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Mario Cardinal at ConFoo

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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:

  • Ninjas prefer to work quietly in the background, while
  • Pirates like to work flamboyantly, swashbuckling and yelling “Arrr!”

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.

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Ignite Your Coding: This Afternoon with Glenn Block!

Ignite Your CodingIf it’s Thursday, it must be time for me and my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe to host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast!

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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.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…

You’ll need:

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Counting Down to Seven: XNA Game Studio 4.0!!!!

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

Xbox 360 Achievement: "Achievement Unlocked: New Version of XNA!"

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The Game Developers Conference is a good time to make game development announcements, and that we did: version 4.0 of XNA Game Studio, Microsoft’s framework and toolset for easier game development. Here’s what it means in a nutshell:

  • No matter whether you develop with managed or unmanaged code, it’s what you’ll use for game development on Windows Phone 7.
  • You’ll create better mobile games faster, thanks to a powerful and comprehensive set of tools.
  • Xbox LIVE comes to mobile, meaning that you can take advantage of the Xbox’s popular gaming social network.
  • For those of you already building games with XNA, you’ve got a brand new platform, and it’s one that you take everywhere you go.

Games pages on Windows Phone 7

You’re going to see all sorts of details about XNA Game Studio 4.0 over the next couple of weeks, and here are some of the best places to get them…

Follow the “Seven Samurai”

By “Seven Samurai”, I’m referring to the Windows Phone 7 Series development team:

Check Out These Sites

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Counting Down to Seven: Charlie Kindel Demos His Windows Phone 7 Handset to CNET’s Ina Fried

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeIf you’re a developer itching to get started writing apps for Windows Phone 7, you’re going to want to follow Charlie Kindel’s blog and Twitter stream (as well as Yours Truly and this blog, of course). Charlie’s one of the developers on the Windows Phone team, and while he won’t be delivering the first presentation on WP7 at MIX10 (Windows Phone’s VP Program Management Joe Belfiore will do that), he’ll be delivering the first technical presentation later that day.

The video above shows an interview that’s as informal as it gets. It’s a hand-held camera interview featuring CNET’s Ina Fried and Charlie on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, talking about what Windows Phone 7 will be like for developers, with Charlie demonstrating on his Windows Phone 7 prototype. I’d love to get my grubby paws on one of those!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Thursday’s “Ignite Your Coding” Webcast: “Composable Applications FTW” with Glenn Block

Ignite Your CodingThis Thursday, my fellow Developer Evangelist John Bristowe and I will host another live Ignite Your Coding webcast, where we’ll interview another high-profile software developer and pass along some of your questions.

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.

blocks.png(We don’t have a photo of Glenn Block, but we do have the image to the right, which is the symbol for MEF – that’s Managed Extensibility Framework – which is one of Glenn’s projects. It’s a lucky coincidence that Glenn’s last name is also featured prominently in the image.)

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast on Thursday and/or Ask Glenn Questions…

You’ll need:

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

What’s Ignite Your Coding All About, Anyway?

It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Counting Down to Seven: User Experience with Microsoft User Experience Gurus Bill Buxton and Albert “Windows Phone 7” Shum

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Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeWe’re a week away from the start of the MIX10 conference! I like to refer to this as Microsoft’s most “right-brained” gathering, as its target audience and topic isn’t just developers and writing software, but designers, design and user experience.

With designers and design in mind, it’s only fitting that I show you a video featuring Nic Fillingham interviewing a couple of Microsoft User Experience gurus who also hail from Canada:

  • Bill Buxton: He’s a Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research, and before that, he was Chief Scientist at Alias Wavefront and a professor at University of Toronto. And I’m pleased to report that he got his bachelor’s degree – in music – from my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University (which some of you may know as Queen’s University). He was the guy who thought of applying Fitts’ Law to human-computer interaction, did some pioneering work with multi-touch interfaces and invented the pie menu (which means that we owe weapon selection in Saints Row 2 and the full combat/spellcasting system in Dragon Age: Origins to him).
  • Albert Shum: He’s the Director of Mobile Experience Design for Windows Phone 7. Albert’s from Winnipeg, studied engineering and architecture at University of Waterloo and went on to do design work at Nike before joining Microsoft. You can watch a video showing him talking about the new Windows Phone 7 experience and the thinking behind it in a previous article of mine, Albert Shum on Windows Phone 7.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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TWC9: 100th Episode, Featuring VS2010 RC Tips, WPF and Bonus Footage

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imageThis Week on Channel 9, or TWC9 for short, is a weekly digest show hosted by Microsoft’s Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller covering the developer community news they find most interesting after sifting through hundreds of blogs, videos and announcements. It’s aimed primarily at .NET developers, but if you have any geeky tendencies at all, chances are they’ll cover something that appeals to you!

This week’s episode is their 100th, and in it, they cover:

Topic What it is or why it’s interesting
Second patch for IntelliSense crashes in the Visual Studio 2010 RC The RC is the last public build prior to RTM. It’s pretty rock solid, but users of touch displays, tablet PCs, screen reader software, and potentially some others as well may need these patches.

Enabling Silverlight 4 with the Visual Studio 2010 RC (NOTE: This is an unsupported hack.) The RC of Visual Studio 2010 did not support Silverlight 4. This support is “coming” but no timeline yet. In the meantime, you can try this hack.

Getting Silverlight 3 to build with Team Build 2010 by Martin Hinshelwood If your projects use Silverlight 3 and you use Team Build on a 64-bit server, you’ll need this. But it’s also a good look at debugging a Team Build 2010 workflow.

What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 (ALM | The rest) There is a LOT of new stuff in this release. Blink and you’ll miss something. These documents do a pretty thorough job of documenting the goodness.

Beta of FireFox testing package for Visual Studio 2010 is now available Visual Studio 2010’s testing framework is extensible and will provide support for additional target platforms via add-ins from Microsoft and 3rd parties.

Optimizing Visual Studio 2010 and WPF applications for Remote Desktop via Greg Duncan. The Visual Studio 2010 IDE makes heavy use of WPF. If you RDP into a development workstation, or build applications in WPF, this post is a must-read.

Configuring VS2010 with SourceGear’s diffmerge The diff / merge tool that ships with Visual Studio is fairly dated, but it’s easy to swap in your favorite tool in its place. This one is free, and comes highly recommended.

Expression Studio 3.0 Tutorials from Paolo Barone Free hands-on tutorials featuring Silverlight, DeepZoom, SketchFlow, and more…

Roundup of WPF Documentation Samples Some good stuff in here; Snoop = “Firebug for WPF”, Inkscape = vector graphics editor…

Write code to enter the NASA Pathfinder Innovation Challenge There are dozens of coding competitions out there at any given time, but we thought this one was really cool – you can either build a “mechanical Turk” game or an image recognition application. And c’mon… it’s Mars! That should be reason enough.

Some (not all) MSR TechFest 2010 content is public and online It’s Microsoft Research’s science fair, and they’ve got some pretty cool stuff this year.

Telling the Visual Studio 2010 testing story with Deep Zoom, and SpeakFlow as a new non-linear presentation medium based on Deep Zoom.

It’s an interesting application of Deep Zoom.
After the credits, some 100th episode bonus materials Because you’re just dying to know.

 

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.