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CUSEC 2010: Montreal, January 21 – 23

CUSEC 2010 logo

For the latter half of this week, I’ll be at CUSEC – the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference – the annual Montreal-based conference by and for Canadian university students interested in topics on software development and engineering. For a conference that’s aimed at students, it punches above its weight class, having hosted some big name speakers including:

This year’s speaker list is pretty good. Among them are:

  • Douglas Crockford, Senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!.  If you truly want to understand JavaScript, listen to this guy! When people were dismissing JavaScript as a toy language – a strange concept in these Ajax-powered days, but this really was the case – he wrote articles like JavaScript: The Wrrrld’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language and other must-read pieces, all of which live at javascript.crockford.com. He’s also the author of the book JavaScript: The Good Parts, which is required reading for web developers. I had the pleasure of meeting him and seeing him speak at the Ajax Experience conference in Boston in 2006, and he’s both a great presenter and guy to hang out with at apres-conference events.
  • Greg Wilson, Assistant Professor at U of T. Greg is many things: much-sought-after provider to academic advice and support at U of T, co-editor of Beautiful Code, DemoCamp Toronto steward, and now, the guy behind the best presentation at the Stack Overflow DevDays Toronto: Bits of Evidence: What We Actually Know About Software and Why We Believe It’s True. It was the presentation so nice, he’s doing it twice – this time at CUSEC. Don’t miss this one!
  • Reg Braithwaite, Superprogrammer-at-large. Whether you know him as “Reg” or “raganwald”, you know that he’s got some seriously big-ass ideas about programming. Very few people push Ruby metaprogramming to its limits the way he does. Every time I see one of his presentations, I come out a little bit smarter.
  • Pete Forde, Unspace. Pete’s one of the “corporate speakers”, a designation that probably makes him feel very uncomfortable. He’s one of the guys behind the Toronto-based development shop Unspace and behind two of the best conferences I’ve ever attended, RubyFringe (2008) and FutureRuby (2009). It’s anyone’s guess as to what he’ll talk about, but it should be good, and we can only hope that he begins it with a dance number, like he did with his presentation at the Mesh 2009 conference.
  • Leigh Honeywell, Symantec. Leigh has forgotten more about security than I will ever learn, and she’s also one of the founders of HacklabTO, the Toronto “hackerspace”.

I had the opportunity to speak at last year’s CUSEC and had a wonderful time both speaking and hanging out with the students. I love the conference vibe – the energy, brainpower and passion of the attendees is palpable, and it makes me optimistic for the future of tech in Canada. I’m only too glad to be able to attend this year, and I’m honoured to be invited to host their DemoCamp event, which will take place Thursday evening.

I’ll be filing reports from CUSEC, so watch this space!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Colin Melia’s Pitch for His MIX10 Presentations

vote for colin meliaOttawa-based developer Colin Melia has been a big help to me with TechDays. He presented at TechDays Ottawa, helped organize Demo Night in Canada, and posted a simple Windows Azure deployment exercise that I’ve found quite helpful and useful.

I’d like to return the favour by promoting the three sessions – that’s right, three – that he submitted to MIX10 in their open call for content. They are:

  1. Everything You Touch Turns to Azure
    Feel the rush of power as you learn how to wave your hands and connect directly to your throne in the heavens – OK well you may have to settle for learning about Windows Touch in WPF/Silverlight and the Windows Azure Platform.  This is the future – make sure that everything you touch can turn to Azure.

    The session shows how the building blocks of Windows Touch, WPF/Silverlight applications and the Windows Azure Platform can be brought together to create a small yet engaging end-to-end experience.  Attendees should gain insight into the benefits and design of Touch-aware applications on Windows 7 as well as the benefits of backing user experiences with the Windows Azure Platform.

  2. Get a WIF of This
    Writing services that understand multiple authentication systems is cumbersome and completely yesterday. Claims-based authentication and authorisation is the way to go. We’ll take a dive into how claims work and what Windows Identity Foundation provides by exploring the key components, but more importantly by building our own identify provider, a claims-based service and a Silverlight application that makes use of it.

    WIF recently RTM’d but the identify framework it cements is one of the most overlooked components when it comes to Internet-based application design.  Attendees should leave with a sense of how to create WIF components or WIF-aware components, as well as knowledge of the necessary design considerations.

  3. The Cloud and the Silver Lining
    You need a place to host your Silverlight applications as well as the WCF RIA Services and database that back them.  This session shows you not only that the Windows Azure Platform (featuring Windows Azure, SQL Azure and other services), is a great place to put them, but also how to create the connections between the pieces.

    This session digs into the mechanics of a real-world application using Silverlight and the Windows Azure Platform.  Attendees should leave knowing how to easily test against and deploy to the Azure Platform, as well as how communication takes place between the component layers. 

I’d like to see Colin speak at MIX10. He’s a good speaker, he’s chosen some interesting and relevant topics, and he’d be a Canadian presence at MIX. If you agree with me, please vote for his sessions on the MIX10 Open Call for Entries site by Friday, January 15th! (If you want to see a list of all the proposed sessions, they’re here.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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MIX10 Web/UX Conference: March 15 – 17 in Las Vegas

MIX10: The Next Web NowI’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?

MIX10: Where designers and developers intersect to make the web a great place

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?

The future of web design and user experience

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!

Open call for content voting is live. Vote now for your favortie session submissions.

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

Register by Jan. 15th and save: $600 on your pass and a free night at Mandalay Bay

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 article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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This Week: Ottawa!

ottawa

Last week, I was in Montreal, this week I’m in Ottawa. Once again, I’ll be road-tripping with my coworker, Damir Bersinic, IT Pro Evangelist and supreme field commander for the TechDays Canada cross-country conference. Watch this space for reports from both Ottawa and the road!

If you’re on the Toronto-Ottawa route and would like to join us for a coffee, let us know, either via email or in the comments!

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TechDays Montreal, Day 2

Day 2 of Techdays Montreal began with the A/V techs (and yes, me) ooh-ing and ahh-ing at presenter Maxime Rouiller’s Alienware laptop, He showed us the utility for controlling its backlighting colours:

01 alienware

Once set up, the Building for the Microsoft-Based Platorm track’s acting host Laurent Duveau introduced Maxime, who then presented Introducing ASP.NET MVC.

02 maxime and laurent

Maxime will present the same session in Ottawa, so if you’re there, you too can get a look at that Alienware. Wonder what it would take to get Microsoft to assign me one of those babies.

Continuing the morning’s ASP.NET MVC theme, Simon Laroche took to the lectern:

03 simon 1

Simon presented SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC Applications, which used the refactoring of an ASP.NET MVC application to demonstrate the SOLID principles of object-oriented design in action:

04 simon 2

Next came lunch, once again held on Centre Mont-Royal’s fourth floor:

05 lunch

Here are Developer Evangelist Christian Beauclair and IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus preparing for the lunchtime presentation:

06 christian and rick

07 christian

And here they are doing that presentation, in which they show off some of the new features in Office 2010. I rather the like the goodies in PowerPoint 2010:

08 christian and rick

In the meantime, some of the attendees hung out in the Windows 7 lounge, trying out the touchscreen machines and playing games – including the indie hit I MAED A GAME WITH Z0MB1ES!!!1 – on the XBox 360:

09 windows 7 lounge

Mario Cardinal led the first session of the afternoon:

10 mario

His presentation was on Building RESTful Applications Using WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). Mario knows his stuff, and as a seasoned presenter, had no problem crossing the stage and doing part of his delivery far away from the lectern and any speaker’s notes:

11 mario and audience

Mario will also present the same session at TechDays Ottawa.

Some of the staff saw me walking around with Rick’s DSLR camera and asked me to take their picture. I was happy to do so – TechDays doesn’t happen without their help:

12 staff

One nice thing about Centre Mont-Royal is that there’s plenty of “hanging out” space. If you’re not spending at least a little time in these spaces between sessions, getting to know the other techies in your community, you’re not getting all you can out of TechDays:

13 break

14 break 2

The final session in my track had Francis Beaudet speaking:

15 francis 1

He presented Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint:

16 francis 2

Day 2 wrapped up at 4:00 p.m., at which point we quickly dismantled the machines we’d set up on Tuesday and packed them up for shipping to Techdays Ottawa. Some of the team stayed to do the end-of-conference review, which Christian and I had to run to catch the Microsoft open source cocktail party at the W, which I’ll cover in the next blog entry.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Scenes from TechDays Calgary

I – along with a good chunk of Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team – am in Calgary for the fourth leg of the TechDays Canada seven-city tour. TechDays Calgary is taking place in the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Wanting to be a good guest, I decided to observe a local custom:

joey devilla

I haven’t worn my flaming cowboy hat in ages!

As far as I can tell, I’m the only attendee who brought a cowboy hat. The only other similarly-haberdashed people on the premises are the Calgary Stampede staff and the washroom signs:

washroom signs

There are a number of Christmas-related events taking place at the BMO Centre before and after TechDays, so the place is all decked out for Christmas:

nutcracker and tree

The isn’t a Santa Claus on site, but we do have IT Pro Evangelist Rick Claus delivering goodies:

rick claus

…and Rick’s session has drawn quite a crowd:

ricks room

ricks room 2

Another well-attended session was Introducing ASP.NET MVC, which was delivered by Tom Opgenorth:

tom opgenorth

Here’s the ASP.NET MVC room, already filling up a full 15 minutes before the start of the day:

asp net mvc room from stage

Tom ended up speaking to a room packed to maximum capacity:

asp_net_mvc_session

The people who couldn’t fit into the ASP.NET MVC sessions were still able to catch the proceedings on a monitor outside the room:

asp net mvc overflow

Meanwhile, next door, Developer Evangelist John Bristowe delivered the Practical Web Testing presentation:

john bristowe

And one door over, Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter (the first guy to suggest to me that I get a job at Microsoft) spoke at the Inside the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 session:

adam carter

Here’s a scene from the speaker prep room that reminded me of the Sesame Street song One of These Things is Not Like the Other:

speaker room

“Look! I’m at a conference, watching the proceedings of another conference!”

john bristowe watches PDC stream

And just outside the speaker prep room, Rob Burke and D’Arcy Lussier chat:

rob burke darcy lussier

Things seem to be going well, if IT Pro Evangelist and TechDays man-in-charge Damir Bersinic’s thumbs-up is any indication:

damir_thumbs_up

And down the hall, the Ford Flex featuring Microsoft’ Ford Sync technology awaits some passengers:

ford sync

Someday, arranging for conference wireless will not be an arduous, expensive affair, but in the meantime, we set up these hard-wired internet access stations. Note the anti-bacterial lotion beside the laptop – a sign of these H1N1 times. If I’d had any foresight, I’d have bought a lot of Purell stock:

internet station

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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Stack Overflow DevDays Toronto

devdays_toronto_audience

On Friday, the Stack Overflow DevDays travelling conference, which covers ten cities in North America and Europe in a month, took place in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts. The sold-out conference was packed enthusiastic developers from both the Toronto area as well as cities within driving distance as well as a large number of volunteers (in fact, there were too many; the conference typically “overbooks volunteers in anticipation of a drop-off, but every volunteer who signed up showed up!).

It was a fun conference, and I was honoured to be selected as a speaker for the event. It was good meeting Joel again (it’s been a number of years now) and speaking on the same stage with some good local friends (Reg Braithwaite and Greg Wilson) as well as some new ones (Jordan Baker and Ralph Whitbeck).

At the end of the conference, Joel took a show of hands of people who’d attend next year. When nearly all the hands in the audience went up, he said “All right – we’re going to be back here next year!”

backstage

For the benefit of all, I’ve posted the slides from all the presentations below:

ASP.NET MVC: Barry Gervin and Joey deVilla

Our presentation followed Joel’s opening keynote and was centred around a live-coding demo in which we built a quick-and-dirty ASP.NET MVC-based clone of RunPee.com, a site that lets you know at what times you can take a bathroom break from a movie in a theatre and not miss any crucial plot points.

I’ll admit it right now: this presentation could’ve been much better, and as the one who gets paid to promote Microsoft’s tools and technologies, I assume full responsibility for this one (Barry’s a great presenter who volunteered and took time out of his extremely busy schedule to do this). Watch this space for a "lessons learned" post, as well as some ASP.NET MVC posts that take the material from the presentation and explain it a little better.

Python: Jordan Baker

jordan_baker

Jordan’s presentation was an introduction to Python by way of a walk-through of Peter Norvig’s How to Write a Spelling Corrector exercise, which comprises 21 lines of Python 2.5 but in those few lines, covers a lot of the Python programming language.

View more documents from hexsprite.

jQuery: Ralph Whitbeck

ralph_whitbeck

Ralph’s presentation was a walk-through of jQuery’s features, and how it will make your web applications sing. I need to get more familiar with jQuery (I’m far more acquainted with Prototype and Scriptaculous), so Ralph’s was the technology demo that was the most useful to me.

Academic: Greg Wilson

greg_wilson

By my own judgement, as well as the judgement of the attendees, Greg Wilson’s presentation was by far the best one of the day. This was sole no-code-at-all presentation of the day, featuring the sort of "let’s change the world" vibe that we strive for at DemoCamp. In it, Greg challenged us to weed out the false or faulty maxims based on poor or no research that are now an accepted part of programming practices, find out what we really know about the practice of software development, and do our best to expand what we do know about programming, with research and rigor, not anecdotes and assumptions. This presentation got a lot of applause, and deservedly so — there’s nothing like a great topic delivered by a great presenter.

View more presentations from Greg Wilson.

Ruby: Reg Braithwaite

reg_braithwaite

Reg Braithwaite’s talk — made up of slides consisting entirely of Ruby code (or Ruby pseudocode, where appropriate) — wasn’t so much about Ruby as it was about metaprogramming, with Ruby examples. Following the quip about a man (one account says it was Winston Churchill) who is chastised by a woman for being drunk who then retorts "Yes, but in the morning, I will be sober and you will still be ugly", he encouraged the audience to "turn ugly problems into drunk ones".

Other Writeups

There are a couple of review of the conference:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.