Actually, from left to right, it’s me, Ward Bell of IdeaBlade and Microsoft’s Glenn Block, whom John Bristowe and I interviewed in the most recent Ignite Your Coding webcast. Ward and Glenn have forgotten more about building composite apps than I will ever learn. If you attended the “Building Composite Applications with WPF and Silverlight” session in my track at TechDays Canada 2009, you saw what was essentially Ward’s presentation; he’s the only reason I know anything about Prism.
In a couple of weeks, Microsoft’s Technical Evangelism Team will embark on the EnergizeIT 2010 Tour, a cross-country set of presentation showing what’s possible with Microsoft tools and technology. If you want to know how Visual Studio 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and other Microsoft tools and tech can cut your costs and help your business and organization, you should catch an EnergizeIT event near you. They’re free, and they’re happening in the next few weeks!
Depending on the city, there will be different “flavours” of EnergizeIT events. I’ve written some descriptions below, and if you want the full set of details, check out the EnergizeIT page.
In Canada’s six largest cities, we’ll hold our EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud full-day events, where we’ll cover the Microsoft-based platform in detail. And yes, even though it’s full-day, it’ll still be free!
Please note: The Toronto session is currently booked. You can register, but you’ll end up on the first-come, first served waiting list.
In the morning, we’ll talk about the big picture. We’ll show you a scenario featuring the Microsoft-based platform as seen from different points of view: the customer, the information worker, the developer and the IT professional. You’ll see our latest and greatest as well as our up-and-coming developer goodies: Silverlight, .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. We’ll show you Windows 7 and Azure in action, talk about Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and tell you how all of Microsoft’s stuff works together.
Just as the morning session answers the question “What’s the latest technology?”, the afternoon sessions answer the question “How do I get to the latest technology from where I am now?” These sessions, split into two tracks – one on infrastructure management and deployment, one on the development process – will cover what you can do with our tools and technology in a little more depth. They’ll show you what you need to implement what you saw in the morning session and provide a roadmap you can follow to learn more and take action.
For more details about From the Client to the Cloud events or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT From the Client to the Cloud page.
We’ll also hold Community Connection events in the evening in many cities across Canada,where we’ll do the “big picture” session (the morning session) of our From the Client to the Cloudevents.
The Community Connection evening events will take place in the following cities:
For more details about Community Connection or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeITCommunity Connection page.
I’ve been using the beta and release candidate versions of Office 2010 in my day-to-day work for the past few months – PowerPoint for my public speaking stuff, Outlook for email, scheduling and get-things-done stuff and OneNote for my copious note-taking. We’d like you to take it for a spin!
Join us at one of our Microsoft Office 2010 Installfests and we’ll hook you up with the latest build of Office, show you some of our favourite features and demonstrate how to get the most out of our productivity suite.
For more details about the Office 2010 Installfests or to register (it’s free!), visit the EnergizeIT Office 2010 Installfest page.
We’ll also be passing through a number of colleges across Canada, talking to students about getting ready for the working world and showing them resources that they can use to fire up their careers.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Here’s the keynote room, about 15 minutes before the start of Scott Guthrie’s keynote. Watch this blog as well as my Twitter stream – I’m @AccordionGuy and I’m tagging my posts with #CanMIX (for Canadian MIX) – for updates!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
I’m in Las Vegas to attend the MIX10 conference, Microsoft’s conference for both developers and designers. This year’s MIX conference, which runs from Monday March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th, is a hotly-anticipated one, thanks the fact that Microsoft will be making announcements about Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7 Series.
As the Canadian Developer Evangelist charged with the responsibility of promoting Windows Phone 7 to small and independent developers (who make up the lion’s share of the people who write smartphone apps), I’ve been writing about Windows Phone 7 and mobile development in general in the series Counting Down to Seven. I plan to continue writing about Windows Phone 7 from several angles, including:
I’ve just come from an all-day hush-hush closed-door set of presentations covering the details of Windows Phone 7 and the tools and technologies that drive it. I’m impressed by what I saw. I can’t say much right now, and you’ll find out from me (and many other sources) tomorrow, but I can tell you this: Windows Phone 7 is cooler than the other side of the pillow.
Keep an eye on this blog over the next couple of days: there’s going to be a lot of information – and more! — from MIX10, and lots of useful information about developing for Windows Phone 7 over the next few months!
I’m in Las Vegas to catch Microsoft’s MIX10 conference, where a lot of big announcements are being made. The combination of having just come from the Confoo conference in Montreal, flying to Vegas by way of Vancouver, and “springing forward” to daylight saving time has left me feeling like the bear pictured above.
More posts from Vegas and MIX10 to follow!
I’m in Montreal at ConFoo, the “web techno conference” where both open source and Microsoft technologies are the topics. I did a presentation on ASP.NET MVC earlier this morning, and as I write this, I’m watching Mario Cardinal talk about REST. I’ve seen him do this presentation before, but I always enjoy watching his sessions; they feel more like techie conversations over coffee (or beer) than lectures.
You’re probably wondering what that pirate flag draped over the lectern is all about. I put that up there for my session to declare my allegiance. It’s a reference to the Pirate/Ninja personality spectrum, where:
If you know me, you know where I fall on that spectrum.
(I also brought a goalie mask in case I needed to talk about JSON. Get it? Goalie mask? JSON?)
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
If it’s Thursday, it must be time for me and my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe to host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast!
This week’s guest is Glenn Block, a Program Manager for .NET FX at Microsoft. Glenn’s one of the go-to guys on Prism, Unity, MEF and ways of building maintainable and reconfigurable applications out of pieces that you can assemble and rearrange in general. We’ll talk with him about building composite applications, design patterns, the “alphabet soup” of SOLID, DI and IoC and whatever questions you ask him.
You’ll need:
We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!