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.
I’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?
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?
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!
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
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 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.
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.
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”.
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.
If you had to give a name to the sort of programming I’m going to be concentrating on in 2010, I’d suggest Cloudy with a Chance of Mobile. I’m using this phrase as a catch-all that comprises the following:
Mobile computing, which means means phones, tablets and other ways to access processing power while on the go
And while it’s yet another thing to put on my plate, I can’t resist XNA, the game development platform for Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune.
Remember: these are just the technologies I’ll that I will be using my in own software development and will be writing about. My job remains helping Canadian developers be the best that they can be, primarily with any Microsoft tools and technologies. If you’ve got questions about tools and tech that aren’t listed above, I (along with my fellow Developer Evangelists, Christian Beauclair and John Bristowe) am still your resource within Microsoft!
I sometimes like to refer to this selection of technologies as “The Undesktop”. The desktop, its operating system and applications have been Microsoft’s bread and butter since the company was a handful of scruffy nerds in New Mexico building a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 (the “old man” of the 8-bit machines). While the desktop has been very good to the company – I’d go so far as to call it Microsoft’s first love – it’s not the only place where the software magic happens.
Sometimes I worry that the company is a little too in love with the desktop:
(Bill Gates, DOS and a game called DONKEY.BAS actually played a surprisingly influential role in my first kiss, but that’s another story. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you in person.)
Since the company already lavishes plenty of attention, documentation, demo code and love on the desktop, I thought that I’d do well to take a different tack and help developers build on platforms other than the desktop (and its svelte fraternal twin, the notebook).
What is Windows Azure?
In this article, I’m going to give you a quick overview of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Windows Azure. I figured that a good place to start would be by answering the question “What is Windows Azure?”, and doing so with a video whose title is, oddly enough, What is Windows Azure?
Steve Marx of the Azure team made this video, and it’s a quick one, running at a mere 4 minutes, 16 seconds and explains what Azure is and how and why you might want to use it:
Steve also made a video on The CIA Pickup, which features an app that says he built to impress people (okay, he wants to impress potential dates) by convincing them he’s a CIA agent. It runs on Azure and makes use of a couple of services too: Twilio for telephony, Live ID for authentication and Live Mail for… well, mail. It’s easier to show you than tell you what it is and how it works:
Azure is Live!
As of this Monday, Windows Azure has gone live. That means it’s out of beta, commercially available and ready to host websites, web apps and data. Azure will remain free-as-in-beer for you to evaluate through January 2010, after which you’ll start getting charged for Azure compute time. Take it out for a spin!
Getting Started with Azure
I’ll cover Azure in greater detail in future posts. In the meantime, here are some links to resources to help you get started developing for the cloud:
Windows Azure, where your apps, data storage live and where you can manage them.
SQL Azure, the cloud-based relational database, with lots of SQL Server goodness.
AppFabric, which makes it easier to connect cloud apps with “on-premises” (that is, non-cloud) apps through features like identity management, firewall-friendly messaging and more.
Building Azure Apps
Before you can put an app in the cloud, you need to build it on your local machine:
Once you’ve got a web app running on your local machine, it’s time to deploy it to the cloud. Here’s how you do it:
Purchase the Windows Azure platform package that works for you. And yes, there’s a free-as-in-beer one. Remember that if you have an MSDN subscription, you already have a monhtly allotment of Azure compute hours – check your subscription!
Package your application for deployment.
If your app needs a storage project, create one.
Create a hosted service for your app, then deploy the your package to that service.
If this seems a bit vague and hand-wavy for you, that’s because it is. I’m working on a step-by-step, from-the-ground-up tutorial that will cover the process in greater detail. I hope to post it in the next couple of weeks.
There were a number of Azure presentations at the Professional Developer Conference (PDC), which took place in November. If you want an introduction to Azure that goes into a little more detail, watch these:
Windows Azure Present and Future by Manuvir Das: An overview of Azure’s new features and a peek at what’s coming in future versions. If you watch only one Windows Azure talk from PDC 2009, watch this one!
Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure by Steve Marx: Steve Mark – yes, the guy who made the two videos above – covers advanced Azure development techniques using the new features announced at PDC. This is of those build-up-an-app-throughout-the-session talks and worth a look.
Canadian Developers Blogging About Azure
Be sure to check out Colin Melia’s and Cory Fowler’s blogs – they write about Azure quite often! (And if you’re a Canadian developer blogging about Azure, let me know.)
It’s another “local guy makes good” story: 
