10 Nov 2014

Microsoft Connect(); What’s Up Microsoft’s Sleeves?

Conferences, General News
Do you make use of Microsoft’s developer tools and/or Azure – or, are you simply interested in what Microsoft might have up their sleeve for up-coming releases? If you answered yes then you definitely do not want to miss this week’s (FREE) Connect(); on-line event! Connect(); is a cloud-first, mobile-first, code-first virtual event focused on current and future technologies for developers creating applications across a variety of platforms. Build on your current skills, unleash your creativity, and expand what's possible to deliver unprecedented innovations. The event will be held on-line this Wednesday and Thursday, November 12th & 13th. Here is…
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13 Apr 2014

Build 2014–Quick Links

Conferences, General News, Visual Studio, Windows Phone
The Build 2014 conference ended just over a week ago and many of us are still sifting through the various announcements and downloads. This post provides a list of some of the various links to sessions and downloads that you might find handy. Sessions You can find the links to all the session videos and slide decks here. Visual Studio / .NET .NET Foundation – There were several open source announcements at this year’s Build event. The .NET Foundation will be the steward of a growing collection of open source technologies for.NET, Microsoft’s comprehensive development framework. Here is a snapshot…
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04 Apr 2014

A Professor and a Former Student Walking Into Build…

Conferences, For Fun
TL;DR -  This is simply a recollection of a random event at Build 2014 this week. If you have no interest in reading about random events in my life I won’t be offended if you click the Back button now So, in the early 1990’s I was working on my Computer Science degree at Hawaii Pacific University (I happened to be stationed in Hawaii at the time while service in the United States Air Force). Like many CS students, I had many instructors. Also, like many others, I had my favorites… One of which was James McCaffrey. What I liked…
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04 Apr 2014

Build 2014-Day 1

Conferences
The first day was a busy day of announcements from Microsoft. There are far too many to list here (I’m sure I’d miss some!) and I could spend hours (or days) writing up the details of each announcement. I’d rather call out some of the announcements that I personally found to be more interesting. WinJS In case you’re not familiar with WinJS, it is a JavaScript library originally released as part of Windows 8 to aid in developing Windows Store apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. WinJS 2.0 was released with Windows 8.1 and is now in version 2.1 adding…
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02 Apr 2014

Build 2014–Day 0

Conferences
Today, thousands of developers from around the world descended upon San Francisco for Microsoft’s flagship developer conference – Build. Although the conference doesn’t officially kick off until tomorrow, there was still plenty going on to keep the nerd in me occupied! :-) Shortly after checking into my hotel room and grabbing some lunch (at Super Duper Burgers – yummy!) I participated in a mini focus group at the Microsoft offices near the Moscone Center. Along with one other enterprise architect (there were other groups before/after us as well) we spent about an hour and a half answering questions for the…
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13 Dec 2013

Build 2014 Conference Announced

Conferences
Today, Microsoft announced the date and location of their next Build conference (notice: they dropped the slashes they used to use when talking about //Build/). The conference will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on April 2nd – 4th. No official agenda has yet been posted and, if it’s like last year’s Build conference, no agenda will be posted until the conference is upon us. However, it is pretty much assumed at this point that topics will cover what’s coming next with Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Azure, Windows Server, Visual Studio, etc. There is also speculation that…
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04 Dec 2013

Technology Education And Literacy in Schools (TEALS)

Training
The U.S. is facing a shortage of computer science (CS) graduates. Every year, 80,000 positions requiring a CS degree go unfilled by domestic talent. This will cost the U.S. economy $500 billion over the next decade, which is detrimental to our economic competitiveness and national defense. Furthermore, 38,000 out of 45,000 high schools do not teach computer science. Only 0.7% of all AP tests taken last year were for computer science. TEALS is looking for tech professionals to team-teach a high school computer science class in an effort to build a sustainable CS program in every American high school. Classes are…
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11 Aug 2013

On-line Training

Training
  Pluralsight – 593; 10-day free trial; Recently acquired PeepCode and TrainSignal. Wintellect NOW – 108; $29/mo; $319/annual; a few free videos available to watch; provides egghead – 46; free; currently all AngularJS videos (streamed from YouTube) jQuery – all things jQuery & everything is open source Microsoft Virtual Academy – free; includes self-assessments
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27 Mar 2013

//Build/ 2013 Announced

Conferences
Yesterday, Steve Guggenheimer announced //Build/ 2013.  Here are the details known so far: Date and Location San Francisco, CAJune 26th (09:00 PDT) – June 28th (14:30 PDT)The Moscone Center – Game Developers Conference 2013 is being held there as I write this. Registration opens at 09:00am PDT, April 2, 2013Early bird (first 500): $1,595 // Full: $2,095 If you happened to attend //Build/ 2012 (last November) then you no doubt recall the endless joy of being bussed from one side of the campus to the other (depending on which sessions you wanted to attend).  You might also fondly recall the…
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30 Oct 2012

(At Least) 5 Things I Hope to Learn at //Build/ 2012

Conferences
Now that //Build/ 2012 is finally upon us, there are a few things I’ve been wondering about that I hope to finally learn more about this week.  These items include: What's new in the Windows Phone 8 SDK.  Although there have been leaked versions of the Windows Phone 8 SDK, I have not given it much thought because a) It is unlikely the SDK is incomplete, b) You are trusting the SDK has not been tampered with (i.e. I don't want to introduce any malware), and c) I'd simply just rather wait for the official SDK. What's new in Windows…
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