by Joey deVilla on November 18, 2009
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 Canadian Developer Connection and Global Nerdy.
by Joey deVilla on October 30, 2009
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.
by Joey deVilla on September 20, 2009
For the TechDays conference’s stops in Vancouver and Toronto, Microsoft hired Vancouver-based photog extraordinaire Kris Krug to take photos of the Developer and Platform Evangelism team, which includes Yours Truly. The photos were taken during the conference, which meant that most of us were wearing the official TechDays shirts, which were colour-coded to match the conference track in which we were leading or participating. The track that I lead is Developing for the Microsoft-Based Platform, and its colour is orange. Luckily the folks who made the shirts had a pretty snappy shade of orange (the label refers to the colour as “Spark”) that I can rock.
Most of our photo shoot was on the promenade outside the Vancouver Convention Centre, looking out over the water. He just had me play tunes on the accordion while he shot photos, so they’re all pretty candid shots. Here’s one of the photos that Kris took of me.
There are more of me and the rest of the DPE team in Kris’ Flickr photoset.
This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
by Joey deVilla on September 13, 2009
My co-worker Rick Claus (that’s him in the photo above) and I have spent the morning working on the final preparations for Microsoft Canada’s TechDays Vancouver conference at the Smart Mouth Cafe in Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood. It’s a rather nice place the work, the staff are friendly, the coffee’s pretty good, and the bar at the front offers a nice view of the street.
by Joey deVilla on September 3, 2009
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:
- Joey deVilla’s Ignite Presentation: Do the Stupidest Thing That Could Possibly Work.
- Avi Bryant will demo Clamato, a Smalltalk dialect that operates within the JavaScript runtime.
- Dima Berastau will demo RestfulX, a RESTful framework for Flex and AIR applications.
- Carson Lam will demo TransitDB, his Vancouver transit information web app, which won the PHP FTW competition earlier this year.
- 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.
