Tag: Vancouver

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TechDays Vancouver: Scenes from the “Platform” Track

"Welcome" sign at Techdays 2009 Vancouver

It’s Monday, September 14th, which means that TechDays Canada 2009 has begun! We’re at the Vancouver Convention Centre in beautiful Vangroovy, the first city of sevencities we’re visiting in our tour. We’re travelling across Canada throughout the fall to show off the latest and greatest things that developers and IT pros can do with currently available tools and technologies from Microsoft.

"Welcome" sign at TechDays 2009 Vancouver, showing the Vancouver Convention centre behind it.

Last year, I was a mere presenter. This year, I’m the lead of the Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform track whose abstract is below:

platform_track

Learning key skills to develop rich client and web-based applications on the Microsoft-based platform is what this track is all about. In this track you will learn how to develop rich, interactive and interoperable applications for both the client and the web using our newest tools and frameworks. You’ll learn how to build software that helps to give your users the best experience possible, whether it’s a program running on Windows 7, a website built on ASP.NET MVC or a Silverlight-based rich internet application. You’ll also learn how to build services that can deliver data to almost any platform and internet-enabled device. And finally, you’ll learn how to build these software and services in ways that are modular and maintainable.

Here’s the room in which my track in taking place, as seen at 8:30 this morning (Pacific time, naturally), with a half-hour to go before the sessions began. We were already picking up a decent crowd:

Ballroom A filling up

First up was Zaheera Valani of the Silverlight team doing the presentation What’s New in Silverlight 3, where she showed off the features in the latest version of Silverlight. According to the rule of thumb for Microsoft software versions, this should be the version that really catches on, and the early signs indicate that this seems to be the case.

Zaheera Valani presenting "What's New in Silverlight 3" at TechDays 2009 Vancouver

As I write this, my co-worker in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group, Qixing Zheng, is doing the Expression Blend for Developers session. That’s right, it’s not just for UI designers – it’s also a pretty good development tool:

Qixing Zheng presenting "Expression Blend for Developers" at TechDays 2009 Vancouver

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Demo Ignite Camp in Vancouver: Less Than a Week Away!

Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14 - 7:00 p.m. - Vancouver Convention entre

If you live in Vancouver or are going to be there on Monday night, don’t forget that Demo Ignite Camp, the show-and-tell event for the bright lights of the Vancouver tech scene, is taking place that night at the Vancouver Convention Centre!

For more details, see my earlier post on Demo Ignite Camp or visit its event page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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TechDays Vancouver’s and Toronto’s “Developer Foundations” Track!!!

If you’ve looked at the TechDays Canada 2009 site this week, you might have noticed the addition of a new track: Developer Foundations. At that point, you might have asked yourself these questions:

  • What’s the Developer Foundations track all about?
  • Why! Do! The! Session! Descriptions! Have! So! Many! Exclamation! Points?!!!

I’ll answer the question about the exclamation! points! first! It’s because the people in charge of the track, Justice Gray and Peter Ritchie, are really exciting about the opportunity to have a track that they really believe in and have been putting heart, soul and viscera into this project. They’ve done a lot of work under an extremely tight schedule in order to have the track ready in time for TechDays Vancouver and TechDays Toronto. The only way to truly capture the enormity of their task is with…a montage!

While most of TechDays’ tracks concern themselves with Microsoft’s tools and technologies, the Developer Foundations track takes a step back to first principles, concerning itself with how you can be a better coder. It’s about writing elegant, maintainable, working code. You’ll learn techniques that get short shrift or don’t even get mentioned in the Teach Yourself X Over Your Lunch Break books. You’ll probably encounter a lot of exclamation! marks!

There are four sessions in the Developer Foundations track:

  1. S-O-L-I-D: The Five OO Principles That Will Change Your Life Forever: “Can’t believe you just got passed over at the club – again – because you didn’t know real object orientation? Thought that the sure-fire way to third base was knowing how to write a constructor? Thought you had the evening all figured out because you read an example of Cat inheriting from Animal? Think again. Annoyed by all those homely elitist jerks that still score all the time because people say they are OO masters? Well, it’s time to turn the tables and learn object oriented programming the way real men and women do it – the SOLID way!”
  2. Going from 0 to 100 Dollars with the .NET You Never Knew: You’ll learn “How generics can be used for more than just collections, the true power of lambdas and anonymous methods, the ins and outs of LINQ to objects, proper error handling beyond try-catch-finally and the importance of regular bathing.”
  3. Layers, the Secret Language of Architects: “Come to the presentation that will show you how to become “the man”! Seams? Design by contract? Services that aren’t prefixed by “web”? Repositories? Anti-corruption layers? (Gasp!) Domain-Driven Design? Do you know how that guy or girl at your office was able to negotiate foot massages and a daily breakfast buffet into their contract? They knew all of these terms and how to use them to build flexible and maintainable systems – and after attending this presentation so will you!”
  4. Refactoring for Fun and Profit: “Are you ashamed of your application? Does your architecture make you want to go home and weep in the shower? Heck, would it be nice if your application seemed to have architecture? This is the presentation for you! Come see how the art of refactoring can help fix your code, fix your house, and maybe even fix your dog! We’re going to show you how to TAKE CONTROL of your codebase without simply tearing everything down and starting over!”

We added this track in response to a call from developers like Justice and Peter for sessions that cover good programming practices. We’re gauging the response to it – if people attend and give it positive reviews, we’ll make it a regular TechDays track. I’d love to see this happen.

We’re calling this “the track so nice, we’re running it twice!” The sessions in Developer Foundations will run on Day 1 and repeat on Day 2! If you’re a developer attending TechDays Vancouver or TechDays Toronto, you have no excuse for catching at least one of the sessions in this track! And thus ends this article and the exclamation points! Ciao!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Your First Warning: Vancouver, September 11 – 18

Photo of downtown vancouver at night, captioned: "September 11th - 18th / Vangroovy", with arrow pointing to Fairmont Waterfront hotel

I’m going to be in Vancouver from the afternoon of Friday, September 11th until the morning of Friday, September 18th. I’m there first and foremost to manage the “Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform” track of the TechDays conference, then to meet up with the local tech community, but also to enjoy the city I fondly refer to as “Vangroovy”.

Here’s what I’ll be up to:

Coffee and Code Vancouver: Saturday, September 12th

"Monkey" latte art

My coworker John Bristowe and I will be holding Coffee and Code on Saturday, September 12th from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Pacific time, of course) at the Take 5 Cafe on Granville (429 Granville, near Hastings). We’ll be there to talk about TechDays, The Empire and the tech industry in general – but it won’t just be geeky stuff; we’ll provide scintillating conversation about accordions, the Calgary Flames, deep fried snack foods, “Am I metrosexual or not”, life, the universe and everything. I will have the accordion with me, so tunes are definitely on the menu!

You can register for Coffee and Code Vancouver on its event page.

TechDays Vancouver: Monday, September 14th – Tuesday, September 15th

TechDays 2009 Canada banner

TechDays is Microsoft Canada’s cross-Canada tour, where we highlight what you can do with currently-available Microsoft tools and tech that you probably aren’t doing yet. We take the content from the infinitely more expensive TechEd North America conference (admission fee USD$2000), update it, and have local techies present it near you at a price you can afford (CAD$299 if you caught the early bird rate, CAD$599 otherwise). You get great content at a great price, and we get to make contact with tech communities across the country. Think of it as “Geek Global, Spend Local”.

TechDays Vancouver will be happening at the Vancouver Convention Centre, which is also the venue of…

Demo Ignite Camp: Monday, September 14th @ 7:00 p.m.

Demo Ignite Camp banner

Since we had the Vancouver Convention Centre booked for two days, it meant that we had these big rooms lying fallow on the first night. I wanted a pajama party for accordion players, but since that idea got nixed, I called on Boris Mann and suggested we hold a DemoCamp-style event. The end result: Demo Ignite Camp!

Thus far, we’ve got 5 out of 8 presentation slots filled:

  1. Joey deVilla’s Ignite Presentation: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
  2. Avi Bryant will demo Clamato, a Smalltalk dialect that operates within the JavaScript runtime.
  3. Dima Berastau will demo RestfulX, a RESTful framework for Flex and AIR applications.
  4. Carson Lam will demo TransitDB, his Vancouver transit information web app, which won the PHP FTW competition earlier this year.
  5. The folks from Ayogo will present their iPhone games built using the PhoneGap cross-mobile-platform framework.

I’m more than happy to drop my Ignite presentation to make room for a demo or Ignite by someone local. I’m already hosting, and Demo Ignite Camp is about the Vancouver tech scene, not me!

For more information, see the Demo Ignite Camp event page.

Launch Party Vancouver, Wednesday, September 16th

Launch Party Vancouver logo My fellow TechDays coordinators and I will be attending Launch Party Vancouver, which is:

…a lively mixer for the city’s brightest entrepreneurs, tech junkies, and bloggers, who are doing it, have done it or want to make their ideas happen here. The goal of the event is to connect BC’s growing community of Internet and new media leaders with investors and other trailblazers across Canada and abroad.

Founded by local entrepreneurs,  LPV is not your typical networking event. There are no presentations or panels to be found.  But what you will discover are the individuals responsible for making Vancouver one of the greatest start-up cities in Canada.  Every event features local, early stage new media companies strutting their stuff and sharing their ideas with the community.

It’s happening at Circa Resto Lounge from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.; tickets are available via EventBrite.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Demo Ignite Camp: Vancouver, September 14th

Demo Ignite Camp - Monday, September 14 - 7:00 p.m. - Vancouver Convention Centre

What Is Demo Ignite Camp?

Think of Demo Ignite Camp as an evening of “show and tell” where the bright lights of Vancouver’s high-tech and startup scene get together to present their projects and ideas. It’ll feature two kinds of presentations:

Demo icon (a toy robot) Demos: By “demo”, we mean a demonstration of your software, web application or project in action. It’s the only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen — no slides allowed! The idea is for you to show off your technology in action and inspire us, not give us yet another marketing spiel.

 

ignite_icon

Ignites: An Ignite presentation on a tech-related topic with some constraints to make it interesting: you’re allowed only 20 slides, and they’re set to automatically advance every 15 seconds. It requires you to keep the text on your slides to a minimum and your presentation to be focused. It’s a true test of your presentation-fu.

Demo Ignite Camp will take place at Vancouver Convention Centre on Monday, September 14th at 7:00 p.m., a little bit after the first day of Microsoft’s TechDays Vancouver conference wraps up.

Demo Ignite Camp @ Vancouver Convention Centre

“Very Nice. How Much?”

Admission is free! As in beer, which we’ll be going out for after Demo Ignite Camp.

Want to Present at Demo Ignite Camp?

Have you got a project you’d like to show as a demo or an idea that you’d like to present as an Ignite? Drop me a line or leave a comment on Demo Ignite Camp’s event page!

Who’s Involved?

avi_bryant

So far, we’ve got Avi Bryant booked for one of Demo Ignite Camp’s 8 presentation slots. He’ll be doing a demo and we’re incredibly pleased – he works on some really cool projects, and we of the Toronto DemoCamp crew still consider his demo of DabbleDB to be one of the best demos in our 21-event history. We’re looking forward to seeing his presentation, which I suspect will be on Clamato, which is equal parts Smalltalk, JavaScript and the future.

Demo Ignite Camp wouldn’t even exist without the efforts of the Bee Man:

"Bumblebee Man" from "The Simpsons"

Actually, that’s @bmann, as in Boris Mann, blogger, technologist, entrepreneur and go-to guy for Vancouver’s tech scene:

boris_mann

He’s helping pull this event together in record time and playing the part of co-host, in spite of his very packed schedule.

microsoft_techdays_canada_2009

Microsoft played a part in making Demo Ignite Camp happen: they provided the venue and the AV system free of charge. The Vancouver leg of their conference, TechDays Canada 2009, takes place on Monday, September 14th and Tuesday, September 15th, which means that they had the facility on Monday night, during which nothing was scheduled. The TechDays organizers decided that they’d make the room available for some kind of community event.

I’ll be helping out as well. I’ll be co-hosting, and I was the guy who emailed Boris and said “Hey, dude, if you’ve got the camp, I’ve got the venue.”

Want to Know More?

There are more details on Demo Ignite Camp’s event page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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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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TechDays’ Developer Foundations Track

techdays_developer_foundations_track

Vancouver and Toronto pinsLast week, John Oxley announced the addition of a new track to TechDays Vancouver and TechDays Toronto: the Developer Foundations track, whose sessions are devoted to the practices and principles of good coding. While the other tracks will be about Microsoft tools and technologies, Developer Foundations will be about answering a single question: How do I write good code?

How Developer Foundations Came to Be

We added the track in response to calls for it from a number of developers who care about about the state of software development in the .NET community: Donald Belcham (whose upcoming book, Brownfield Application Development in .NET, is worth checking out), Justice Gray and Peter Ritchie. We put out a call for suggestions in a post titled TechDays, Blogs and the Fundamentals, and based on those suggestions, we added the Developer Foundations track to the Vancouver and Toronto stops of the TechDays tour and put Justice and Peter in charge. We’re taking care of the physical logistics like the room and the audiovisual gear, but when it comes to content, Justice and Peter are calling the shots.

How Developer Foundations Will Work

Developer Foundations will be a four-session track, with the same four sessions being held on Day 1 and Day 2 of the Vancouver and Toronto conferences. With the same sessions happening on both days, we’re hoping to make it as easy as possible to catch a Developer Foundations session while still catching all the other great tool- and tech-specific presentations that TechDays is known for. We’re treating the Vancouver and Toronto Developer Foundations sessions as a test run – we’re going to watch this track, take in attendee feedback, make a note of all the lessons we learn and if it’s success, we’ll build on it and make the track a part of TechDays for all cities.

What You Can Do

Justice and Peter have a lot of work ahead of them, what with the TechDays conferences in Vancouver and Toronto taking place next month. If you’ve got suggestions or ideas for what they should cover – perhaps you’re a bit iffy on patterns, exception handling, the use of version control or how to do test-driven development – let them know! If you’re on Twitter, send a tweet to @JusticeGray or @PeterRitchie. You should also feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line; I’ll make sure it gets to them.

The other thing you can do is watch this space! I’ve got all sorts of articles coming up on the topic of good code which you’ll find useful, especially if you’re planning on hitting the Developer Foundations track at TechDays.

The early bird special price – a mere CDN$299 – is going away very, very soon. If you want to catch the great tracks at TechDays, you’d better register now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.