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Slice of Life: Official Photos from Techdays

For the TechDays conference’s stops in Vancouver and Toronto, Microsoft hired Vancouver-based photog extraordinaire Kris Krug to take photos of the Developer and Platform Evangelism team, which includes Yours Truly. The photos were taken during the conference, which meant that most of us were wearing the official TechDays shirts, which were colour-coded to match the conference track in which we were leading or participating. The track that I lead is Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, and its colour is orange. Luckily the folks who made the shirts had a pretty snappy shade of orange (the label refers to the colour as “Spark”) that I can rock.

Most of our photo shoot was on the promenade outside the Vancouver Convention Centre, looking out over the water. He just had me play tunes on the accordion while he shot photos, so they’re all pretty candid shots. Here’s one of the photos that Kris took of me.

joey_devilla_on_accordion_kk

There are more of me and the rest of the DPE team in Kris’ Flickr photoset.

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

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A Pair Programming Article…in the New York Times?!

pair_programming_at_hashrocket

It’s one thing to see an article on pair programming in a a book, magazine or site that concerns itself with software development, but it’s something completely different when you see it covered in the New York Times. Still, that’s exactly the topic of an article in the Sunday, September 20th edition titled For Writing Software, a Buddy System. In it, developer and Rubyist Jim Remsik, who works at Hashrocket, does a pretty good job of explaining pair programming to an audience that is presumably most non-developers. I might have to use his Where’s Waldo example the next time I need to describe the benefits of pair programming.

hashrocket_logo A little aside: Hashrocket’s logo is a great example of a development company working closely with a design company. After some discussion about the company’s name and where it comes from, they took the => symbol, which demarcates the keys from the values in Ruby hashes, and worked it into a clever little graphic. This is what good designers do, especially when you communicate with them!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Don’t Forget About FailCamp Toronto 3 – Tuesday, Sept. 29!

failcamp_toronto_3

FailCamp Toronto 3 is 10 days away! Come join us in our “celebration of fail”. We’ll share stories about the times when things went pear-shaped, got SNAFUed, or just plain failed — and just as important, the lessons we learned from them. And unlike many failures, FailCamp’s admission is free.

For more details about FailCamp, see the FailCamp registration page or this earlier article.

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Photoshoppery of the Day

I was 10 years old when Space Invaders came out, so this photo brings back happy memories:

space_invadersClick the photo to see it on its original page.

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This Zune HD Could Be Yours!

zune_hd_and_accordion

Pictured above is a 16GB Zune HD (the accordion’s there to act as a nice stand and prove that it’s actually in our possession). It’s quite nice, the navigation system is both simple and clever, and the browser experience is nothing short of amazing – I spent a little time surfing with it last night and kept saying “If only they had a plan to put this into Windows Phone…”

The Zune HD is not yet available in Canada. We have one because IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus made a quick run down from Vancouver (where we are for the TechDays conference) into the U.S., where they’re available (although very hard to find – people are snapping them up).

This Zune could be yours. There’s a plan in motion as to how that will come about, so watch this space…

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Ignite Your Career Webcast: “Internal or External Training?” – Thursday, September 17th

in-and-out_training

The second installment of the Ignite Your Career webcasts takes place tomorrow, Thursday, September 17th, from 12:00 noon to 1 p.m. Eastern (9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Pacific). This will be the second of four Ignite Your Career webcasts taking place this month, and this week’s topic will be Internal or External Training – Know Your Options. Here’s the abstract:

Maintaining your technical and personal skill sets are critical to being successful in the job you already have and anything you might be looking to progress into. Unfortunately, the option of external training might not be available to you at this point in time. How can you take advantage of internal resources like job shadowing, mentoring, internal courses, study groups as well as external training activities when available? How can you pitch setting up new training options to your team and managers? Looking externally – what about valuable online free offerings, professional associations and community events? This session will bring information together to equip you with the knowledge and resources required to get the ball rolling.

The panel of industry experts speaking at this webcast will be:

Ignite Your Career is presented by Microsoft Canada and is about helping you make the most out of your career and make the best career choices. As such, it’s “platform neutral” – whether you develop on .NET, the iPhone or Ruby on Rails, the topics covered in Ignite Your Career apply to you.

It doesn’t cost a thing to catch an Ignite Your Career webcast. Simply register at the Ignite Your Career site.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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TechDays Vancouver 2009: Day Two at the “Microsoft Platform” Track

Vancouver Convention Centre and waterVancouver Convention Centre, as seen from the Fairmont Hotel across the street

Yesterday marked Day 2 of the TechDays Vancouver 2009 conference. The track that I’m in charge of is the most broad one: Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform. With such a wide array of topics that I could cover, I decided to focus on four areas that I and the people I surveyed thought would be both important and interesting:

  • Rich (Internet) Applications
  • The “Software” half of “Software + Services”, namely client applications on computers and other devices
  • ASP.NET MVC, the model-view-controller web app framework that I like to call “Rails That Scales”
  • The “Services” half of “Software + Services”: services accessible via the internet

Day 1 was about the first two, and Day 2 covered MVC and Services.

The Track in a Nutshell: MVC and Services for Day 2

The morning featured two ASP.NET MVC sessions. First, Charles Nurse of DotNetNuke presented Introduction to ASP.NET MVC, which was aimed at ASP.NET developers looking to make the leap from WebForms or to see what MVC is all about. Daniel Flippance of Habaneros provided a great follow-up presentation with SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications, which matched two great topics – our new web application framework and the SOLID principles of object-oriented design (which I covered back in July with this article).

Charles Nurse and Daniel Flippance presenting at TechDays Vancouver 2009Charles Nurse and Daniel Flippance

The afternoon was all about services. We started with Phil Bolduc presenting Building RESTful Services with WCF, which covers two topics that Microsoft developers are just starting to pick up. After that came Ho Yan Leung, whose session was Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint. As you can see in his photo below, you can find Windows 7 and Microsoft platform development in places you wouldn’t expect:

Ho Yan Leung and his MacBook at TechDays Vancouver 2009Ho Yan Leung

(Phil: I got sidetracked during your presentation and didn’t get a chance to snap your photo. My apologies!)

After the final session, we cleared out the presentation halls, gathered for a post-conference meeting to discuss what went right, what went wrong and what we should do at the next stop on the TechDays tour, which is Toronto on the 29th and 30th. We packed the demo machines in their nigh-indestructible flight cases:

Flight case holding several laptops

The red, green and blue machines are Dell Netbooks. They’re cute, but my stance on netbooks remains unchanged.
The really nice machines are the copper-coloured 16 gig “Dell-a-saurus” machines in the middle row.

We marked the end of TechDays Vancouver 2009 with strong drink and flaming teppanyaki:

Flaming teppanyaki, with Rick Claus saying "Funny, that's exactly what happens when I get my hands on a computer!"

[This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.]