Categories
Uncategorized

Colin Melia’s Pitch for His MIX10 Presentations

vote for colin meliaOttawa-based developer Colin Melia has been a big help to me with TechDays. He presented at TechDays Ottawa, helped organize Demo Night in Canada, and posted a simple Windows Azure deployment exercise that I’ve found quite helpful and useful.

I’d like to return the favour by promoting the three sessions – that’s right, three – that he submitted to MIX10 in their open call for content. They are:

  1. Everything You Touch Turns to Azure
    Feel the rush of power as you learn how to wave your hands and connect directly to your throne in the heavens – OK well you may have to settle for learning about Windows Touch in WPF/Silverlight and the Windows Azure Platform.  This is the future – make sure that everything you touch can turn to Azure.

    The session shows how the building blocks of Windows Touch, WPF/Silverlight applications and the Windows Azure Platform can be brought together to create a small yet engaging end-to-end experience.  Attendees should gain insight into the benefits and design of Touch-aware applications on Windows 7 as well as the benefits of backing user experiences with the Windows Azure Platform.

  2. Get a WIF of This
    Writing services that understand multiple authentication systems is cumbersome and completely yesterday. Claims-based authentication and authorisation is the way to go. We’ll take a dive into how claims work and what Windows Identity Foundation provides by exploring the key components, but more importantly by building our own identify provider, a claims-based service and a Silverlight application that makes use of it.

    WIF recently RTM’d but the identify framework it cements is one of the most overlooked components when it comes to Internet-based application design.  Attendees should leave with a sense of how to create WIF components or WIF-aware components, as well as knowledge of the necessary design considerations.

  3. The Cloud and the Silver Lining
    You need a place to host your Silverlight applications as well as the WCF RIA Services and database that back them.  This session shows you not only that the Windows Azure Platform (featuring Windows Azure, SQL Azure and other services), is a great place to put them, but also how to create the connections between the pieces.

    This session digs into the mechanics of a real-world application using Silverlight and the Windows Azure Platform.  Attendees should leave knowing how to easily test against and deploy to the Azure Platform, as well as how communication takes place between the component layers. 

I’d like to see Colin speak at MIX10. He’s a good speaker, he’s chosen some interesting and relevant topics, and he’d be a Canadian presence at MIX. If you agree with me, please vote for his sessions on the MIX10 Open Call for Entries site by Friday, January 15th! (If you want to see a list of all the proposed sessions, they’re here.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Jason Alderman’s Pitch for His MIX10 Presentation

Two days remain for you to cast your vote for sessions at the MIX10 conference, which I wrote about in the previous article. A number of people who submitted proposals for sessions are wooing voters, and one of the best promotions is that of Jason Alderman, who put together this comic explaining why you should vote for his session, titled Guerilla User Research – Carrying Out Missions Behind Enemy Lines to Get the Insight You Need:

Comic: MIX10 needs a session (or two) on user research and testing!

This lovely hand-drawn comic is a reminder for me to fire up the scanner I bought for Christmas and get back to something for which I was notorious during my days at Crazy Go Nuts University: cartooning.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

MIX10 Web/UX Conference: March 15 – 17 in Las Vegas

MIX10: The Next Web NowI’m going to be at Microsoft’s MIX10 conference, which takes place from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, where I’ll be catching sessions and posting photos and reports. If you can spare a couple of days off work to attend Mix10, you should too – and soon, because the early bird discount is going to evaporate very soon!

What is MIX?

MIX10: Where designers and developers intersect to make the web a great place

The email sigs for people involved with MIX claim that it’s a “designer/developer lovefest for the web”, and I think it’s a pretty one-line summary of the event. It’s a conference for people who develop and design for the web, with particular attention paid to user interface and experience. This will be the 5th MIX conference, the first one having been held in 2006.

What Sort of Sessions Will There Be at MIX10?

The future of web design and user experience

Here’s a selection of some of the sessions and workshops at MIX10:

There are some other cool things happening at MIX10 that I can’t talk about until the conference. Be there, or if you can’t, watch this space!

You Get to Vote!

Open call for content voting is live. Vote now for your favortie session submissions.

You can help choose some of the content for MIX10! We took a number of submissions for presentations in an open call for content, and now it’s time to vote for them. You can see all the submissions here, and voting ends on Friday, January 15th.

Early-Bird Discount

Register by Jan. 15th and save: $600 on your pass and a free night at Mandalay Bay

If you register for MIX10 by January 15th, you’ll save US$600 off the admission and pay only US$795 – and you’ll also get a free night at the conference hotel, Mandalay Bay! After the 15th, the price goes up to a full US$1395, so if you want to go, register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Mathew Ingram Joins GigaOM

mathew ingramIt’s another “local guy makes good” story: Mesh Conference co-founder, Globe and Mail writer and editor for the better part of two decades, all-round respected Canadian voice in tech journalism and fixture of the Toronto tech scene, Mathew Ingram is leaving the Globe to join GigaOM as one of its full-time reporters.

This is great news all ‘round: for GigaOM, who are getting a great writer to join their ranks, for Mathew, because this is a great opportunity, and for Canada – whose techies since Alexander Graham Bell have been punching above their weight class – who now has a voice in one of technology’s most important and influential blogs.

Congratulations, Mathew, and see you online!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

Visual Studio 2010 Event in Kitchener-Waterloo: Thursday, January 21st

Attention Kitchener-Waterloo residents: Better Application Lifecycle Management with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, presented by Dave Lloyd

If you’re in the Kitchener-Waterloo area and want to know more about Visual Studio 2010, you should check out the Visual Studio 2010 presentation by ObjectSharp and Microsoft on the morning of Thursday, January 21st.

Dave Lloyd of ObjectSharp will walk you through the goodies in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 and how they can help you and your team with all those things you do in your day-to-day development, from collaboration to architecture to prototyping to testing and debugging.

You’ll also learn about the Ultimate Offer, which is a great way to level up your Visual Studio licence and MSDN subscription levels. This offer won’t be around forever!

This event is free-as-in-beer to attend; all you have to do is register. I’ve provided the details below:

How do I sign up for the event? Register here and enter this invitation key when prompted:

DEAA69
When is the event? Thursday, January 21st, 2010.
Registration takes place from
9:00 – 9:30 a.m.
Presentation takes place from
9:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

Includes a continental breakfast buffet
Where is the event? St. George Hall
655 King Street North
Hall
Waterloo, Ontario

There’s free parking at the event in the lot just off King Street.

 

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Categories
Uncategorized

“I’m With @Stupid” T-Shirt

Here’s what happens when the 1970’s “I’m with Stupid” t-shirt gets a 21st century Twitter upgrade:

Grey t-shirt featuring a pointing finger with a Twitter bird on it: "I'm with @Stupid"

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

Categories
Uncategorized

Microsoft and the W3C SVG Working Group: A Step in the Right Direction

internet explorer and svg

My philosophy is that Microsoft should focus less on “compete” and more on delighting the users. Or, as I’ve said before, “the best tech advocacy is to make tech that helps people rock.”

One important path to building tech that helps people rock is interoperability. In today’s networked, heterogeneous world, no tech is an island (my apologies to John Donne). It’s best for Microsoft – and everyone else – if the company plays well with others, adopts open standards and the open web and actively participates with standards-making bodies. I see things like The Empire’s participation at W3C’s Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee Meeting in November, Microsoft’s being a Gold Sponsor at the upcoming ConFoo conference and the work being done by the Open Source Teams in both Redmond and Toronto as signs of what I call the company’s “Sea Change”.

So it pleased me to see an Ars Technica article titled Microsoft’s Collaboration on SVG is a win for the Open Web pointing to the announcement on IEBlog that Microsoft is joining the W3C working group on Scalable Vector Graphics, a.k.a. SVG.

Patrick Dengler, Senior Program Manager for the Internet Explorer Team, writes:

We recognize that vector graphics are an important component of the next generation Web platform. As evidenced by our ongoing involvement in W3C working groups, we are committed to participating in the standards process to help ensure a healthy future for the Web. Our involvement with the SVG working group builds on that commitment.

To date, I have had several interactions with the SVG working group, and their clear dedication to creating a great technology for end users and developers alike stands out.  I personally look forward to future and more direct involvement with this great set of folks.

It’s not a formal announcement that SVG support’s going into future versions of IE, but I certainly hope that this is the first step towards that.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.