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Windows Phone 7 Bootcamp

Devvin' for Seven: Windows Phone 7 DevelopmentYou’ve seen the announcement and perhaps you’ve downloaded the beta of the Windows Phone 7 dev tools (if you haven’t, do it now!)

Click here to download WP7 Developer Tools Beta

Now that you’ve got the tools, what’s next? Will they just lie there, dormant on your hard drive, or are you going to use them and be a trailblazer on a brand new mobile platform?

Windows Phone 7 Bootcamp: Montreal (August 23 - 24), Vancouver (August 30 - 31), Ottawa (September 2 - 3), Toronto (September 7 - 8)

If you’re looking for intense training with personal attention by a highly-rated presenter with Silverlight and cloud development expertise, you’ll want to check out DevTeach’s Windows Phone 7 Bootcamps. They’re being presented by Colin Melia, who’s presented at TechDays, wrote the Silverlight demo app that we used for the EnergizeIT tour and is one of our go-to guys for Windows Azure – simply put, the guy knows his stuff.

BootThe Windows Phone 7 Bootcamps are serious courses – two full days of in-class hands-on training in which Colin will explain the Windows Phone 7 platform and especially Silverlight as it runs on Windows Phone, with all the details on Silverlight programming techniques, controls, templates, styling, resources, animation, data binding, navigation, interfaces and all those things you need to know about to build a mobile app. The course will mostly cover the Silverlight side of Windows Phone development, although there will be a section on game development with XNA.

If you’re a busy developer who’s having trouble setting aside time to learn all those separate bits that go into Windows Phone development – Silverlight, calling on web services, the Windows Phone-specific APIs, using information for sensors such as GPS and accelerometers and dealing with the constraints of mobile devices – this course is well worth the money. It’ll give you the kick start you start writing apps and capitalize on the wide-open marketplace of Windows Phone apps.

Windows Phone 7 "People" hubThe bootcamps take place in the following cities on the following dates:

  • Montreal: Monday, August 23 and Tuesday, August 24 at the Microsoft office
  • Vancouver: Monday, August 30 and Tuesday, August 31 at the Sutton Place Hotel
  • Ottawa: Thursday, September 2 and Friday, September 3 at the Microsoft office
  • Toronto: Tuesday, September 7 and Wednesday, September 8 at Microsoft’s downtown office

The registration fee is CDN$999 for the full-day training session, and you can save $100 by using the discount code WP7BOOTCAMP when you register. I repeat:

Save $100 with this code: WP7BOOTCAMP

For the full details on the Windows Phone 7 Bootcamp, see the Windows Phone 7 Bootcamp page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Now in Beta: Windows Phone Developer Tools!

Devvin' for Seven: Windows Phone 7 DevelopmentThe announcement went out earlier today: the Windows Phone Developer Tools have moved from the CTP ("Community Technical Preview”) phase to Beta (“Almost There!”). As Brandon Watson wrote in the Windows Phone Developer Blog, “This Beta release represents the near final version of the tools for building applications and games for Windows Phone 7.”

Go ahead, go and download it! Click the big graphic link below. You know you want to.

click here to download wp7 developer tools beta

Make sure you uninstall previous versions of Windows Phone Developer Tools before you install the beta.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Techmeme: One-Stop Tech News and Your Ticket to Nerd Rock Stardom

techmeme

One of the bits of advice that Scott Hanselman gave in our interview with him on Ignite Your Coding  was that a good way to stay on top of all the things happening in the tech world is “follow the aggregators” – the people who take the time to comb through all the tech news and collect it into a single place. I hope that you consider this blog one of your aggregators.

Even aggregators rely on other aggregators, and this one has relied on Techmeme for the longest time (since writing for Canadian Developer Connection since 2009 and Global Nerdy since 2006). Techmeme is Gabe Rivera’s ever-updating “Page One” powered by news crawlers and a human editorial board featuring breaking tech news stories and commentaries on those stories, from big tech news sites to tech blogs (ranging from big, corporate-funded ones to one-person developer blogs). I hit Techmeme several times a day and have found it incredibly useful in all sorts of ways, and it’s nice to see Gabe and Techmeme get their due in the New York Times article Techmeme Offers Tech News at Internet Speed.

Not Just the Story, But the Stories Around the Story

One of the great things about Techmeme is where it leads you. Not only do the big tech stories of the moment appear on Techmeme, but so do stories that link to that story. As a result, you get not just what’s going on, but also links to articles that follow up on, expand, provide context for and even counterpoint to that story.

Here’s a screen shot of a story featured on Techmeme last week, Mary Jo Foley’s article on WebMatrix:

anatomy of a techmeme story

Mary Jo’s article, Microsoft takes aim at Web developers with new WebMatrix tool suite, appears at the top. Below it, in the section titled “Discussion”, are all the blogs that link to Mary Jo’s article. Each of these discussion articles provides some additional context, often with a different angle, from the developer-specific angles covered by Scott “ScottGu” Guthrie and me (in the 3rd article in the discussion list) to the overview angle provided by Ars Technica to the managerial angles provided by Softpedia News and Betanews. You’ll often see disagreeing points of view as well. This “story plus discussion” approach is often very useful for getting a better picture and broader perspective of what’s going on.

Okay, What About the “Your Ticket to Nerd Rock Stardom” Part?

Star Wars Rock

According to the New York Times article, Techmeme has a reach of about 260,000 readers and get 3 million pageviews a month. Its Alexa traffic rank worldwide is 7,845 (out of all the web pages in the world, it is the 7,845th most popular) and its traffic rank in the U.S. is 2,954 (the 2,954th most popular site for U.S. readers). How can you harness that power for yourself?

The trick is a simple one: it’s to get Techmeme to mention your blog articles in the “Discussion” section for its stories, or better still, make one of your articles a featured article. Once that happens a couple of times, you’ll notice that your readership will grow from the “Techmeme bump” and if you play your cards right, all sorts of opportunities will follow. It’s worked for me at Global Nerdy, which often gets listed in “Discussion” lists for Techmeme articles and has had a few articles as feature articles, and it’s grown from zero readers in 2006 to getting 1.6 million pageviews (1.3 million unique) in 2009.

How do you get noticed by Techmeme? I gave away this secret back in 2006, in an article titled Jason Calacanis Swiped Our 5-Step Plan for Becoming an A-Lister! It goes as follows:

  1. Go to Techmeme.
  2. Blog something intelligent about the top story of the day.
  3. Link to and mention all the people who have said something intelligent.
  4. Repeat for 30 days.
  5. Go to a couple of conferences a month.

(And to get noticed by Techmeme, you can ignore step 5. But attending conference helps in all sorts of ways too. Did I mention that TechDays is coming?)

That’s all there is to it: find featured articles in Techmeme, write something intelligent about it in your blog (don’t forget to link to the article!) and keep doing it. Like a lot of other things in tech, as long as you’ve got the threshold amount of smarts, it’s all about perseverance.

If you take on this challenge, let me know how it goes!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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TWC9: WebMatrix, Razor, Debug MSBuild Files and Beer-Fetching Robots

Get Microsoft Silverlight

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in iPod, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

This Week in Channel 9 logoAnother week, another This Week on Channel 9 (TWC9), Microsoft’s regular webcast showing the past week’s highlight on Channel 9, where Microsofties talk about what they’re working on or what they’re thinking, unfiltered by the marketing or PR departments. Regular co-host Dan Fernandez is joined this week by Larry Larsen as they talk about:

The co-hosts’ picks of the week are:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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A “Whiteboard Jam” on Monads and Coordinate Systems

And now, a left turn into Theoryland! Don’t worry, it’s good for your brain, and might even change the way you look at your day-to-day programming.

Get Microsoft Silverlight

Can’t see the video? You can download and install Silverlight or download the video in iPod, MP3, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune formats.

Here’s the latest in Channel 9’s “Expert to Expert” series of videos – a “whiteboard jam” between two big brains:

Here’s the abstract for the video:

The idea for the format of this conversation is simple: put two geniuses together, give them each a whiteboard and some markers, and see what happens. It’s much like free jazz: expert improvisation, seriously geeked-out whiteboard jamming.

The content theme for this episode — Monads as coordinate systems–is not simple. To grok this, we need to think in three dimensions: programming, physics and mathematics. But don’t worry. Brian and Greg do not expect to be jamming in front of only fellow experts. This is Channel 9, after all, and there are many different levels of knowledge out there amongst our Niner population. Accordingly, you will not feel as though you’re watching something in a language you don’t speak. That said, you should possess interests in the theoretical, in mathematics, and in physics, and an overall appreciation for learning new things.

Monads are often used in functional programming – they’re structures that describe a flow of control and data (ff you’re a SharePoint person or have developed using WF, you might want to think of them as distant cousins of workflows). As the practical upshot of Moore’s Law has shifted from “doubling in speed about every couple of years” to “doubling in cores about every couple of years” and shows no sign of shifting back, functional programming and what it offers to parallel programming are becoming increasingly important. So don’t pass by this video thinking that it’ll never apply to you – there’s a chance it might.

Explanations of monads for non-functional programmers include:

(Perhaps I should buttonhole Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite into providing us with a nice beginner’s explanation of monads. Would you folks like that?)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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The jQuery Online Conference: Monday, July 12th – Everywhere!

ThinkVitamin presents...The jQuery Online Conference

Are you a web developer and want to sharpen your jQuery skills? Would you like to attend a conference featuring some of the brightest lights in jQuery programming? Are you too short on time and travel expenses to hit such a conference?

For a mere US$150 and no travel at all, you can attend the jQuery Online Conference. It’s a live, over-the-‘net conference taking place on Monday, July 12th starting at 12:00 noon EDT / 9:00 a.m. Pacific and featuring these four sessions:

  • Beyond String Concatenation. Using jQuery Templating to Cleanly Display Your Data
    Rey Bango (Client-Web Community Program Manager for Microsoft and Head of Evangelism for the jQuery JavaScript Project)
    In this presentation, Rey will show you a new way to produce easily maintainable dynamic pages via pre-built JavaScript templates and the Microsoft jQuery templating plugin.
  • Testing Your Mobile Web Apps
    John Resig (JavaScript tool developer for Mozilla and creator of jQuery)
    This talk will be a comprehensive look at what you need to know to properly test your web applications on mobile devices, based upon the work that’s been done by the jQuery team. We’ll look at the different mobile phones that exist, what browsers they run, and what you can do to support them. Additionally we’ll examine some of the testing tools that can be used to make the whole process much easier.
  • Taking jQuery Effects to the Next Level
    Karl Swedberg (Web developer at Fusionary Media, member of the jQuery Team, author of jQuery 1.3 and 1.4 Reference Guides and maintainer of the jQuery API site)
    One of the first things web developers learn to do with jQuery is to show and hide elements on a page and then add some flair by sliding those elements up and down or fading them in and out. Too often, though, we stop there, missing out on the incredible range and flexibility of jQuery’s core effects. In this talk, we’ll investigate both standard and custom animations and how they can be used to create useful and fun effects. We’ll also build a couple effects plugins, explore parts of the effects API that are often overlooked, and learn how to avoid common problems when attaching these effects to certain events.
  • jQuery Pluginization
    Ben Alman (Developer at Boston.com, contributor to jQuery and Modernizr)
    In this live-coding session, Ben explains how, with just a little thought and effort around generalization, parameterization and organization, you can convert your "just get the job done" jQuery code into a legitimate, reusable, modular jQuery plugin.

Your conference attendance fee not only lets you watch the live event and ask questions of the presenters, it also lets you watch the recordings of the events any time afterwards. So if you can’t catch the live event (perhaps you’re busy at work, or it’s 3:00 a.m. in your time zone), you can still watch the presentations. This also lets you watch the live event to get the general idea, and then watch it again for note-taking or hands-on workshopping.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Thinking of Moving to the Cloud? Get Free Compute Time with Windows Azure

a special cloud offer

Windows Azure PlatformAre you a developer looking to launch your new web application? Or perhaps you’re an IT Pro or IT Architect trying to understand what all the fuss about “The Cloud” is. Or maybe you need for some compute time to run calculations. No matter who you are, or why you’re thinking about the cloud, Microsoft is making it easy for you try out our cloud offerings: Windows Azure (which runs your apps the in the cloud), SQL Azure (your database in the cloud) and AppFabric (which ties your on-premises and cloud systems together).

Check out the Azure Pricing Page and take a look at the introductory special, which lets you take Azure for a spin for a limited time – free of charge. Here’s what you get:

Included each month at no charge:

  • Windows Azure
    • 25 hours of a small compute instance
    • 500 MB of storage
    • 10,000 storage transactions
  • SQL Azure
    • 1 Web Edition database (available for first 3 months only)
  • AppFabric
    • 100,000 Access Control transactions
    • 2 Service Bus connections
  • Data Transfers (per region)
    • 500 MB in
    • 500 MB out

Any monthly usage in excess of the above amounts will be charged at the standard rates. This introductory special will end on October 31, 2010 and all usage will then be charged at the standard rates.

This special offer is available right now through October 31, 2010 and is limited to one per customer.  (You’ll probably want to look at the “full details and disclosure” page.)

If you’re in Canada and have questions about Windows Azure, my team and I are here to help and can answer your questions.  We’d also love to hear what sorts of projects you’re using Azure for. To reach us, drop us an email at cdnazure@microsoft.com.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.