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Toronto Area Windows 7 Installfest

This article originally appeared in Canadian Developer Connection.

We held a Windows 7 Installfest yesterday as part of the cross-Canada EnergizeIT tour. The idea is pretty simple: invite developers, IT pros and early adopters of all stripes to the Microsoft Canada Headquarters in Mississauga, provide them with DVDs of the Windows 7 beta, walk them through the installation process and show them what the upcoming operating system can do!

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We held two sessions on Saturday, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Both sessions were hosted by IT Pro Evangelist extraordinare Rick Claus, who with his signature Tilley hat and friendly delivery style ran them with great fanfare and high praise from many participants. Rick gave a quick presentation walking the crowd through the basics of the installation process, demonstrated a number of Windows 7 features and covered other topics such as creating a bootable USB stick with a Windows 7 installer.

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The event wouldn’t have been possible without the able assistance of our proctors. They were volunteers from the local IT community who believed in Windows 7 so much that they were willing to spend a Saturday morning and afternoon helping people install a beta version on their computers. Thanks, guys – without your help, we would’ve been swamped!

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I was also there for both sessions, helping Rick out as well as doing my own demonstrations showing all kinds of software than ran “right out of the box” on Windows 7, from Visual Studio 2008 and XNA (I showed them my incredibly simple and incredibly dumb prototype for a game based on the move Zardoz), to Far Cry 2 to the music synthesizer/production app FL Studio, which I used to build a hip-hop backbeat on the fly.

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Also present was IT Pro Evangelist Damir Bersinic, who along with Anne Murakami and Cristina Ferreira from our partner company Maritz Canada, made sure that everything ran smoothly, from making sure that the room was set up to signing in the attendees to getting not just enough mini-burgers to feed the crowd, but also enough to haunt Rick’s dreams for the next week.

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Most of the people who came brought laptop computers. A couple brought netbooks. Some people who really wanted Windows 7 brought desktop systems, and they weren’t tiny ones, either! Here’s one that got brought in, complete with a decent-sized monitor and webcam! The system was so new that it still had all the feature stickers on it.

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The “Flashy Chassis” award goes to this guy, whose pimped-out enclosure got a lot of oohs and ahhs. Speaking as a guy who walks around town and tech conferences with an accordion on his back, I applaud personal expression of all kinds and salute this gentleman with a filet mignon on a flaming sword! I plan to build a gamer/music studio PC rig at some point, and you’d better believe it’s going to be at least this decked out:

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Ages ago, a full two years before The Empire hired me, they sent me an Acer Ferrari 1000 as part of program to get prominent Canadian bloggers interested in Vista. I still have it…

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…but it no longer has Vista. Under Windows 7, it feels a little snappier. I plan to use the machine, which is now a couple of years old and whose specs are a bit lower than than developer-grade laptops that The Empire provides me, as a “reality check” device, where I’ll test applications that both Microsoft and I develop.

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I never thought I’d see the day when people would get jazzed about an upcoming Windows operating system, never mind sign up in droves to get their hands on a pre-release version, but that’s just what happened. The room was filled with geek love and techno-lust for Windows 7.

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It was also great to meet new people and make new connections with the tech community at large, and they in turned seemed quite happy to meet some of the actual human faces that make up Microsoft. When we asked the audience if they’d like to see more Saturday events like this, they responded with a resounding “YES!”, and we’re keeping that in mind as we plan events for 2009 and beyond.

All in all, the Toronto Area Windows 7 Installfest was a lot of fun, and from where I stand, it was a great success! Thanks to everyone who attended and helped out!

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“If You’re Not Indie, F**K YOU!”

Here’s a great video inspired by Andy Samberg’s People Getting Punched Out Just Before Eating short film from Saturday Night Live made to promote the Independent Games Festival at the Game Developers Conference 2009:

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Microsoft’s Open Source License (MS-PL): Short, Sweet and Simple

Windows logoMicrosoft’s new web development framework, ASP.NET MVC, which developers working with Rails, Django and other MVC web frameworks will find familiar, was recently released as an open source project under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). As you might expect, the mere mention of Microsoft doing something open source has gotten some tongues a-wagging, especially in the more zealous corners of the F/OSS world. As you might not expect, a lot of what they said was positive (even if grudgingly so).

Consider what a commenter on Slashdot had to say about our license (the emphasis is mine):

I really don’t want to like the MS-PL or anything Microsoft, but I read it, and re-read it, and I can’t see anything wrong with it. In fact, at the risk of being modded to oblivion, I gotta say it’s a far cry easier to understand than the GPL license, seems straightforward, and truly "open." It seems roughly as open as the BSD license. It doesn’t even require you to open your own code under the same license. What am I missing? Is this a late April Fools’ joke?

In case you were wondering what the MS-PL looks like, I’ve included it below. It’s OSI-approved. It’s also short and sweet: what you see is not the preamble or a set of introductory statements, it’s the whole thing. Take a note of the language: it’s simple, straightforward and quite free of legalese. As the Slashdot comment above says, the rights, terms and conditions conferred and imposed by MS-PL license are like the BSD license:

Microsoft Public License

This license governs use of the accompanying software. If you use the software, you accept this license. If you do not accept the license, do not use the software.

1. Definitions
The terms "reproduce," "reproduction," "derivative works," and "distribution" have the same meaning here as under U.S. copyright law.
A "contribution" is the original software, or any additions or changes to the software. A "contributor" is any person that distributes its contribution under this license.
"Licensed patents" are a contributor’s patent claims that read directly on its contribution.

2. Grant of Rights
(A) Copyright Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce its contribution, prepare derivative works of its contribution, and distribute its contribution or any derivative works that you create.
(B) Patent Grant- Subject to the terms of this license, including the license conditions and limitations in section 3, each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license under its licensed patents to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and/or otherwise dispose of its contribution in the software or derivative works of the contribution in the software.

3. Conditions and Limitations
(A) No Trademark License- This license does not grant you rights to use any contributors’ name, logo, or trademarks.
(B) If you bring a patent claim against any contributor over patents that you claim are infringed by the software, your patent license from such contributor to the software ends automatically.
(C) If you distribute any portion of the software, you must retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices that are present in the software.
(D) If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
(E) The software is licensed "as-is." You bear the risk of using it. The contributors give no express warranties, guarantees or conditions. You may have additional consumer rights under your local laws which this license cannot change. To the extent permitted under your local laws, the contributors exclude the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

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Tired: DateTime. Wired: DateTimeOffset!

You’d think that with 10,000 years of date- and time-keeping under our belts, it would be easy to keep track of dates and times in a modern-day database. It’s a little trickier than you might think, according to The Death of DateTime?, an article in Bart Duncan’s SQL Weblog.

The gist of the article is pretty simple: if you’re using SQL Server 2008 and want to store dates and times unambiguously, use the datetimeoffset type (introduced in SQL Server 2008) rather than the traditional datetime.

Why? Because datetimeoffset is datetime with these key differences:

  • The time value is stored internally in an unambiguous UTC format
  • The local time zone offset is stored along with the UTC time
  • It is capable of storing more precise times than datetime

DesktopDuncan recommends that if you’re storing data in SQL Server 2008, you should almost always store date-and-time values in datetimeoffset rather than datetime. It’s a good idea; I’d go even farther and suggest that if you’re programming using .NET 3.5, you should make use of the corresponding DateTimeOffset type instead of DateTime. You can read more about .NET 3.5’s DateTimeOffset type in this entry in Dan Rigsby’s blog titled DateTime vs. DateTimeOffset in .NET.

When might you want to use datetime? Duncan suggests that you should use it in those rare cases when you want to store time ambiguously. The example he provides is: “if you wanted a column to record the fact that all stores in a chain should open at 8:00am local time (whatever the local time zone may be), you should use datetime.”

Thanks to Brent Ozar for the link!

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Ottawa Coffee and Code on Tuesday!

This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.

Ottawa skyline

Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team is hosting a Coffee and Code in Ottawa next week! They’ll be there for the EnergizeIT cross-Canada tour and they’re holding a Coffee and Code on Tuesday, April 7th from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Bridgehead at 109 Bank Street (at the corner of Bank and Albert).

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“Les Bons Gars”, Christian Beauclair, Rick Claus and Pierre Roman will be hosting this event, where he’ll talk about EnergizeIT, the future of Windows from the client to the cloud, the industry in general and anything else!

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Toronto Coffee and Code Returns Next Thursday!

This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.

Coffee beans

Toronto’s Coffee and Code returns next Thursday, April 9th! It’s going to take place at The Roastery at 401 Richmond from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. See you there!

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Coffee and iPhone

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This is short notice and I apologize, but if you’re going to be near Toronto’s “Annex” neighbourhood, you might want to catch David Janes’ Coffee and iPhone event today between 1 and 3 p.m. at the Lettieri Cafe at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst streets.

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