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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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Microsoft’s “Fune”

While I do hope and believe that Microsoft can get their mobile strategy right, there are days when I worry that Windows Mobile 7 is going to be like this:

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Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2: RTM and FTW!

 XBox 360-style achievement: "Achievement Unlocked: Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 RTM'd" Windows 7 logo

Windows 7 Released to Manufacturing

It’s been announced on the Windows Blog: Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing!

Brandon LeBlanc explained that “RTM” happens only after it’s been signed off. One of the release candidate builds becomes a contender for release to manufacturing after it goes through significant testing and passes all the validation tests for RTM including having all languages for that build completed. Build 7600 crossed all those hurdles and got signed off today.

The beta and release candidate period for “Seven” was quite unusual. Rather than hand it out to a closed group of beta testers, it was made available for download and I was given piles and piles of DVD-ROMs to hand out like candy. And strangely enough, people were asking for it. At the EnergizeIT installfests this spring, we played to packed rooms of people who took time out of their Saturday mornings and schlepped to Mississauga to install the beta. Even people with Macs, who ran it under Boot Camp or Parallels. It’s unusual for an operating system in beta – especially one from The Empire – to be in such demand.

I’ve been using the beta since January and the release candidate for the past few weeks as my primary operating systems with nary a hitch, glitch or blue screen. I’m looking forward to getting the final version of Windows 7, which will be the first of many new goodies coming from The Empire over the coming months,

If you’re a developer with an MSDN subscription or an IT pro with a TechNet subscription, you’ll be able to download the English Windows 7 RTM on August 6th, with other language versions on October 1st. Windows 7 will go on sale to the general public on October 22nd.

Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 logo Windows Server 2008 R2 was also released to manufacturing today. As they state in the Windows Server Division Weblog, the simultaneous release is no coincidence but a design goal. “R2”, as I prefer to call it, boasts a lot of features such as Hyper-V, Live Migration, File Classification Infrastructure, an improved Active Directory, Pervasive PowerShell, IIS 7.5, server scalability, DirectAccess, BranchCache and improved Remote Desktop.

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Thrive for Developers: Microsoft’s New Site for Developers Looking for Work

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Motivational poster: Sad "Star Wars" stoprmtrooper sitting alone on a train: "Unemployment: Sucks when your job gets blow'd up"

If you’re a developer looking for a job – or if you already have a job and are looking for a better one – you’ll want to check out Microsoft’s new Thrive for Developers, which describes itself as a one-stop community hub for advancing your career, enhancing your skills and connecting with your community. Having stuff like this has always been important, but it’s even more so in the middle of what I like to refer to as “The Econopocalypse”.

Some of the features on Thrive for Developers are:

  • Driving Your Career: A 32-week screencast series that takes a look at some skills that developers need to thrive in the current climate. The fact that they’re called “soft skills” suggest that many people don’t think much of them, but if you’ve seen my own personal example (laid off by a startup last September, invited to a dozen interview, hired by Microsoft three weeks later) or read books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, you know that soft skills are valuable and anything but “soft”. Screencast Brian Prince will cover things like quick learning techniques, building consensus and the oft-difficult task of communicating with those pesky carbon-based lifeforms.
  • Connecting with Your Community: There’s a whole section that makes it easy to meet with other developers in your area or across North America, whether you want to find a job, join a user group, attend a developer gathering or catch a “nerd dinner”.
  • Developing in a Downturn: A lively 10-week podcast with stories, insights and real-world lessons from developers in all sorts of work environments – from small companies to multinationals – who share their top recession survival strategies.
  • Enhance Your Skills: Interactive lab sessions and resources covering both web development and Windows client application development.

Whether you’re looking to get into the game or stay on top of yours, Thrive for Developers is a great resource worth checking out.

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Boo-Effing-Hoo

Parody of the "You Find It, You Keep It" graphic: "You watch our ads / You throw a hissy fit"with the Apple logo.

(Click the image to get the story.)

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Mini-Microsoft and the Sea Change

"Mini-me" in front of a Windows logo

I’m happy to see that the anonymous blogger at Mini-Microsoft is seeing the same “sea change” that I was betting on when I first joined not quite nine months ago. I agonized over the decision all through the interview process (six interviews over the period of a week), pored over articles, books and reports about the company and had phone, email and IM conversations with every Microsoftie I knew, all in an attempt to “read the tea leaves” and see if the company was sailing towards the future or stagnating in the Doldrums. While I saw some serious challenges (including a few that could induce serious facepalms), I saw opportunities to match. And with that, I signed my offer letter back in October, bought my red travel-sized accordion that same afternoon and declared myself a Sith Lord.

The painful-but-necessary process of correcting the company’s course is nowhere near done, but signs like the ones mentioned in the article are not only good news; they’re necessary. It’s like seeing that first drop in the numbers on the scale when starting a diet: while there’s still still a long way to go, it shows that you’re actually heading in the right direction, which encourages you to keep going. Just as vanishing love handles and better-fitting clothes the good signs that a dieter watches for, things like Windows 7, Bing, Silverlight and moves towards interoperability and open source are the good signs that I’ve been watching for. But yes, while we’re turning the corner, we have to watch out, ‘cause Steve Jobs might be waiting ‘round the bend, shovel in hand.

As with many companies and organizations, we’re at the start of a new fiscal year at Microsoft. Like the calendar new year, there was some looking back (as in my annual review, where it was concluded I rocked in my Rookie Year), but there was also looking forward, in the form of setting goals, on personal, team and company-wide levels. My big goal this year to contribute to that “sea change” that both the Mini-Microsoft blogger and I see, and in the process change the Microsoft, the tech world – and hey, why not the whole world? – for the better.

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“Silverlight on the Silver Screen”: Two Days Away!

"Silver Thunder" parody poster for "Silverlight on the Silver Screen"

Don’t forget that Silverlight on the Silver Screen, ObjectSharp’s free seminar on Silverlight 3, Expression and SketchFlow takes place in Toronto this Thursday at the Scotiabank Theatre. If you’d like to learn more about the rich-UI applications that you can build with Silverlight 3 and Expression and how quickly you can design and prototype user interfaces and interactions using SketchFlow, you’re going to want to catch this event. For more details about this event, see my earlier article on Silverlight on the Silver Screen and the Silverlight on the Silver Screen official site.