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Ignite Your Coding Begins Today – 2 p.m. Eastern with Andy “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning” Hunt!

igniteGratuitious flaming wok shot courtesy of Ricardo Liberato. Yay Creative Commons!
Click the photo to see the original.

Ignite Your CodingToday’s the big day! John Bristowe and I kick off the live Ignite Your Coding webcast this afternoon at 2:00 p.m. Eastern/11:00 a.m. Pacific with an interview with Andy Hunt, co-founder of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, co-author of The Pragmatic Programmer and many other books, and author of Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, which I dubbed my favourite geek book of 2008.

If You Want to Catch the Live Webcast and/or Ask Andy Questions…

You’ll need:

If You Want to Listen to a Recording of the Webcast Later…

We’ll make it available in MP3 format soon. Watch this site for details!

What’s Ignite Your Coding All About, Anyway?

It’s all about helping you, the software developer, find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We got our hands on some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We got some big names from the Microsoft/.NET world, but we also went farther afield and got some people from beyond that world as well, because a different perspective is often helpful.

Who Else is Going to Appear on Ignite Your Coding?

These distinguished individuals:

For a full description of our upcoming shows, take a look at the Ignite Your Coding site.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Counting Down to Seven: The Most Active Mobile Social Networkers Are…

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeA report from Nielsen – as in the ratings company that got their start with television – says that women use mobile devices for social networking more than men do and that the lion’s share of mobile social networking isn’t done by Millennials (see the previous article in this series).

First, the women: 55% of the people in their study who said that they use social networking software and sites on their mobile phone were women, while the remaining 45% were men:

men-women-mobile-social

Second, age: according to Nielsen’s study, the age group who used their mobile devices to social network the most were between the ages of 35 and 54, closely followed by the 25 – 34 group.

social-mobile-by-age

More stuff to consider as you think of applications to build for Windows Phone 7: what are you writing for women between the ages of 25 to 54?

This article appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Ignite Your Coding: This Thursday at 2pm Eastern!

Catch the Interview with Andy Hunt This Thursday!

Ignite Your CodingThe Ignite Your Coding live webcast series starts this Thursday, March 4th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) with me and John Bristowe interviewing Andy “Pragmatic Programmer” Hunt! Join us as we talk with Andy about how he got into software development, how he became a writer and publisher, his book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning and much more. After we’re done asking our questions, we’ll turn over the interview to you, and you can ask Andy your questions!

If you’d like to catch the live webcast, you’ll need Live Meeting, which you can download here. We’ll also record the webcast and make it available in MP3 form.

Who Else Will Appear on Ignite Your Coding?

Here’s a complete schedule of the Ignite Your Coding webcasts we’ve set up so far. You can find full descriptions of each of the upcoming shows at the Ignite Your Coding site.

Andy Hunt
Pragmatic Programming, Thinking and Learning

Thursday, March 4, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Glenn Block
Composable Applications FTW

Thursday, March 11, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Jeremy Miller
Essence versus Ceremony

Thursday, March 18, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

David Laribee
Agile Techniques for Paying Back Technical Debt

Thursday, March 25, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Richard Campbell
Scalability and Performance

Thursday, April 8, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST, (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Scott Hanselman
State of the .NET Developer Nation

Thursday, April 15, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Jeff Atwood
Horrors, Overflows and Fake Plastic Rock

Thursday, April 22, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

Robert C. Martin
A Chat with “Uncle Bob”

Thursday, April 29, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 a.m. PST)
Register for this webcast (it’s free!)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Counting Down to Seven: Millennials and Mobile

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

"Counting Down to Seven" badge

Who are the Millennials?

In Andy Hunt’s book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (which we’re covering in Ignite Your Coding in a couple of days!), there’s a chapter devoted to recognizing and compensating for your cognitive biases. In that chapter, there’s a section titled Recognize Your Generational Affinity, and it begins with this quote from Douglas Adams:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that is invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

It’s an interesting quote to keep in mind when discussing that demographic known as “Millennials” or “Generation Y”. While there aren’t any hard and fast rules for defining the boundaries of a generation, it’s generally accepted that when we’re talking about Millennials, we’re referring to a group of people born after 1982.

Here’s a quick video introduction to the Millennial Generation from Futurist.com [length 8:04]:

By Douglas Adams’ maxim above, even the oldest members of this generation, who were 15 in 1997, would consider the web and mobile phones that actually fit in your pocket as normal and ordinary and just a natural part of the way the world works. Members of this generation who are in university or just about to enter the job market probably can’t even remember a world where the internet and mobile phones weren’t household items.

How Millennial are You?

I followed a tweet from my friend, co-worker and fellow Generation Xer David Crow which lead me to the Pew Research Center’s How Millennial Are You? Quiz. David scored 51/100, which suggests that his tendencies fall somewhere between Generation X and Millennial. Here are my results:

Results from "How Millennial Are You" quiz: 77/100
I don’t know how I should feel about that score (I was born in 1967). Millennial tendencies or not, I don’t think you’re going to hear me blasting any Justin Bieber tunes out of my car anytime soon.

(Go ahead, take the quiz. If you feel like sharing, tell me your score in the comments!)

Millennials: Under the Microscope and With Mobile Phones

The quiz led me to the Pew Research Center’s study titled Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next [1.25 MB PDF]. It’s subtitled with “Confident. Connected. Open to Change.”, and it’s a pretty interesting read if you’re the sort of person who likes to know what makes people tick (and if you know me, I’m just that sort of person). It’s also worth reading – at least parts of it are – if you’re planning to get into developing for Windows Phone 7 (and yes, any other vendor’s smartphone platform, but those don’t pay my bills).

Millennials grew up in the networked world and spent at least part of their adolescent years in the era of what Microsoft Research’s danah boyd calls “networked publics”. They’re the first “always connected” generation, having grown up with broadband, wifi and mobile devices. They’re more technophilic than previous generations, as the chart below shows:

image

(Note the use of the phrase “cell phone” – clearly an Xer or Boomer wrote the study.)

The stats about mobile phones are worth repeating:

  • 88% of Millennials use their mobile phone to send text messages
  • 80% have texted in the past 24 hours
  • 64% have texted while driving (how you do this, I don’t even know)
  • Of those who’ve texted in the past 24 hours, the median number of texts they have sent and received is 20.

Here’s another observation: 83% of Millennials sleep with their mobile phones nearby, according to the chart below:

Most Millennials have a mobile phone, and many of them have the mobile as their only phone (as opposed to having a land line at home):

image

Millennials are also big on wireless ‘net access:

image

In the past 24 hours, Millennials are more likely to have watched an online video, posted a message to an online profile and played a video game than the other generations. Here’s a chart showing “Past 24 Hours” activities for various generations:

image

Motorola on Millennials

Given the Millennials’ technophilic tendencies, it’s not surprising that a number of high-tech companies have researched this generation. Here are a couple of videos posted by Motorola Media Center:

Microsoft on Millennials and Money

The Empire has also done some studies on Millennials. One of the most recent was on the difference between the way Boomers and Millennials deal with banks:

  • Millennials are much more likely than Boomers to use web banking (49% versus 35%)
  • See online service capabilities as important when researching a bank (54% versus 42%)
  • Care less about doing transactions in person at a bank branch (32% versus 44%)

Summary

Keep the Millennials in mind when you’re thinking about apps to write for Windows Phone 7. Think of the sorts of application that would appeal to people who:

  • Don’t think of mobile phones as just phones that fit in your pocket, but as remote controls for the world.
  • Send a lot of text messages, sometimes at inadvisable times.
  • Always have their phones close by, even when they’re asleep.
  • Are bigger videogame players than any previous generation.
  • Are more likely to have their mobile phone as their primary and sole phone.

What needs would they have? What goals would arise from those needs? What user contexts would they have, and how would you use them to filter what your apps would present to them?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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TWC9: MIX10, Tweets from Your TiVO, Touch UI Gesture Icons and More

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Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
MP4, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune format.

imageThis Week on Channel 9, or TWC9 for short, is a weekly digest show hosted by Microsoft’s Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller covering the developer community news they find most interesting after sifting through hundreds of blogs, videos and announcements. It’s aimed primarily at .NET developers, but if you have any geeky tendencies at all, chances are they’ll cover something that appeals to you!

In this week’s episode, they cover the following topics, summarized in the handy-dandy table below:

Topic What it is or why it’s interesting
Mike Swanson’s MIX10 Recap MIX10 is going to be big this year, especially with Windows Phone 7.

Coding4Fun: Tweevo, a free, open source application to have your TiVo tweet what you’re recording

It’s nice to know what your TiVo is doing while you’re at work.
LINQ to SQL Profiler It lets you see the SQL being generated by your LINQ queries.

Silverlight 4’s TCP Sockets Video It’s part of Mike Taulty’s 8-part series on networking with Silverlight.

S. Somasegar’s Key Software Development Trends
(I covered it in this article)
It’s interesting to see what Microsoft’s brain trust sees as important, and it’s also good to see testing treated as a first-class citizen.

Gesturecons, a set of free icons to describe touch gestures For touch interactions, a picture is worth a thousand words.

System.Uri For URIs, you really should be using System.Uri instead of strings.

Code Project: How to Automate Software Using WPF UI Automation An underused but incredibly handy feature that lets you automate testing an application’s UI.

Mercurial Integration with Visual Studio A step-by-step guide to using CodePlex’s Mercurial integration inside Visual Studio.

How to Use Selenium and NUnit Together Selenium’s a good, free option for web app testing.

60 .NET Libraries Every Developer Should Know What, you’d rather not know?

Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit Dude! Augmented reality!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Cloud Cover, Episode 2: RoleEntryPoint, Windows Azure’s Billing Model and Troubleshooting Initializing-Busy-Stopping

Get Microsoft Silverlight
Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
MP4, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune format.

Here’s the second episode of Cloud Cover, the Channel 9 show where hosts Ryan Dunn and Steve Marx show you what’s in the Windows Azure cloud computing platform and how to get the most out of it.

Steve’s off being a jet-set celebrity – what kind of excuse is “I’m off to Japan to shoot a commercial”, anyway? – so David Aiken, who also knows quite a bit about Azure, is filling in for him in this episode. Here’s what David and Steve cover:

  • They do a walkthrough of the RoleEntryPoint class and show you the hooks that you can use to build web and worker services,
  • Explain Azure’s billing model, and
  • Show you how to troubleshoot the Initializing-Busy-Stopping loop.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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AlignIT Webcast Series in March and April

Microsoft TechNet Align IT 2010 Tour -- Consolidation. Exploration. Optimization.

Dave Remmer and Adam Gallant, two of my colleagues from Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, are hosting a series of webcasts aimed at enterprise application developers, architects and managers on Tuesdays from March 23 through April 27th.

Here’s what the series is all about:

With IT being an increasingly vital strategic asset and business enabler in organizations today, we all need to strive for excellence in execution in the IT projects we’re leading. There are a number of different ways to help create this excellence; so they’ve put together six, one-hour webcasts to give you our perspective on how to help make it happen. Starting with the ALM [that’s short for Application Lifecycle Management – Joey]  foundation of successful project delivery, they’ll look at architectural patterns for the web, for building secure solutions, for leveraging the cloud and client devices, for IT governance and operations, and finish up with real life stories from experts who’ve done it before. At the end of the series, they hope that you will gain new insights how to help increase business value and agility through IT by having a better understanding of how to leverage the Microsoft platform and toolset.

Here are the individual webcast episodes and their dates and times. To register for a webcast (and yes, registration is free), click on its title: