Canadian Developer Connection

PDC 09 – Day 3 Recap

christbe — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:13:28 GMT

That’s a wrap for the PDC. I spent a fair amount of time meeting partners and visiting the expo so I attended only one more session on XAML 2009. There are many changes coming in the runtime to streamline it and improve the performance across all platforms (WPF, WF and SL4).

I did catch the fact that there was a quiet announcement on the new release of Biztalk Server 2009 R2 in the Future roadmap which will be available in 2010.

After 3 days of cool announcements, it is time to go back to TechDays for the last 3 stops. Your job is to find out more about these new technologies and the best way is to go watch the videos of the sessions at the Microsoft PDC web site.

Good Bye LA!

PDC 09 – Day 2 recap

christbe — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:04:09 GMT

Here we are with Day 2 at PDC 09. Keynote duties were handled by Steven Sinofsky, Scott Gutrie and Kirk DelBene.

The list of announcements was fantastic again. Steven kicked it off with an overview of the Windows 7 developement and some of the telemetry used. Do you realized that 46,447,784 Aero snap and shake happened during the beta? He also showed some User testing videos which were really funny. He then gave a bit of an overview on IE 9 development and some of the improvements they’re making including Direct 2D graphic acceleration. He closed up with the most amazing announcements. Every paying attendees got a free Touch tablet notebook from Acer. Here’re some photos and the line up to pick them up.

Scott Guthrie than took the stage and made a really big announcement as well. He started by listing the features of Silverlight 4 and then shocked everyone by telling them that the Beta was available the same day. Here’re some of the new features:

Media support of microphone and camera.
Business – Printing, rich text, clipboard, Right click and mouse wheel
Implicit styles, drag and drop, Bidi&RTL, HTML hosting
Complete out of browser experience in SL4 with Elevated Trust mode

Kirk DelBene then closed the keynote by talking about Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 and announced the immediate availability of the Beta.

I then attended some of the session in the day. The first one was an overview of Windows Identity Foundation. It RTM’d yesterday. It is a claims based system integrated with .NET identity API. It is config driven and usese the same programming model on premise or in the cloud.

I attended Joe Stegman session on the Out of Browser enhancements in SL 4

Out of browser WebBrowser control included in SL4

Works only out of browser
Browser control does not support Opacity, Rotation, Effects, overlay content

HTML Brush overcomes the above limitation

I then closed the day on a session about Securing REST services in Azure Access Control Service (ACS)

Based on OAuth WRAP (Web Resource Authorization Protocol). A protocol developed with the community like Google and Yahoo.
Very simple and cool. Implemented all in Azure.

Again you can follow the action on Channel 9 which is broadcasting live from the show floor. And all the session content will be available there as well.

Career Demo Camp Montreal: Wednesday, December 2nd

Joey deVilla — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:11:43 GMT

If you’re a techie in Montreal, you want to attend Career Demo Camp on Wednesday, December 2nd at 6:30 p.m. in the Mont-Royal Centre! It’s part tech career guidance conference, part DemoCamp-style event, and an opportunity for developers and start-ups to get together and learn about the job market, see projects that Montreal-area techies are working on and get to know and network with your local nerds. It’s presented by the Confoo conference (taking place in March 2010) and PHUG and will be hosted by Yours Truly and Jean-Luc SansCartier.

Here’s the schedule:

6:30 p.m.: Intro to Career Demo Camp
7:00 p.m.: Alex Kovalenko - IT Headhunting and Recruiting
7:30 p.m.: Joey deVilla; Better Living Through Blogging
8:00 p.m.: DemoCamp Introduction
8:15 p.m.: DemoCamp Presentations
10:00 p.m.: Networking Session

The event is free of charge! All you have to do to attend is sign up at Career Demo Camp’s Registration page.

Microsoft Canada’s providing the space – we booked the Mont-Royal Centre for TechDays Montreal for two days (December 2nd and 3rd) and we weren’t doing anything with the space on the evening of Day 1. We decided to offer the space for some kind of community event, and Confoo and PHUG put together Career Demo Camp. I love doing developer community events and was only too happy to co-host.

The DemoCamp portion of the evening needs people to do DemoCamp-style demos: 5 minutes of “Show and Tell” where you show 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 to do a sales pitch. Think you’ve got a demo in you? Contact Jean-Luc Sans Cartier or Yann Larrivee and let them know you want to demo at Career Demo Camp!

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

Scenes from TechDays Calgary

Joey deVilla — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:50:19 GMT

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:

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:

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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:

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:

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

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

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

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

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:

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

PDC 09 – Day 1 Recap

christbe — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:58:35 GMT

Wow! What a first day. This year the PDC is again at Los Angeles Convention Center.

Opening Keynote was by Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia and they made lots of announcements around Azure and the services provided plus a whole bunch of new ones as well that will come out later in 2010.

The big first news was that Wordpress has been ported and now runs in Azure. Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress made the announcement and demonstrated it on Azure.

Then it was a rolling thunder of announcements like:

Project “Dallas”
Microsoft PinPoint
Project Sydney
Windows Server App Fabric
System Center “Cloud”

These are just a few of the announcements but in my opinion the most important. There were demos of the whole end to end scenario including the last one which showed an asp.net app from inside the firewall being moved to the Azure cloud using the new models in VS 2010 and then being monitored by the next version of System Center. You’ll be able to view the entire keynote from the PDC09 site soon. Make sure to tune in this morning for the live day 2 keynote. It will be even louder :-)

I also walked the partner and Microsoft fair and got to see a container used to host Azure in the new modern Data Center. Here’re some photos.

I then attended a couple of sessions in the afternoon including one on the new Entity Framework 4.0. This new version will be a game changer in the ORM space. You have to download the Beta and try it.

Stay tune for more PDC 09 coverage and follow me on twitter.

Joel Semeniuk on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server

John Bristowe — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:33:00 GMT

In this episode of Developer Night in Canada (DNIC), John Bristowe (@jbristowe) and Joey deVilla (@AccordionGuy) chat with Joel Semeniuk (@joel_semeniuk) about a number of topics including Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Download MP3 Audio - Joel Semeniuk on Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (24.59 MB - 53 minutes, 58 seconds)

Show Links

About Joel Semeniuk

Joel Semeniuk is a founder of Imaginet Resources Corp; a Canadian based Microsoft Gold Partner. He is also a Microsoft Regional Director and has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba. Joel has spent the last twelve years providing educational, development, and infrastructure consulting services to customers throughout North America. Joel specializes in helping organizations realize their potential through maturing their software development and information technology practices. He employs a customized and incremental approach, promoting the ability to quickly adopt and tailor processes and technologies that best suit the needs of the organization. Backed by industry best practices and his experience, Joel works with organizations to ensure that their technology supports the vision of their business and is adaptable to the ever-changing marketplace, to accomplish this responsiveness without sacrificing quality, and to realize earlier and greater returns on their technology investment. For Joel and his customers, the ultimate goal is to achieve superior business agility.

About Developer Night in Canada (DNIC)

Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) is a podcast produced by John Bristowe (@jbristowe) and Joey deVilla (@AccordionGuy) of Microsoft Canada. Its focus is to provide insight and analysis from some of the developers and experts in Canada. The RSS feed for Developer Night in Canada (DNIC) is available here. Alternatively, you can subscribe through Apple's iTunes here.

Windows Azure Training Videos

Joey deVilla — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:35:21 GMT

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and it’ll be going live very soon – expect to hear a number of announcements about it from next week’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC).

I’ll be posting articles showing you how to get into developing on Azure, but if you want to get a head start in the meantime, a good place to go is MSDev, Microsoft’s site that’s packed to the rafters with video training on all sorts of Microsoft platform development topics. There’s a series of training videos covering Azure development, including:

…and more videos are on the way.

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

Next Week: TechDays Calgary

Joey deVilla — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:46:34 GMT

The next stop on the TechDays Canada cross-country conference tour is Calgary! We’ll be there for most of the week, and the conference itself takes place on Tuesday, November 17th and Wednesday, November 18th at the Calgary Stampede Roundup Centre.

After that, we’ve got the following dates in December:

Montreal (Sold out!) – December 2nd and 3rd
Ottawa – December 9th and 10th
Winnipeg – December 15th and 16th

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

New Book: Ultra-Fast ASP.NET

Joey deVilla — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:53:00 GMT

The Empire’s been fine-tuning ASP.NET, SQL Server and the .NET runtime from the get-go, so ASP.NET is a pretty snappy platform. Even so, the fastest of platforms will still run like molasses in January if you don’t do things right. With any platform, there’s a body of best practices for getting the best performances, and with far too many platforms, these best practices haven’t been gathered into a single place.

ASP.NET developer are in luck: I just got notified by Apress of the release of a new book, Ultra-Fast ASP.NET. Here’s the blurb:

Ultra-fast ASP.NET by Rick Kiessig presents a practical approach to building fast and scalable web sites using ASP.NET and SQL Server. In addition to a wealth of tips, tricks and secrets, you'll find advice and code examples for all tiers of your application. By applying the ultra-fast approach to your projects, you’ll squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your code and infrastructure, giving your site unrivaled speed.

Learn How To:

Think about performance issues that will help you obtain real results.

Apply key principles that will help you build ultra-fast and ultra-scalable web sites.

Use the ultra-fast approach to be fast in multiple dimensions. You’ll have not only fast pages but also fast changes, fast fixes, fast deployments and more.

Use techniques that are being used by some of the world's largest web sites.

Structure your HTML and CSS to create pages that load ultra-fast.

Utilize tips and tricks for optimizing your ASP.NET and SQL Server code for performance and scalability.

You can order the dead-tree edition of Ultra-Fast ASP.NET online (it sells for USD$49.99, which at today’s exchange rate is CAD$52.32), or if you’re like me and try to get the electronic version when possible, the PDF version sells for USD$34.99 (CAD$36.62 at the time of this writing).

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

WinMoDevCamp Toronto’s Agenda

Joey deVilla — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:56:16 GMT

WinMoDevCamp Toronto, the Toronto edition of the workshop for developing applications for Windows Phone, takes place today at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters.

If you can’r make it to WinMoDevCamp in person, you can attend virtually by watching the streaming video feed.

Here’s the agenda (all times are Eastern):

12:30 pm – 1:00 pm	Light Snacks and Event Registration
1:00 pm – 1:15 pm	Opening Remarks & Explanation of WinMoDevCamp purpose.
1:15 pm – 1:45 pm	Keynote by Microsoft Canada’s Joey deVilla, Developer Evangelist. This session will give you an overview Microsoft’s commitment to mobility and the tools in place to assist developers in creating world class applications.
1:45 pm – 2:00 pm	Break
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm	Developing for Windows Mobile - Mark Arteaga, RedBit Learn how to use the familiar Microsoft .NET Framework and .NET-based programming languages like Visual C#® development tools to develop world class applications. Learn about new features in Windows Mobile 6.5 such as the Gesture APIs and the Widget Framework and how to use them appropriately.
3:00 pm – 3:30 pm	Saviidesk – Joe Compta, Bradon Technologies Ltd (Bell Mobility) Application presentation and demo
3:30 pm – 3:45 pm	Break
3:45 pm – 4:15 pm	Telus Application Developer Program Presentation Program presentation and overview
4:15 pm – 4:45 pm	Merge Healthcare OEM – Atul Agarwal, Director Web Apps Application presentation and demo
4:45 pm – 5:45 pm	Samsung TouchWiz and Widgets – Max Karlin, Samsung Canada An in-depth look at Samsung’s TouchWiz UI and Widgets. How to develop widgets, upcoming features and functionality and how to distribute widgets for Samsung devices.
5:45 pm – 6:30 pm	Dinner – Windows Marketplace Overview, Anthony Bartolo, Microsoft
6:30pm – 7:00 pm	vPost, Sculpting Mobile Data Convergence – John Cousens, Vayyoo Application presentation and demo
7:00pm – 7:30 pm	Sony Ericsson “Hero” Developer Program – Sean Cheddi, Sony Ericsson Developer Program enrolment and Panel SDK overview
7:30pm – 8:00 pm	WinMoDevCamp wrap up and Prize Giveaway

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

The Facebook/.NET SDK

Joey deVilla — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:42:05 GMT

Facebook has announced official support for the just-released 3.0 version of Microsoft’s Facebook SDK (also known as the Facebook Developer Toolkit). The kit was written with one goal in mind: to make it easier for .NET developers to write applications that integrate with Facebook.

I’ll leave it to the Facebook SDK Overview to do the talking:

The main entry point is the API (Facebook.Rest.Api) class in the Facebook.dll assembly. This class wraps the Facebook REST API and provides an easy to use interface for calling the different methods currently available in the Facebook API. We've also provided samples and tools for helping develop Facebook applications in the various .NET platforms including: ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and WinForms. Additionally, we've provided all the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples for you to explore.

The toolkit is comprised of the following core assemblies:

Facebook.dll: This is the main assembly that will be used by all applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications (Silverlight and WPF) to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier.

Facebook.Silverlight.dll: This is the Silverlight version of the main assembly that will be used by all Silverlight applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier. The REST API in this assembly is Asynchronous only.

Facebook.Web.dll: This assembly should be used by Canvas applications. The main functionality supported in this assembly is to encapsulate the handshake between the Facebook application and a canvas application (both FBML and IFrame)

Facebook.Web.Mvc.dll: Provide a support building canvas applications using ASP.NET MVC. Separated from Facebook.Web.dll to avoid all developers from needing to install the MVC bits.

Facebook.Winforms.dll: This assembly provides support for writing Facebook applications using Winform technology. This provides a Component that wraps the API to make it easier to use from Winforms. This also contains some user controls to help display Facebook data easily.

To get started, download the SDK, then consult these docs:

If you create any Facebook apps using the SDK, let me know by dropping me a line. I’d love to feature it here!

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

Taking JavaScript Performance to the Extreme with Thomas Fuchs

Joey deVilla — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:30:38 GMT

"Extreme JavaScript Performance" (from JSConf.eu, November 7)

Take a look at the slides from Extreme JavaScript Performance, a presentation by Thomas Fuchs, creator of the script.aculo.us JavaScript library, collaborator on the book Agile Web Development with Rails and one of the people behind FailCamp. He gave the presentation last week at JSConf.eu in Berlin.

In the presentation, Thomas looked at six simple things you can do to boost the performance of your JavaScript:

Use inline functions instead of function calls.
Embrace the language – using the language’s conventions yields unexpectedly faster code. Instantiate arrays using var myArray = [] instead of var a = new Array, and instantiate objects using var myObject = {} instead of var o = new Object.
Unroll your loops! (A trick so old that we covered it when I was in school!)
Cache globals. If you’re going to access a global object, store a local reference and use that instead.
Tune your boolean expressions: in logical “AND” (&&) operations, make the operand most likely to be false the first one.
Watch out for slow constructs such as with blocks, try/catch and features that JIT compilers don’t support well.

The presentation includes benchmarks for the four most common JavaScript engines:

SpiderMonkey (Firefox 3.5)
JavaScript Core (Safari 4)
JScript (Internet Explorer 8)
V8 (Google Chrome)

And yes, he does warn you – at least twice – of the dangers of premature optimization.

JavaScript Performance Rocks

If you liked Extreme JavaScript Performance, you’ll love the ebook Thomas co-authored with Amy Hoy, JavaScript Performance Rocks! Actually, it’s more than just a book – it’s four books and a profiling tool:

Book 1: Understanding and Measuring Performance (or: “Dude, Where’s My Performance?”) - “In which our brave hero or heroine (that's you!) apprentices to the cryptic-but-charming Master (that's us) and learns how to get into the enemy's head—the better to eat it alive, my dear.”
Book 2: Loadtime (or: “The Land of Unicorn Tears”) - “Loadtime is a sad time, a time of of enormous, slow-loading assets; of maxed-out request queues; of bloated, waddling DOMs. Of limp white screens. Most of the world's worst web performance woes? They live and breed in Loadtime. That's why it's the Land of Unicorn Tears, because unicorns hate slow web apps just as much as the rest of us. And they have magical horns. So there.“
Book 3: Runtime (or: “’Cuz Tuning Loops is Hardcore”) - “The vast majority of the problems that the vast majority of apps will have can be solved with loadtime fixes of various stripes. But just in case you're unique, and special, and have particularly intractable issues—or are just a glutton for punishment—we have written a third booklet, all about speeding up code when it runs.”
Book 4: Interface Coping Strategies (or: “If You Can’t Fix It, Fake It”) – “Come across a performance problem that you really can't fix? Long-running calculations? Slow server you can't tune up? If you can't make it, fake it. You can make your app feel faster to your customers, even if you can't fix the underlying problem. And, let's face it, that's what your customers care about.”
The DOM Monster profiling tool.

JavaScript Performance Rocks! isn’t your ordinary ebook, with material laid out for a dead-tree book simply cast in PDF form. It was designed from the ground up for onscreen reading, written in an entertaining way to keep you amused and your mind ready to learn, and written in a fun, irreverent way so that you don’t zone out. I know Thomas and Amy personally and have seen them teach; trust me – you want to learn from them.

JavaScript Performance Rocks! usually sells for US$49, but there’s a special deal right now – the first 500 books are selling for 10 dollars less -- US$39. You’ve got two good reason to buy immediately: first, there’s this $10 discount, and second, the US/Canada exchange rate’s pretty good right now (as I write this, the PayPal exchange rate is CAD$1 = US$0.92).

I’ve already ordered my copy.

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

WinMoDevCamp Toronto This Wednesday!

Joey deVilla — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:05:19 GMT

WinMoDevCamp Toronto, the free workshop where you can learn about Windows Phone Development, takes place this Wednesday at Microsoft Canada’s offices in Mississauga. Come learn about Windows Phone by participating in a development project, and come meet some of the faces (including me) at the local branch of The Empire! (And yes, we’ll serve snacks and dinner.)

WinMoDevCamp is free of charge and takes place this Wednesday, November 11th, from 1 to 9 p.m. at Microsoft Canada Headquarters (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard, just off Mississauga Road north of the 401). To participate in WinMoDevCamp, please register.

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

First a Django Guy and Now a Microsoft Guy: “Thank You, Rails”

Joey deVilla — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:26:51 GMT

Platform wars are like monkey knife fights: amusing at first, but regrettable and messy in the end.

You don’t see this very often, and it’s a shame: Jacob Kaplan-Moss, co-creator of Django, the Python-based MVC web application framework, wrote a great article titled Thank You, Rails. From the article’s opening paragraph:

It’s fashionable, or perhaps inevitable, for tech communities to trash their competition…We geeks make arguing over minor technical points into a kind of art.

The most important point in his essay is a few paragraphs down. He points out that while having a competitor often lends focus to a developer community and that a rivalry can often bring about excellence among all parties concerned, it can also bring bitterness and nastiness. He wants to counter those latter things, and so he writes:

I think it’s important to recognize that we in the web development community do in fact owe Rails and the Rails community a debt of gratitude. Rails helped reframe the way we think about web development, and even those who’ve never touched Rails nevertheless are probably reaping indirect benefits right now.

So I think we should all step back from our personal preferences and plainly say thank you, Rails, for all that you’ve done to move the state of web development forward.

Rails was a wake-up call to the web development world in so many ways. In the short time – a mere five years -- that it’s been around, it’s been responsible for many changes in the world of web applications:

Popularizing MVC amongst web developers. Yes, it had been done before, but never quite as elegantly or explained so clearly.
Bringing concepts like DRY and Convention Over Configuration into the developer vernacular.
Proving that simplicity is a feature, whether it’s from the developer’s or end user’s point of view.
Pointing the spotlight at the Ruby programming language.
Driving a movement towards web applications with both beautiful and usable interfaces.
Reminding us that programming should be fun.
Reinforcing an important idea that we often forget: community matters. (If you’ve been to a RailsConf or better still, RubyFringe and FutureRuby, which takes the Ruby/Rails community camaraderie and turns the dials up to 11, you know what I mean.)

Speaking as a Microsoft guy, I too would like to say “Thank you, Rails”. While I can’t honestly classify myself as ever having been a serious Rails developer – it’s mostly noodling on personal projects and one major cancelled project at Toronto’s worst-run startup – I come from the periphery of the Rails community, having been an unofficial evangelist and occasional court jester, as evidenced in this performance from the evening keynotes at RailsConf 2007:

I take a lot of what I’ve learned from the community-building effort that made Rails what it is today and have applied it to my work at Microsoft. From what I’ve been hearing, it seems to be helping.

It’s not just the community aspects of Rails for which both Microsoft and I owe Rails a debt of gratitude -- there are the technical aspects as well. I’m sure the event-driven desktop-style development metaphor behind ASP.NET makes a lot of developers happy, but it drove me bonkers – and also to PHP (and eventually, Rails) -- back in 2002. The drive to create an MVC web application framework that treated the web like a first-class citizen instead of “like the desktop, but lamer” led to the creation of my preferred Microsoft web framework, ASP.NET MVC, and I cannot begin to convey how grateful I am for that. I love ASP.NET MVC, and a good chunk of the reasons why stem from the Rails-isms that found their way into it. I think ASP.NET MVC developers would benefit from getting to know Rails and taking it out for a spin – and I think the Rails developers would also gain something from giving ASP.NET MVC a try.

I once read a saying that has stuck with me all these years: “When you slice a blade of grass, you shake the universe.” Yeah, it’s a pretty drama-queeny way of saying that everything is interconnected, but it’s true in many respects, including human endeavour, which in turn includes software development. It’s an ecosystem, and different parts of it influence each other all the time. I think that the best participants in that ecosystem learn from other parts, and acknowledge those efforts that make the ecosystem a better place in which to live.

So to echo a Django guy’s sentiment, here’s a Microsoft guy saying it: Thank you, Rails.

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]

Halifax Coffee and Code This Afternoon – Just Us Cafe on Barrington

Joey deVilla — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:54:41 GMT

This afternoon (Wednesday, November 4th) from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Atlantic time, I’ll be holding a Halifax edition of “Coffee and Code” at Just Us Cafe on Barrington (1678 Barrington). My coworkers Damir Bersinic and Rodney Buike will be joining me. Come on down and chat with us about Microsoft, the tech industry in general, the job market, accordions, whatever!

(If you’re a developer who’s interested in building a cloud computing-based application on Windows Azure, you might want to come down for this one, as I might have an offer that you might find difficult to resist. Just sayin’.)

There may be plans for dinner and accordion-and-beer-fueled mayhem this evening, so if you’re into that sort of thing, drop me a line.

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]