May 2013 Entries
This week in Mississauga, the DevTeach conference is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend this year, but I wanted to share my thoughts on what this conference has meant to me and to the Microsoft development community in Canada. In fact, let me start off with a bold statement: The emergence and success of the Canadian Microsoft user group community over the last decade is due, in large part, to DevTeach. Let me tell you why. DevTeach Connected Community Leaders ......
Prairie Dev Con has been providing fantastic opportunities to learn, network, and have fun for software developers living in the Canadian prairies over the last four years. We're looking at running the next Prairie Dev Con in Saskatoon, but we need your help! What sessions would you like to see? What session styles do you like? What would make Prairie Dev Con Saskatoon a must-attend event? We have a short survey that I'd invite you to fill out. It doesn't take long and the information will go a long ......
This is a response/continuation of the discussion that Chad McCallum started over on his blog. He wondered what people’s view was on doing live coding within a presentation – for or against. Where. To. Begin. There is no right answer to the question. As developers, we like to look at things almost from a bit perspective – 0 or 1, yes or no, true or false. But humans aren’t computers and so to say that yes you should or no you shouldn’t use live coding demos isn’t a worthwhile argument because you’ll ......
Remember Hello World? It was the program that we all started out with at some point. We did something that would make Hello World display somehow. But as we got older and more into our careers as developers, we’ve forgotten Hello World. Instead, we’ve replaced it with Contoso or Pet Store or whatever large, heavy, complex domain we decided would be a much better sandbox to frame learning a new technology with. I was talking with an attendee at Prairie Dev Con about this last week, and how we can ......
The evening of Tuesday, May 7th is community night! Prairie Dev Con Winnipeg is hosting a free user-group-like event for the Winnipeg developer community! Mark Stafford, Product Manager at Microsoft, will be presenting on OData – what it is, why its important, and how it can impact your day-to-day development. Pizza will be provided, and again – this is a free event! You don’t have to be an attendee of the conference to come out. For more information including times and how to register, click the ......