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 Canadian Developer Connection.

TechDays, Microsoft’s cross-Canada conference for developers and IT pros took a break in October, but returns in November to complete its tour of the five remaining cities. As leader of one of the conference tracks it means that I’ll be on the road, hitting these five cities over the next couple of months:

• Halifax: November 2nd and 3rd
• Calgary: November 17th and 18th
• Montreal: December 2nd and 3rd
• Ottawa: December 9th and 10th
• Winnipeg: December 15th and 16th

If you’re a programmer or IT pro who works with Microsoft tools and technologies or is thinking about doing so, you’d do well to check out TechDays. You can find out more at the TechDays site, or you can always drop me a line.

If you’re in Halifax and would like to catch up, I’ll be holding a Coffee and Code at Just Us Cafe (1678 Barrington) on Wednesday, November 4th from 2 to 6 p.m. Come by, have a coffee and a chat!

I’ll be landing in Halifax this weekend, and chances are I might be looking to do something on Saturday night…

This article also appears in Coffee and Code.
Related articles appear in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

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

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 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.

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

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.

If it’s Friday, it must be time for another Toronto Coffee and Code! This one will take place at the usual location – the Dark Horse Cafe, 215 Spadina – and will run from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m..

Coffee and Code is my Friday afternoon ritual (a phrase that my classmates at Crazy Go Nuts University will find hauntingly familiar) in which I work out of a cafe and announce that I’ll be there. I’m making myself available as both a Developer Evangelist working for Microsoft Canada and a member of the Toronto Tech Community to answer your questions, take your comments, bounce ideas off or just chat with. Come on down, have a coffee (or tea, or juice) and say hi!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.

It’s gonna be a busy week for me — there’s a lot going on!

Monday: Damian Conway and The Missing Link

On Monday evening, I’ll be catching Damian Conway’s presentation, The Missing Link. There’s nothing quite like a Damian Conway presentation – they’re equal parts computer science, mathematical digression, history lesson, physics lecture, pop-culture observation, Perl module code walkthrough and stand-up comedy routine.

If you’re up for an entertaining and enlightening presentation by one of the bright lights of the open source world and you’re going to be in Toronto tonight, you should catch this one. There’s no charge for admission and no registration process – just show up at University of Toronto’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology (40 St. George Street, west side, just north of College) at 7:00 p.m. and head to room 1160 (the big lecture theatre near the back of the first floor).

Tuesday: DemoCamp 21 with Special Guest John Udell

Tuesday evening brings the 21st edition of DemoCamp, which I like to describe as “show and tell for the bright lights of the Toronto-area tech community”. It’s a chance for people, from hobbyists working on a pet project to enterprise software developers building something globe-spanning to show their peers their projects in action or share an idea. It’s put together by my fellow Microsoftie David Crow (who’s also in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group); I cost-host the event with Jay Goldman.

This one’s going to be a special one for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this will be the first DemoCamp held at the Rogers Theatre. Second, Jon Udell, Microsoft Tech Evangelist extraordinaire, will be there.

The presentations on the schedule are:

• You can’t pick your neighbours, but you can pick your neighbourhood!
  Saul Colt, Zoocasa
• ArtAnywhere : Where Lost artwork meets Empty walls
  Christine Renaud, ArtAnywhere
• Bringing Social Media to Contractors
  Brian Sharwood, HomeStars
• Create a BlackBerry/iPhone Mobile App in 5 Minutes
  Alan Lysne, Cascada Mobile
• Stories Told Together – Introducing Social Cards
  Shaun, MacDonald, MashupArts
• WeGoWeGo.com: semantic search for city events
  Dan Wood, WeGoWeGo.com
• Guestlist – online event management
  Ben Vinegar, Guestlist
• guiGoog: Advanced Visual Power Search
  Jason Roks, GuiGoog

Alas, this event is sold out. I’ll take notes and post them on this blog.

Wednesday: Science 2.0

The Science 2.0 conference takes place on Wednesday afternoon. Its topic: how the web and computers can radically change and improve science. It takes place at the MaRS Centre and the presentations are:

• Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
  Titus Brown
• A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
  Cameron Neylon
• Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery
  Michael Nielsen
• Using “Desktop” Languages for Big Problems
  David Rich
• How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method
  Victoria Stodden
• Collaborative Curation of Public Events
  Jon Udell

As with DemoCamp, this event is a popular one and is sold out. I’ll take notes and blog the conference.

Thursday: Windows 7 Blogger Event

I’ll be helping out at a gathering of Toronto bloggers on Thursday, where we’ll be showing them Windows 7.

Friday: Coffee and Code

If it’s Friday, it must be time for Toronto Coffee and Code! It’s the day when I set up shop at a cafe – usually the Dark Horse – and work from there, making myself available to answer questions, hear your opinions and comments and chat. I’ll talk about Microsoft, our tools and tech, the industry in general, whatever!

This Friday’s Toronto Coffee and Code will take place at the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina) from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.. Feel free to drop by!

Other Stuff Going On This Week

• Along with the other people on the team, I’m helping out with the preparatory work on the TechDays conference, which will be taking place in seven cities across Canada this fall.
• I’m also working on ongoing series of articles covering stuff like coding fundamentals, ASP.NET MVC, mobile and some other stuff that I have to keep on the down-low for the time being.
• And it’s not too late for me to start working on the ASP.NET MVC presentation that I’m doing with ObjectSharp’s Barry Gervin at the Toronto edition of Stack Overflow’s DevDays conference in October.

The scene at the big communal table at the May 29th Coffee and Code.

There’s a Toronto Coffee and Code this Friday! For details, see the Coffee and Code blog.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be time for Guelph Coffee and Code! See the Coffee and Code blog for details.

Yes, Toronto Coffee and Code returns today! It’s a day when I make myself (and by extension, Microsoft) very accessible by working out of a cafe and answering your questions, getting your opinions and sharing ideas. Once again, it’ll take place at the Dark Horse Cafe at 215 Spadina, near the lights between Dundas and Queen.

I’ve got some stuff to do at Microsoft Canada HQ in the morning, so I’m declaring tomorrow’s schedule to run from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.. I might be there earlier, but I thought I’d give myself extra time in case traffic decides not cooperate. I’ll see you there!

This article also appears in the Coffee and Code blog.

I’m a bit swamped with work and other things, so the Toronto Coffee and Code events are taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks. Worry not, it’s a temporary thing, and in a couple of Fridays – May 29th, to be precise, Coffee and Code will make a triumphant return, all phoenix-like, to the Dark Horse Cafe at 215 Spadina on Friday, May 29th from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m..

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

This week, I’m going to have my hands full on Friday with WordCamp Toronto, so I’m moving my Coffee and Code session from Friday to this Thursday, May 7th, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina).

This particular Coffee and Code has a theme: developing and deploying PHP applications on Windows. I’ll be talking about and answering questions about PHP on Windows, the Web Platform Installer (which I recently covered in this article) and the PHP FTW! contest, which pits student developers against professional developers for cash prizes.

Come on down and join me for a coffee! I’m going to see if I can bring some PHP-themed goodies to give away, just in case my scintillating company and Dark Horse’s great coffee aren’t enticements enough for you to drop by.

Yes, I’m holding a Coffee and Code today – Friday, April 24th from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. – at the Dark Horse Cafe at  215 Spadina Avenue (at Sullivan Street). C’mon down!

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another Coffee and Code here in Accordion City! Today’s Coffee and Code is happening at the new branch of the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina, at Sullivan, which is south of Dundas and north of Queen) between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m..

What is Coffee and Code, Anyway?

It goes back to 1998, when I first tried out “cafe coding”. I shared a consultancy with my friend Adam, where we did a pretty good business writing custom software for small- and medium-sized companies. I was going a little stir-crazy working out of either Adam’s spare room or my home office and just for kicks decided to try working for a day at the Tequila Bookworm cafe on Queen Street West.

Here’s a photo of me at “The ‘Worm” from back then, with my Windows 98-equipped 233 MHz Toshiba Portege laptop sporting a then-respectable 96 megs of RAM. That green box in the foreground is a Jaz Drive, which held 1-gig hard drive cartridges:

Me at Tequila Bookworm, November 1998.

It worked out so well that I started working there at least twice a week. I also found that as a “regular” at the cafe, I started meeting of all sorts of people – not just friends, but potential customers, colleagues, collaborators and business contacts. We exchanged ideas, traded stories, made suggestions on each other’s projects and formed friendships. I’m still in touch with a lot of these people today,

My job at Microsoft Canada – Developer Evangelist – is a “mobile worker” position, since our job is to make connections with software developers wherever they are. Sometimes it’s at our home offices, sometimes it’s at the Microsoft offices, sometimes it’s on the road. As long as the job gets done, where we are is where we work.

So I thought “Why not re-create the situation at Tequila Bookworm?” It might work out even better than last time, since I now had some reasonably widely-read blogs to announce my presence, and since the Toronto tech scene is now considerably more vibrant than it was ten years ago (thanks largely to things like DemoCamp and HackLabTO).

I’ve had about a half-dozen Coffee and Codes so far, and I think the endeavour has proved to be worthwhile. I’ve made connections — new and old — with all sorts of techies, answered questions and taken suggestions, hooked up people with software and other nerds, learned a lot and even given a human face to The Empire. We’ve talked about all sorts of things: the expected “shop talk”, but all sorts of non-techie stuff as well. It’s sort of like the salons of old.

Coffee and Code has grown beyond just me holding them:

• The Microsoft Developer Evangelism team has held these events across the country as part of the EnergizeIT tour,
• David Janes holds “Coffee and iPhone” events here in Toronto,
• Cory Fowler has his regular Coffee and Code nights in Guelph,
• and Denny Cherry wins the long-distance award for holding one in Irvine, California.

The internet is a great and scalable communications medium, but there’s something about meeting face-to-face that it can’t provide; that’s why the saying “You had to be there” exists. That’s what Coffee and Code is all about.

Come to chat, come for coffee, come to hang out and even get some work done. Whatever you come to do, I hope to see you there!

The Wifi Situation at Dark Horse

The Dark Horse opened on Tuesday, and word is that they haven’t got their wifi up and running yet. If you need to catch up on your email and Twitter, I suggest you bring a 3G phone. I hope it doesn’t deter you from dropping in, but I thought you should know.

This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.

I am swamped (and in one case, double-booked) with meetings either online or out at Microsoft’s Mississauga offices all day Friday, March 27th, so I’m sorry to report that I won’t be able to hold a Toronto Coffee and Code this week.

Watch this space; Coffee and Code will return next week!

Davisville Station at night.

This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.

Yes, there’s going to be a Coffee and Code in Toronto this Friday, March 13th, and this time, it’s going to be midtown. I’ll be holding it at the Starbucks at Yonge at Davisville (1909 Yonge Street, right by Davisville subway station) from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m..

This particular Starbucks branch is pretty big, with a large second floor. A number of local groups, such as the Toronto Spanish Group, the “Mompreneurs” and other business networking groups have used it as a meetup location. The WiFi isn’t free, but if you have a Starbucks card with at least a $5 balance, you get two hours’ worth of wifi access at any wifi-equipped Starbucks every day. I myself have 3 such cards.

If you’re a telecommuter, come and hang out for the day! If you work in a nearby office, drop by during your coffee break! I’ll be handing out installer DVDs for the beta version of Windows 7 and ready to talk about Microsoft, programming, technology, the industry in general, accordion, music, whatever! Who knows – we might even start a video chat session with the Calgary Coffee and Code, which will be taking place at the same time out west.

This article originally appeared in the Coffee and Code blog.

The next Toronto Coffee and Code will take place this Friday, March 6th, at The Roastery at the 401 Richmond building (401 Richmond Street West, just east of Spadina) from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.. This cafe is nice and spacious, has free wifi thanks to the efforts of the cool people at Wireless Toronto, has good food and is located in one of the best workspaces in the city, If you have an artistic bent, I recommend that you pass by Swipe Books (located in the same building), an amazing bookstore that specializes in advertising and design.

Coffee and Code is a regular event where I “set up office” at a local cafe in order to make myself as accessible as possible to developers and other techies, so they can talk to me about Microsoft, its tools and tech, the industry or whatever else is on their mind. It’s also many other things:

• A networking opportunity for people looking to find other people in the local tech industry
• A chance for indie and self-employed software developers to get out of their home offices
• A interesting coffee break for people who work in the area
• A chance for you to get your hands on a copy of the Windows 7 beta (I’ll burn a DVD for you)
• A way for techies to put a little money back into the local economy (by buying lots of coffee and supporting local businesses)
• A nice social event in a relaxed atmosphere…all on a “school day”

If you’re in the neighbourhood, please drop by! If you’re not in the neighbourhood, don’t worry – I plan to hold future Coffee and Code events in different locations all over Toronto and surrounding areas very soon.

(And if you’re really far away, say Irvine, California, there’s a Coffee and Code in your neck of the woods this Friday.)

This article originally appeared in Global Nerdy.

Coffee and Code, for those of you who haven’t been following this blog, is a regular event where I “set up office” at a wifi-equipped cafe to make myself more accessible to you. We’ve had two so far here in Toronto, and they’ve gone quite well: we’ve have some good discussions, local developers have made new connections with each other, I’ve answered questions about Microsoft and its tools and tech, and I’ve also hooked people up with copies of the Window 7 beta.

This Friday, there will be two Coffee and Code events. One will be in Toronto (details will be in the following post), and the other one will be three time zones away…in Irvine, California.

Denny Cherry is a Microsoft MVP and Senior Database Administrator and Architect at Awareness Technologies. He’s forgotten more about SQL Server than I will ever learn, his blog is SQL Server with Mr. Denny at IT Knowledge Exchange and he tweets at twitter.com/mrdenny. He heard of Coffee and Code and decided that he wanted to hold one in his neck of the woods, southern California. I gave Denny access to the Coffee and Code blog, where he announced his Coffee and Code event, which takes place this Friday, March 6th at the Starbucks at at the Tustin Marketplace (2959 El Camino Real), just off the I5 and Jamboree.

For more information about Denny’s gathering, check out his entry on the Coffee and Code blog.

This article originally appeared in Coffee and Code.

Coffee and Code is happening today, Tuesday, February 24th, from about 1:30 p.m to 5:30 p.m. at Le Gourmand, (152 Spadina, on the west side, south of Queen and north of Richmond).

It’s not the only geeky get-together in Toronto today:

• The Developer Lunch (the 10th so far!) takes place today at Noon at Sky Dragon restaurant, on the top floor of Dragon City mall, at the southwest corner of Spadina and Dundas.
• Later this evening, I’ll be at HacklabTO’s open lab, which takes place every Tuesday night. I’m bringing the Xbox 360 with me, although the Rock Band kit will have to wait for some other night.
• Also tonight is FacebookCamp 5, a.k.a. Facebook Developer Garage. It’s at MaRS and starts at starts at 6:30. Admission is free.
• UX Book Club Toronto is meeting tonight at C’est What at 6:30 p.m.. Tonight’s book: user experience guru Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design.

My first Coffee and Code day – a day when I work at a wifi-equipped cafe rather than my home office or the Microsoft offices in order to be very accessible – was a success. For more, check out my article on the Coffee and Code blog.

Coffee and Code is an idea I’ve been meaning to try out for some time. Every so often – perhaps once a week – I plan to work somewhere other than my home office or Microsoft’s offices but instead spend the day working in one of Toronto’s wifi-equipped cafe.

The idea is to make myself available to you, to answer your questions and talk about Microsoft, programming, the tech job market, games, accordions or whatever topic strikes your fancy. I’ll be pretty easy to spot: just look for the guy with both a laptop and an accordion.

For this inaugural Coffee and Code session, I’ll be at Urbana Coffee (1033 Bay Street, a couple of blocks north of Wellesley, at St. Joseph) from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. I’ve picked the place for a number of reasons: a central location near parking and transit, friendly staff, free wifi, power outlets aplenty, recommendations from friends and a glowing review from Torontoist. If you’re in the neighbourhood, please drop by!

Since I live and work in Toronto, I’ll be holding most of my Coffee and Code days there. However, my job does involve a fair bit of travel, and it’s quite likely that I’ll hold Coffee and Code days in other cities. Some of my coworkers are also thinking about holding their own Coffee and Code days in their own cities as well.

If you’d like to know more about upcoming Coffee and Code days, keep reading this blog, or check out Coffee and Code’s site at coffeeandcode.org.

This article was originally published in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m announcing the start of Coffee and Code, a regular event where I’ll spend the day working at a wifi-equipped cafe somewhere in Toronto. It’s not just an excuse to get out of the home office, but a way of making myself available to you, to answer your questions about Microsoft, our tools and technology, development and tech in general – or anything else. If you’re in the neighbourhood, I invite you to drop by for a chat!

The first Coffee and Code will take place tomorrow, Friday, February 20th, from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at Urbana Coffee (1033 Bay Street, a couple of blocks north of Wellesley, at St. Joseph). I’ve picked the place for a number of reasons: a central location near parking and transit, friendly staff, free wifi, power outlets aplenty, recommendations from friends and a glowing review from Torontoist. It looks like a promising place to “set up shop”.

Feel free to drop by! I look forward to talking with you.