpower, the vibe, and yes, the partying. All work and no play makes you a dull developer, after all.
Finally, I’m here to help the Internet Explorer team promote the very-soon-to-be-final IE9. Here’s a browser that we can proudly say gives the best of both worlds: it’s as compliant as our very own nitpicky legal department (no more coding to quirks!) and thanks to hardware acceleration, it runs like snakes on ice. I’ll be checking in with the IE9 team, helping out at the Austin JavaScript Party on Sunday and talking to developers about the troika of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript and how IE9 supports it.
Keep an eye on this blog for my reports from South by Southwest! I promise you’ll be informed and entertained.
Are you a Canadian post-secondary student? Do you think you (or better still, you and a team of your fellow students) whip up a mobile game in 48 hours? Are you looking for something to do this weekend, something where you could end up with a published app, some fame and prizes? Then the Great Canadian Appathon, which takes place this weekend, is right up your alley.
Toronto-based mobile game shop XMG Studio, along with the National Post, Telus and KPMG are holding this event. As the folks behind the phone with what I believe to be the easiest development frameworks for apps and games – Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight and XNA – we’ve stepped up and are the official platform sponsor of the Great Canadian Appathon.
The Appathon isn’t just about building a great game, but also doing so within a limited timeframe. Competing teams can’t start developing until Friday, March 11th at 5:00 p.m. Eastern and are working towards a deadline set at 48 hours later: Sunday, March 13th at 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Teams can be up to 4 students and can compete either at specific Appathon venues located in several colleges and universities across Canada (which will be providing the appropriate hacker food and energy drinks) or in the comfort of their own room.
The importance of participating in competitions like the Appathon is greater than you might think. For starters, participating in such an exercise will help bring you closer to the 10,000 hours you need to become an expert in software development (if you’re not familiar with the 10,000 Hour Rule, you should read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers). The time constraint will be a challenge, but things like that will help give you the necessary experience to handle the sorts of stressful situations that you’ll encounter in the working world. There’s also the matter of prizes. And finally, contests are a great way to get noticed by potential employers, even if you don’t place first, second or third. Kristan “Krispy” Uccelo, a friend of mine, placed 4th in a node.js contest and was contacted by Google – he’s got a pretty nice job with them now.
If you’d like to participate in the Great Canadian Appathon, your team should sign up by 5:00 p.m. this Friday, March 11th. And may we suggest that you build a game for Windows Phone 7?
If you’re planning on competing in the Appathon, you might want to check out these phone developer resources:
Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7 are two Microsoft technologies that have taken a lot of people by surprise. People expected them to be mere incremental releases rather than what they were: complete re-thinks of their predecessors. IE9 brought serious web standards compliance and hardware acceleration to Internet Explorer, and WP7 was a complete from-the-ground-up reworking of the way we did phones. For many people, IE9 and WP7 are terra incognita – unknown territory – and we’d like to help you navigate it.
Internet Explorer 9’s scheduled for general release soon, and Windows Phone is due for a couple of updates this year, so there’s never been a better time to get up to speed on these two technologies. That’s why we’re holding boot camps in cities across Canada to help you get the most out of both. These free (that’s right, free, as in you-don’t-pay-nuthin’) events will features the following sessions
A Lap Around Internet Explorer 9 and HTML5
A look at IE9’s support for the troika that collectively goes by the name “HTML5”: HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. You’ll see how standards compliance and the resulting “same markup” will make life good for both developers and users and how that same markup runs faster on IE9 thanks to the newer, faster JavaScript engine and hardware acceleration.
Enhancing Pinned Sites with Internet Explorer 9
IE9’s “pinned sites” feature makes web apps feel more like desktop apps by letting users add website to the taskbar and start menu and let developers add custom context menus to pinned site icons, provide visual notifications on the task bar with icon overlays and even add custom buttons on the default thumbnail preview. This session will show you how to best use this feature and also cover IE9’s developer tools.
Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Recipes
You’ve read the introductory material and written “Hello World” on the Phone, and you’re now thinking of starting a bigger project. You’re now asking this question: “How do I do X on Windows Phone?”. This session is the answer. You’ll learn all the recipes for building blocks of applications, which you can use, modify and combine in your own Windows Phone 7 apps.
Windows Phone 7 XNA Kickstart
Haven’t you always wanted to write a videogame, but could never get started? This is your chance. This session will show you the basics of XNA, the game development framework for Windows Phone (and the Xbox 360 and Windows too!). You’ll get your feet wet writing 2D videogames, learn some game coding techniques and get you need to start you on your journey as a game developer.
Here’s where and when they’re taking place. Remember, they’re free – you just have to register!
| Where and When | Which Sessions |
| Downtown Toronto KPMG (333 Bay Street, 46th Floor) Tuesday, March 8th Click here to register |
IE9 sessions only |
| Downtown Toronto Microsoft Canada Ernst & Young Tower, 12th floor (222 Bay Street) Friday, March 18th Click here to register |
WP7 sessions only |
| Mississauga Microsoft Canada (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard) Friday, March 25th Click here to register |
IE9 and WP7 sessions |
| Vancouver BCIT, Burnaby Campus (3700 Willingdon Avenue) Saturday, March 26th Click here to register |
IE9 and WP7 sessions |
| Winnipeg IMAX Theatre Winnipeg (393 Portage Avenue) Tuesday, April 5th Click here to register |
IE9 and WP7 sessions |
A recent blog entry of Rob Tiffany’s points out what the mobile web is, and equally important, what it isn’t. Here’s Rob’s example of the mobile web, as seen on Windows Phone:
As the name “mobile web” implies, what we see here is a web page formatted for mobile devices. Consider the alternative: the traditional web site, designed with desktop computers in mind, as seen on the Phone:
Rob says that having web pages that can switch to mobile-friendly mode is important because:
Rob also believes that access to phone features will be made available to the HTML5/CSS/JavaScript troika by 2013, meaning that web-based phone apps will have functionality rivalling those of native apps:
For more, check out Rob’s article on the mobile web, where he covers a wide array of topics:
I often refer to the browser currently on Windows Phone as “IE 7.5” – it’s basically IE7 with some IE8 features included. It’s a decent, functional browser that I’ve been making very good use of (especially since I’ve been on the road a lot in the past few months), but it’s no IE9.
Luckily, that state of affairs won’t last for too much longer. There’s a team hard at work bringing IE9 to the Phone, and for the first time, the desktop and mobile versions of IE are built on the same codebase. The upcoming IE for Windows Phone will have IE9 desktop’s standard compliance, and as you can see in the video above (featuring Joe Belfiore presenting WP7 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a couple of weeks ago), it’ll also have IE9’s hardware acceleration.
You’ll see more about IE9, the mobile web and other goodies at MIX11 in just over a month. There’s great tech afoot!
There’s a new Windows Phone 7 ad titled What If? running in the US for AT&T. It features the Samsung Focus, which is offered by Rogers here in Canada. It’s a nice ad with a lot of flash, but even more important is that it shows the Windows Phone UI in action.
Here’s what the voice-over says:
What if the best-looking phone in the room also had brains? And let you watch your favourite movies? Find the best restaurants? Play Xbox Live? And keep up with your friends? If it had that, and this, shouldn’t you have one?
Yes, you should. Get the only phone with Office, Xbox live and thousands of apps. Get a Windows Phone for only ninety-nine ninety-nine at AT&T.
In case you were wondering what the background music was, it’s Infinity Guitars by Sleigh Bells, off their album Treats (which is on heavy rotation at my home office).
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and The Great Canadian Apportunity.
“Look at this crowd,” I said, pointing to the people boarding Air Canada 541 late Sunday afternoon, the daily direct Toronto-to-Seattle flight. “Ogio bags with Microsoft branding, laptops with Windows stickers, Windows Phones and more Zunes than I’ve ever seen in the wild. This flight’s mostly MVPs and a few employees.”
MVPs are Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals. The title of MVP is an award given by Microsoft to non-Microsofties who voluntarily share their expertise with some Microsoft tool or technology with others and whose contributions help build communities around that tool or technology. MVPs are the sorts of people who start user groups, help out in forums (whether they’re Microsoft’s or independent ones like Stack Overflow), write blogs or books, speak at conferences, and generally do things to promote and spread the know-how of some Microsoft product. Microsoft awards MVP status to these extra-keen contributors twice a year, and it’s awarded based on their activities through the past year. MVPs get lots of perks from Microsoft, including the event I’m at this week: the 2011 MVP Global Summit.
MVP Global Summits are annual gatherings where MVPs from around the world come to Microsoft to be thanked for their hard work, see “deep dive” presentations covering the tools and technologies in which they specialize (including sessions on upcoming stuff that the world at large doesn’t know about yet), meet with people on the product teams and other MVPs, and ask questions, make comments and provide feedback on the product for which they are experts.
As I write this, I’m sitting at an MVP Global Summit session at the taking place at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond with a couple of Canadian MVPs: Mark Arteaga of Toronto-based RedBit Development, who is a Windows Phone MVP and Silverlight MVP Louis-Philippe Pinsonneault of RunAtServer in Montreal. We’re in the middle of an afternoon of sessions on Windows Phone:
In my role as a Microsoft Developer Evangelist, I think of MVPs as my primary “go-to” people for real-world experience and knowledge of various tools and technologies. I call on MVPs for all sorts of things, ranging from answers to questions to speaking at events to referring potential customers to them. Having MVP status means that you’ve got a closer relationship with Microsoft, which brings all sorts of benefits, opportunities and connections. If you’re the sort of developer who also likes getting involved with knowledge sharing and community building and go above and beyond what other people do, you might be a good MVP candidate.
Here’s a quick summary of the MVP nomination process, lifted straight off the MVP site:
To receive the Microsoft MVP Award, MVP nominees undergo a rigorous review process. A panel that includes members of the MVP team and Microsoft product groups evaluates each nominee’s technical expertise and voluntary community contributions for the past 12 months. The panel considers the quality, quantity, and level of impact of the MVP nominee’s contributions. Active MVPs receive the same level of scrutiny as other new candidates each year.
If you know someone who should be an MVP – someone who contributes to Microsoft-y social/technical communities, consistently demonstrates outstanding community leadership and freely shares deep technical knowledge — you should nominate him or her! This page explains how.