We’re in Halifax this week for TechDays! Here’s what we’re up to this week:
Watch this blog for updates and goings-on!
TechDays, Microsoft Canada’s cross-country technical conference for developers and IT pros, heads to Halifax next week! So far, we’ve been to Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto, and now it’s time to head out east.
TechDays Halifax will take place on Tuesday, November 2 and Wednesday, November 3 at the World Trade Centre (1800 Argyle Street). As with TechDays in every other city, there’s a lot going on:
See you next week!
It’s going to be a busy week for Yours Truly…
On Monday, I’ll be helping out at the Windows Phone Deployment Clinic at Microsoft Canada HQ in Mississauga (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, off Mississauga Road, north of Highway 401), where you can book some time to test your apps on a real Windows Phone 7 device. If you’ve got an app and you’re going to be in the area, drop me a line and book an appointment!
(By the bye, that thing I’m standing beside in the photo above is a promo device known colloquially as the “Big-Ass Phone”.)
On Tuesday, I’ll be spending some time at the AndroidTO conference, a gathering of Android developers, where I’ll be minding the Windows Phone 7 booth. Yes, that’s right, Microsoft is a gold sponsor at an Android conference. Why? Because:
AndroidTO takes place at the Polish Combatants Hall (206 Beverley Street, just south of College), is free-as-in-beer, and is alas, completely booked solid.
I’ll also be doing some setup for TechDays Toronto, which takes place on Wednesday and Thursday.
Wednesday brings with it TechDays, Microsoft Canada’s cross-country tech conference: two days of great sessions for developers and IT pros who are building stuff with the Microsoft stack. I’m the guy who picked the content for both developer tracks, “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” and “Optimizing the Development Process”. I strove for the best mix of both technology-specific stuff like Mark Arteaga’s Windows Phone 7 sessions and Kate Gregory’s Windows API Code Pack presentation as well as practice-of-programming sessions such as “Top 10 Mistakes in Unit Testing” and “Branching and Merging Strategies”. TechDays will occupy me from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m..
From 7 p.m. on, it’ll be Go DEVMental, the student event where we’ll show university and college students what’s possible with Microsoft’s web and mobile platforms. I’ll be doing a presentation on getting starting with game development for Windows Phone with an amusing little live-coded game called “BieberSmash”, starring the bubblegum pop idol of the moment. Go DEVMental is free and open to post-secondary students – just bring your student ID! You’ll get all sorts of goodies, including a DreamSpark token and Visual Studio 2010 Pro.
Both TechDays and GoDEVMental take place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre’s South Building (222 Bremner Boulevard, right beside the CN Tower).
Thursday means another full day of the TechDays conference, to be followed by some very strong whiskey-based drinks.
I’ll be running a Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code this Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Timothy’s at 225 Front Street West (in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre building). I’ll be hanging out at the cafe, working on Windows Phone 7 code on both the emulator and real Windows Phone devices. Want to learn more about Windows Phone 7, see a real-live phone, play some games or test your code? Come on down!
University of Toronto computer science prof Steve Engels invited me to speak in front of a group of high school teachers at the ACSE (Association for Computer Studies Educators) Conference taking place on Saturday. I’m going to be showing them programming for high school students on Windows Phone as well as with the Kodu game development environment.
Well, it won’t be all sleep. I’ll have to pack for my Monday flight to TechDays Halifax!
Since TechDays – Microsoft Canada’s cross-country developer and IT pro conference visiting 8 cities across Canada this fall – is a two-day event, we’ve got the venues for the entire 48-hour period, including evenings. Rather than have the session rooms (which are already set up for an audience, complete with A/V and seating) lie fallow, we decided to put them to good use and hold free community events in the evenings. One of these events is Go DevMENTAL, where we show college and university students what they can build using Microsoft’s tools and technologies and give them a lot of free stuff.
Go DevMENTAL is a two-track conference, with one track devoted to web design and development using WebMatrix, Expression Blend and Silverlight, while the other covers mobile development for Windows Phone 7 using Silverlight and XNA. At the end of the evening, we give the students a token for DreamSpark, our program that gives them free Microsoft development tools and operating systems and a DVD full of goodies so they can start coding right away.
If you’re a college or university student and would like to have an informative and entertaining evening where you learn cool new things, get free cool stuff, connect with industry people and get some help with your career, register for Go DevMental!
We’ll be hitting these cities on these dates:
| City | Where | When |
| Edmonton | Shaw Convention Centre | October 5 |
| Toronto | Metro Toronto Convention Centre South Building |
October 27 |
| Halifax | World Trade Centre | November 2 |
| Ottawa | Hampton Inn Ottawa (200 Coventry Road) |
November 9 |
| Montreal | Palais Des Congres | November 23 |
| Winnipeg | Winnipeg Convention Centre | December 7 |
| Calgary | Round-Up Centre (Calgary Stampede Park) |
December 14 |
Go DevMENTAL Vancouver took place on Tuesday, September 14th in the West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre, a gorgeous venue (for more, see this entry).
I was helping out with the Phone track, so I only managed to get photos for its sessions. My colleages in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, Christian Beauclair and John Bristowe, took care of the Web track, while Mark Arteaga of Redbit Development and I ran the Phone track.
Here’s Mark setting up for his presentation, as the students and a number of professors milled into the room. We had some drinks and snacks set up in the back; that’s what the line at the back of the room is all about:
And we’re off! Mark did the first presentation, which focused on app development with Silverlight.
By the end of his session, he had a working, skinnable Magic 8-Ball app that responded to the user shaking the phone. The app was flexible enough so that it would be really easy to repurpose it as a fortune cookie app, the Wisdom of Master Yoda app and so on, without having to touch any code.
Mark’s session was followed by a break, which concluded with a quick accordion performance by Yours Truly:
Followed by a quick word from Andrew Gottlieb, a Microsoft recruiter who works the UBC campus looking for the next great Microsofties. If you’re looking for a job at Microsoft and you’re a student in the Vancouver area, you’re going to want to drop him a line.
Then came my presentation, a live-coding exercise in which we start with “File –> New Project…” and in 45 minutes, put together a game in which you get to smack Justin Bieber around. Let it never be said that I let professionalism stand in the way of a good coding presentation‘
Live coding in front of an audience is not for the weak of heart, and you’d better really know your stuff. But when you do it right, it’s fun for both you and the audience.
In these photos, I’m holding up two pieces of paper as a way of explaining collision detection using bounding boxes. It’s not every day you see some goof in an ironic hipster trucker cap talking about videogame fundamentals!
After the student sessions, I made my way to the faculty roundtable where we chatted with the professors about what Microsoft could do for them.
It was great meeting the students and faculty – I had a great time, and also learned a lot from them. I’m looking forward to the upcoming Go DevMENTAL cities. See you there!
I’m sitting in the airport lounge in Vancouver, waiting to board my flight back to Toronto. Some quick updates:
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Update: Please note the changes to the Toronto-area deployment clinic locations!
!["I [Canada] Windows Phone" logo](https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/windowsphonecanada2.jpg)
If you’re not a member of LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, you should join it now! It’s a great place to keep in touch with your network of working peers, post and maintain your resume, find people in your industry and be found yourself, and take part in professional discussions in LinkedIn groups.
Once you’re a member of LinkedIn, you should join the Windows Phone Canada group. It’ll have links to the latest Windows Phone articles, host discussions about all aspects of Windows Phone development, from coming up with ideas for apps to writing them to selling them in Marketplace. You’ll also get to network with Windows Phone developers across Canada, and as I’ll tell you over and over, that’s where opportunities are born.
Join the WP7 discussion – join the Windows Phone Canada LinkedIn group!
Pictured above: some of the phones we’ll be using in our deployment clinics.
Anyone who’s built apps and tried them out on an emulator and then deployed to the real thing will know what Jan van de Snepscheut was talking about when he said “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
To support you in your WP7 development and help you make the leap from theory to practice, we’re starting our deployment clinics this week! It’s your chance to deploy your app to a real WP7 phone and see how it works. This week’s are being held in:
There are also some events being planned for next week:
(I’m working on Toronto dates for next week…watch this blog!)
We’re working on ways to hold deployment clinics in as many places across Canada, as often as our schedules and pool of phones will allow. For those of you out west, we’re working on getting clinics out your way – watch this space!
DevTeach’s Windows Phone 7 Bootcamp – a four-city, two-day, hands-on intensive training course taught by Colin Melia – started off quite nicely last week in Montreal (pictured left).
This week, the Bootcamp comes to Vancouver on Monday and Tuesday (August 30 – 31) and Ottawa on Thursday and Friday (September 2 – 3).
Next week, Yours Truly sits in on the Toronto Bootcamp, which happens next Tuesday and Wednesday (September 7 – 8).
Want to sign up for the Bootcamp? Register here, and save $100 when you use the discount code WP7BOOTCAMP.
TechDays, our cross-Canada conference on how to make the most of Microsoft’s tools and technologies, is just over two weeks away, starting with TechDays Vancouver on September 14th and 15th. We’ve got two 65-minute breakout sessions on Windows Phone app development being presented by Windows Phone MVP Mark Arteaga and a half-hour “Turbo Talk” by Windows Phone MVP Anthony Bartolo on distributing your apps through the Marketplace. To find out more about TechDays, visit the TechDays site.
We’ll be running deployment clinics in the TechDays cities when we’re there (those cities, in order: Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Halifax, Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg, Calgary), in the TechDays lounge, as well as outside the conference. Watch this blog for details!
Just as TechDays is a cross-Canada tour for working developers and IT pros, Go DevMENTAL is a cross-Canada tour for post-secondary students who’d like to learn more about the coolest apps and platforms, get connected with people in the software industry and get help in pursing a career. To find out more about Go DevMENTAL, check out the Go DevMENTAL site.
One of Go DevMENTAL’s tracks is dedicated to creating Windows Phone apps. It’ll have two sessions: one on building Silverlight apps for WP7; the other on building XNA-based games for WP7.