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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.]

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Scenes from Demo Ignite Camp

Last night’s Demo Ignite Camp was a success. We got a decent-sized crowd, a bunch of great presnetations on all sorts of projects by Vancouver-area techies and hopefully inspired the local nerds to get together and do "show-and-tell" events more often.

Demo Ignite Camp came about thanks to a couple of lucky circumstances. First and foremost, Vancouver is lucky enough to have a guy like Boris Mann, who is a technologist, entrepreneur and David Crow’s West Coast evil twin. He was able to rally the local techies to come out to a gathering on short notice on a week packed full of techie-oriented events (including "Launch Party" this Wednesday, which we’ll be attending).

The other lucky break comes as a result of the TechDays Vancouver conference. TechDays is a two-day conference, and we booked the Vancouver Convention Centre for it. We had no evening events, which meant that the conference halls were going to be empty and unused on the first night of the conference. We decided to make the space available for some kind of free community event; I thought of hosting a DemoCamp-style event and immediately thought of getting Boris’ help.

Last night’s presentations – all which of were quite good — were:

  1. Clamato — Hot Smalltalk on JavaScript action by Avi Bryant
  2. TransitDB – Carson Lam’s online guide for Vancouver Transit users that won the PHP FTW contest earlier this year
  3. RestfulX Framework – Dima Berastau’s framework for bringing Rails-esque goodness and RESTfulness to Adobe Flex and AIR development
  4. PhoneGap and Ayogo’s use of it for iPhone Game Development
  5. Joyent’s Smart – Joyent’s cloud platform
  6. Walruz — Ruby framework for managing complex authorization policies

We didn’t have time to get around to Mobify’s presentation, so I’m going to make up for it by writing an article about them and give them lots of link love (I’ll be emailing you guys soon!).

Once the presentations wrapped up, we took the attendees to the Lions Pub where we pulled out the Microsoft American Express corporate card and bought a round for everyone.

And now, the photos, courtesy of John Bristowe. You can check them out in the slideshow below or view them on Flickr:


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Vancouver’s got some great people doing some very interesting tech work, and we’d like to make sure that it gets nurtured with events like Demo Ignite Camp and other community-building gatherings. If there’s anything we can do to help – because a healthy tech ecosystem, regardless of the technology is also good for Microsoft – please let us know! Drop me a line in the comments or email me!

I’d like to thank Boris Mann for helping put this event together, Barnaby Jeans and Damir Bersinic for offering up the space, Angie Lim, Nik Garkusha and Arun Kirupananthan for providing the during- and after-refreshments – but most importantly, the presenters and attendees!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Kanye West Wants You to Go to FailCamp!

failcamp_kanye

That’s right, you want to join FailCamp Toronto 3, the celebration of FAIL taking place on Tuesday, September 29th at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre! Take it from Kanye, you don’t want to miss this event. For more details, see the FailCamp event page and my earlier article on FailCamp Toronto 3.

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TechDays Vancouver: More Scenes from the “Platform” Track

Two out of three of this afternoon’s sessions in my track at the TechDays conference – Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform — were presented by Anthony Vranic, an independent consultant who used to be a Microsoft developer evangelist. His sessions:

  • Building Modular Applications Using Silverlight and WPF
  • Optimizing Your Apps for the Windows 7 User Experience

Anthony Vranic presenting at TechDays Vancouver 2009

Next up were Anthony Bartolo and Mark Arteaga, who were there to present the session Taking Your Application on the Road with Windows Mobile Software, in which they showed us things that people think Windows Mobile can’t do.

arteaga_bartolo_1

Yup, that’s The Beatles: Rock Band beside Anthony – this was a session where you could leave with a prize! They gave away XBox games to people who answered skill- and mobile market knowledge-testing questions correctly.

arteaga_bartolo_2

They gave The Beatles: Rock Band to the person working on the most interesting Windows Mobile app, as judged by audience applause. It went to the gentleman in the photo below on the right, who wrote a currency exchange application that watches exchange markets for the ideal time and buys foreign currencies then. He uses it to send money home to New Zealand within taking a bath on the exchange rate.

winner

As I write this, it’s 5:45 p.m. Pacific, which means that the next event, Demo Ignite Camp, is just over an hour away.

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Slice of Life: Striking the “Charlie’s Angels” Pose with Netbooks

Yesterday, while setting up for the TechDays conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre, my co-workers Rick Claus (pictured below on the left with the red netbook) and Rodney Buike (pictured below on the right with the blue netbook) and I couldn’t resist playing around with the Dell netbooks that we were using to do PowerPoint donkey-work. John Bristowe, who was doing the photography, suggested striking a Charlie’s Angels-style pose and we were only too happy to oblige:

Rick Claus, Joey deVilla and Rodney Buike strike the "Charlie's Angels" pose with Dell netbooks Click the photo to see it at full size.

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TechDays Vancouver: Scenes from the “Platform” Track

"Welcome" sign at Techdays 2009 Vancouver

It’s Monday, September 14th, which means that TechDays Canada 2009 has begun! We’re at the Vancouver Convention Centre in beautiful Vangroovy, the first city of sevencities we’re visiting in our tour. We’re travelling across Canada throughout the fall to show off the latest and greatest things that developers and IT pros can do with currently available tools and technologies from Microsoft.

"Welcome" sign at TechDays 2009 Vancouver, showing the Vancouver Convention centre behind it.

Last year, I was a mere presenter. This year, I’m the lead of the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track whose abstract is below:

platform_track

Learning key skills to develop rich client and web-based applications on the Microsoft-based platform is what this track is all about. In this track you will learn how to develop rich, interactive and interoperable applications for both the client and the web using our newest tools and frameworks. You’ll learn how to build software that helps to give your users the best experience possible, whether it’s a program running on Windows 7, a website built on ASP.NET MVC or a Silverlight-based rich internet application. You’ll also learn how to build services that can deliver data to almost any platform and internet-enabled device. And finally, you’ll learn how to build these software and services in ways that are modular and maintainable.

Here’s the room in which my track in taking place, as seen at 8:30 this morning (Pacific time, naturally), with a half-hour to go before the sessions began. We were already picking up a decent crowd:

Ballroom A filling up

First up was Zaheera Valani of the Silverlight team doing the presentation What’s New in Silverlight 3, where she showed off the features in the latest version of Silverlight. According to the rule of thumb for Microsoft software versions, this should be the version that really catches on, and the early signs indicate that this seems to be the case.

Zaheera Valani presenting "What's New in Silverlight 3" at TechDays 2009 Vancouver

As I write this, my co-worker in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group, Qixing Zheng, is doing the Expression Blend for Developers session. That’s right, it’s not just for UI designers – it’s also a pretty good development tool:

Qixing Zheng presenting "Expression Blend for Developers" at TechDays 2009 Vancouver

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FailCamp Toronto 3: September 29th at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre

FailCamp Toronto 3 / Tuesday, September 29, 2009 / Metro Toronto Convention Centre

That’s right, we’re holding another FailCamp in Toronto! Mark Tuesday, September 29th on your calendar and be prepared to share you best/worst stories of FAIL, impress the judges in our “Panel of Fail” and win big prizes!

Here’s what the event is all about, as taken directly from FailCamp Toronto 3’s event page:

The pictures of Sean Connery in his ridiculous costume from Zardoz can only mean one thing: it’s time for another FailCamp!

FailCamp is a celebration of failure. It’s about sharing your tales of epic fail and the lessons you learned from them. It’s about learning not to view failure as defeat, but as a learning opportunity and stepping stone to success. It’s about taking away the fear of failure and learning to take a chance, think big and achieve what you thought you couldn’t.

We’ll start with some stories of historical failure: some you’ve read in the history books, and some culled from our own personal histories — the wisdom of fail through the ages. Then we’ll turn the microphone on you, inviting you to share your greatest stories of failure, challenging you to entertain the audience and even win prizes if our "Panel of Fail" deems your failure or the lessons derived from it to be the best of the bunch. The more embarassing, hilarious and educational your story, the better! Where else can you win big by losing big?

Joey deVilla (Microsoft, DemoCamp, accordion trouble-making) and John Bristowe (Microsoft) will host the event, encouraging you to confess your failures while sharing their own. FailCamp alumni Meghann Millard (Unspace, RubyFringe, FutureRuby) and Justin Kozuch (Refresh Events) and others will be the Panel of Fail whom you must impress in order to win prizes.

FailCamp takes place on Tuesday, September 29th at 7:00 p.m. at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (255 Front Street West, between John and Simcoe Streets). Admission is free — all you have to do is register to attend, and make sure you bring your best story of fail! It’ll be full of win!