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Your Last Day for TechDays Vancouver or Toronto at $299!

Microsoft TechDays Canada 2009: $299 - Last day!

Today is your last chance to register for TechDays Canada 2009’s Vancouver (September 14 – 15) and Toronto (September 29 – 30) conferences at the early bird price of CDN$299. Tomorrow, the price doubles to CDN$599 – that’s the price for procrastination!

I’ve written a lot about TechDays Canada 2009 lately, so I think I’ll close with this video shot by the folks at TechVibes on the last leg of the TechDays Canada 2008 tour: Vancouver. It features my coworkers Rick Claus (IT Pro Evangelist) and Qixing Zheng (User Experience Evangelist) as well as Yours Truly (Developer Evangelist) talking about TechDays:


Techvibes at Microsoft Tech Days 2008 from Techvibes.com on Vimeo.

With the work we’re putting into TechDays, we think it’ll be the conference that offers you the most conference for your hard-earned dollars. It features big-league sessions delivered by local people plus great resources for you to take home (and to work) and supercharge the way you work with technology. You really should register today, while the early bird price is still in effect.

Microsoft TechDays Canada 2009: 2 days - 7 cities - 5 tracks - 40 sessions - plus more!

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TechDays Toronto and Vancouver: 2 Days Left for the Early Bird Rate

techdays_299_2_more_days

The early bird registration price for TechDays Vancouver (September 14th – 15th) and TechDays Toronto (September 29th – 30th) will disappear after Monday, August 31st. If you want to catch TechDays at the ultra-cheap rate, you should register now!

Here’s a quick graphic recap of what TechDays Canada 2009 is all about:

Rather than asking Canadian developers and IT pros to fly far away to a conference and take a hit on the currency exchange, TechDays Canada 2009 takes the conference to them. We’re taking the sessions and information from conferences like TechEd, updating them with the latest information and bringing them to the following cities:

  • Vancouver (September 14 – 15…two weeks away!)
  • Toronto (September 29 – 30…a month from now)
  • Halifax (November 2 – 3)
  • Calgary (November 17 – 18)
  • Montreal (December 2 – 3)
  • Ottawa (December 9 –10)
  • Winnipeg (December 15 – 16)

TechDays Canada 2009 features the following tracks:

  • Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform (which happens to be the track I’m in charge of)
  • Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices
  • Windows Client
  • Servers, Security and Management
  • Communications and Collaboration

And, as a bonus, we’ve got an extra track for Vancouver and Toronto: Developer Foundations, which contains sessions of a non-platform-specific nature covering best coding practices and good software engineering.

Attendees also get $700 worth of goodies, including a TechNet Plus Direct Subscription (which gets you Windows 7 for free, among other things), access to content from the TechEd conference, the TechDays 2009 Resource DVD, discounts on books and more.

TechDays presentations are given mostly by local people and attended by local people. If you want to get to know and network with developers, IT pros and techies in your area – and believe me, this sort of thing pays off in spades – TechDays Canada 2009 is a great place for it.

If you’re a developer or IT pro and work with the .NET platform – or are even just curious about it – you should be at TechDays Canada 2009. And if you like saving money, you’ll register before the end of Monday, August 31st.

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Reminder: 3 Days Left for TechDays Vancouver and Toronto at $299

TechDays Canada 2009: $299 for 3 more days

If you want to attend TechDays Vancouver (September 14 – 15) or TechDays Toronto (September 29 – 30) at the early bird rate, you’ve got 3 days left! After Monday, August 31st, you’ll have to pay the full $599. Register now and save!

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The TechDays $299 Deal

For the price of this (an Xbox 360 Elite or $300), you get all this (conference sessions, opportunities to meet people, a supercharged brain, Microsoft TechNet subscription, developer resources, a happy cat)

The Early Bird Price is Going Away Soon

The $299 early bird pricing for TechDays Canada 2009’s Vancouver and Toronto stops will vanish after Monday, August 31st. From September 1st onward, if you want to catch TechDays in Vancouver (Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th) and Toronto (Tuesday, September 29th – Wednesday, September 30th), you’ll have to pay the full price of $599. Why pay double when you don’t have to?

The TechDays Formula

Continuing with this article’s theme of using pictograms to explain things, here’s TechDays in a nutshell, pictorial-style:

The TechDays Formula -- TechDays = Content from premium conferences far, far away + Delivered by local speakers at venues close to home + Extra events and goodies for you to enjoy We take presentation sessions that cover getting the most out of current and new Microsoft tools and technologies from big conferences like TechEd, which are typically held in a large city in the southern United States, at a large convention centre, near large hotels and will set you back a couple “large” for registration, transportation and accommodation. TechDays 2009 features over 40 sessions split into these tracks:

  • Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform
  • Developer Fundamentals and Best Practices
  • Windows Client
  • Servers, Security and Management
  • Communications and Collaboration

We update that content where necessary and find local speakers to present it. We pick out speakers who are either well-versed in the session topic or who are simply bright techies with a thirst for knowledge, a knack for presenting and who have been meaning to get well-versed in that topic. Whenever possible, we try to get someone who lives in the area of the conference city, because TechDays isn’t just about spreading knowledge; it’s also about helping developers make connections with their peers nearby.

We also set up extra events and goodies. Attendees get a one-year subscription to TechNet, which alone is worth more than the price of the early bird registration and gets you access to all kinds of goodies including Windows 7. There’s also all the content from the TechEd conference. You also get the learning kit DVD packed with goodies to help you get the most out of Microsoft’s tools and tech. We’re throwing in some discount codes for books. We’ll also be announcing surprise events in your city – watch this space for details!

And last but not least, don’t underestimate the job-and-employee-seeking opportunities that a gathering like TechDays provides. Events like TechDays are where opportunities happen!

All This for $299

3 Canadian 100-dollar bills, minus one loonie

And don’t forget, that’s $299 Canadian, for content from conferences that cost 7 times as much. And with extra goodies such as a TechNet subscription (which costs more than the early bird fee and gets you Windows 7) thrown in. Plus a chance to meet up with your peers as well as us evangelists, whom you should think of as “your people on the inside”. It’s a great deal, and it’s going away after next Monday, so sign up now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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GigPark Acquired by CanPages

GigPark logoLocal business search site Canpages has just acquired GigPark, the social networking site for employers and job-seekers.

Here’s a snippet from Canpages’ news release:

"Online recommendations, especially those from a user’s social networks, are increasingly important when choosing which local businesses to buy from," said Olivier Vincent, President and CEO of Canpages. "With the acquisition of the GigPark, we are thrilled to be the first local search and directories publisher in North America to embrace social recommendations in a relevant way."

(I thought I was the only person to refer to the company as “The GigPark” – although ironically, as in “The Facebook” or “The Twitter”.)

GigPark are based here in Toronto, and founders Pema Hegan and Noah Godfrey are pillars of the Toronto tech community as well as all-round great guys, as are their team: Gianni Chiappetta, Paul Dowman and Tony Targonski. To echo the words of Jevon MacDonald at StartupNorth, it’s hard not to like them.

GigPark answers a few questions about their acquisition in their most recent blog entry:

Who is Canpages?

Canpages is the fastest growing local search and directories publisher in Canada. On its way to becoming the market leader in local online search, Canpages’ website gets more than 3.5 million unique visitors per month and is a pretty awesome place to find a local business. Its iPhone and Blackberry apps are pretty sweet too. They also publish 84 print directories that reach 8 million households and business across the country.

And the icing on the cake is that Canpages is run by a bunch of really smart and nice people (shout out to our new colleagues!)

What’s going to happen to GigPark?

GigPark is not going anywhere. We will continue to be the easiest place to find the local services your friends use. And with Canpages’ support and resources, GigPark will become even more useful.

How will GigPark play with Canpages?

The acquisition enables Canpages to integrate GigPark’s recommendations into its online and mobile search platforms. Like we said, Canpages is already a pretty awesome place to find local businesses and the addition of GigPark will make this local search experience even better.

Beyond that, Canpages is also excited about the prospect of adding some of GigPark’s social functionality to better connect users with advertisers through recommendations from friends.

I’m a business owner on GigPark. What does this mean for me?

It means A LOT more people are going to see the testimonials for your business and you’ll likely get even more business. You’re welcome! :)

The acquisition was also covered by The Globe and Mail.

Congrats to the folks at GigPark!

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Remember: The Race to Market Challenge is On!

Last month, I posted a video announcing the launch of the Race to Market Challenge, a competition that challenges you to add some Windows Phone applications to our up-and-coming Marketplace and compete for one of four grand prizes: developer editions of a Surface table.

There’s a new video out, and I’m posting it as a little reminder for you would-be mobile developers, Windows Phone is a great way to get in on the ground floor of the world of mobile application development and win prizes at the same time:

I’ll be posting articles about how to access useful data and features on Windows Phone, including the Pocket Outlook Object Model (POOM, which gives you access to things like contact information) and using the GPS to get the user’s location.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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XKCD’s Tech Support Flowchart

Give this to your non-techie friends and relatives who keep hitting you up for tech support:

XKCD's tech support flowchart