Edmonton Notes for 6/12/2010

Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

It was a beautiful, busy day at the City Market today! Al Fresco continues through the evening, with the movie starting at 10pm.

City Market Downtown

Recap: Tech·Ed North America 2010 Day 4

Yesterday was the final day of TechEd North America 2010 and the start of a max exodus of geeks out of New Orleans (they’re hard to miss wearing the official TechEd backpacks or other clothing emblazoned with tech company logos). I’m sure some people skipped the final day, but it still seemed pretty full. As you can see in this video I recorded mid-afternoon, many people were still attending the final sessions:

After a leisurely morning, John and I attended Mark Russinovich’s session on Pushing the Limits of Windows. Mark is one of just a handful Technical Fellows at Microsoft, and probably knows more about how Windows works internally than anyone else. As expected, Mark packed one of the larger auditoriums at the convention centre. He didn’t strike me as a natural-born presenter, but I still very much enjoyed his talk (and learned quite a lot). As John remarked on the way out, “my brain hurts.”

Tech·Ed North America 2010

I couldn’t resist attending the Coding4Fun session in the afternoon, titled Learn Windows Phone 7 Development by Creating a Robotic T-Shirt Cannon. Daniel Fernandez and Clint Rutkas walked us through how they built a Windows Phone 7 app to control the robot (affectionately named Betty) that debuted at Mix back in March. Along the way, they shot out a few dozen t-shirts and weren’t afraid to show off the robot’s capabilities! Here is a video I recorded of the robot in action:

Tech·Ed North America 2010

It was a fun way to get some exposure to Windows Phone 7 development. If you’ve never checked out Coding4Fun before, you really should! You can find the source code for the app they built here.

The final session I attended at TechEd was Programming AppFabric: Moving Microsoft .NET to the Cloud, presented by Pluralsight’s Aaron Skonnard and Keith Brown. Despite progressing a little slowly at times, I thought the talk was fantastic. In particular, the way Aaron started it was memorable. He fired up a console app running on his laptop and asked everyone with Internet-connected devices in the audience to hit a public URL. Immediately requests started appearing on the screen, prompting the very distinctive “how did he do that” murmurs among everyone in the room (turns out it is the magic of the AppFabric Service Bus).

TechEd officially finished with a large party in the evening at Mardi Gras World. Buses took thousands of geeks to and from the event, which featured a number of live bands, magicians, jugglers, palm readers, and an Xbox gaming room, among other things. It was fun to just walk around the party, taking in the sights and sounds.

Mardis Gras World

Mardis Gras World

I learned quite a lot at TechEd, and have a pretty long list of things I want to look into further! It was a fun week.

You can see more of my TechEd photos here, and also at the TechEd group on Flickr.

Recap: Tech·Ed North America 2010 Day 3

Maybe it was because I was wearing shorts, but the convention centre seemed especially cold yesterday (and today). Still really hot outside for TechEd attendees however, with temperatures hovering around the 30 degrees C mark. The day seemed to go fairly smoothly, with the exception of lunch (there was a session that went through most of the lunch break, and they ran out of food, which meant incredibly long lineups right at the end).

Tech·Ed North America 2010Tech·Ed North America 2010

The first session I went to yesterday was Windows Server AppFabric Caching: What It Is and When You Should Use It. I’m a fan of Memcached, and have been using it for a number of years now, so I really wanted to see how AppFabric compares (the codename for this was Velocity, which I wrote about here). I’d say that overall they are quite similar, though if you’re a .NET developer using AppFabric can give you some quick wins. One example is that with just a couple of lines in the Web.config, you can use AppFabric to store Session information, perfect for a web farm scenario. Another thing I like is that AppFabric Caching is managed through PowerShell. Here are some resources:

Tech·Ed North America 2010

After lunch I attended one of the bigger sessions, Overview of the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4, hosted by Julie Lerman and Chris Sells. I really enjoyed it, first and foremost because it consisted mainly of demos, and secondly because Julie and Chris were really entertaining and worked well together. Here again, I have been using an open source solution – SubSonic. I remember reading about EF really early on, but didn’t spend too much time on it because of all the criticism it received. If nothing else, the session yesterday made me want to look at EF again – it has really come a long way. I was impressed.

Another session I attended was Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol. Although labeled a 300-level session, it was very introductory, and didn’t contain anything I hadn’t already seen. It was great to see so many people in the session though – clearly there’s some interest.

I also took some time yesterday to explore the Exhibition Hall a bit more, stopping by the Spoon booth to talk with them. They have some really interesting virtualization and application streaming technology. I recorded a short video and wrote more at Techvibes.

Tech·Ed North America 2010

There are lots of social events during TechEd, but last night in particular seemed like a busy night. John and I checked out the Springboard party at the House of Blues (where we saw some of the Hawks-Flyers game) as well as the Pluralsight mixer. Good times!

You can see more of my TechEd photos here, and also at the TechEd group on Flickr.

Recap: Tech·Ed North America 2010 Day 2

Full day of sessions at TechEd yesterday, though I did take some time in the morning to catch up on blogging, as I am doing today. Probably the most talked about topic at TechEd so far has been the breakfast! People are simply not happy with bagels, muffins, and scones. Either the breakfast or these mascots that everyone has been stopping to get a photo with:

The main feature of the day was the Business Intelligence keynote with Ted Kummert, Microsoft Senior Vice President, Business Platform Division. I missed it, so I’ll watch it online, which you can do here. You can also read a transcript here.

The first session I went to was Prototyping Rich Microsoft Silverlight 4 Applications with Microsoft Expression Blend + SketchFlow. It was really interesting to see how you could use SketchFlow to draw out some screens from your application, and then start to add behaviours and other improvements. We also saw the new feature that enables you to publish a SketchFlow document to SharePoint, making it easy to share a prototype/mockup with colleagues. For more information:

Another session I checked out was Intro to Workflow (WF) Services & Windows Server AppFabric. I’m getting increasingly interested in AppFabric. It seems like a no-brainer to use it if you’re on the Microsoft platform already. I probably should have brushed up on some WF before attending the session, but it was still useful to see how WCF, WF, and AppFabric work together. For more information:

My favorite session of the day was the final one, Open Data for the Open Web, presented by Douglas Purdy and Jonathan Carter. This session had two things going for it: open data, one of my favorite topics, and the hilarious tag team of Douglas and Jonathan. They were really quite entertaining, but still managed to do a great job of explaining what OData is, and what the vision is. And, bonus, the City of Edmonton logo was on screen briefly! Some resources from this session:

The Internet at TechEd was pretty reliable yesterday, which meant that everyone on Twitter was able to find out that it was raining outside:

Some other sights:

Tech·Ed North America 2010
Microsoft Tag spotted at TechEd!

Tech·Ed North America 2010
Developers don’t actually talk like that…

Tech·Ed North America 2010
Top Secret! mPad!

You can see more of my TechEd photos here, and also at the TechEd group on Flickr.

Recap: Tech·Ed North America 2010 Day 1

TechEd kicked off here in New Orleans yesterday, with an opening keynote from Bob Muglia, President of the Server & Tools Business at Microsoft. There are more than 10,000 customers, partners, and staff on-site and I think all of them caught the keynote (they had to setup a few overflow rooms). John and I arrived early to register and quickly chow down some breakfast so that we could lineup for the keynote. Neither of us have sat in the front row before, but we managed to do so yesterday!

Here’s a quick video that John recorded:

The focus of the keynote, which you can watch here, was cloud computing. Some of the highlights  for me included (more info here):

  • The public beta of Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 will start in July.
  • Windows Server AppFabric is now available.
  • The Pivot control for Silverlight 4 will be launched this summer. Pivot is such amazing technology (it utilizes Deep Zoom for some of its magic) and being able to embed it on a web page is going to be awesome.
  • We saw a quick demo of Windows Phone 7, specifically related to integration with SharePoint. The enterprise features look pretty slick, so I hope they can deliver on the consumer experience too. You can see some screencaps from the demo here.
  • It was really interesting to hear from Tony Scott, Microsoft’s CIO, about how they are fully adopting the cloud internally. He said that Microsoft IT is now officially “cloud first”.
  • Also very cool: a video talking about the digital asset management system that Microsoft built for James Cameron and his team for Avatar. Cameron talked about this at D8 too.

Tech·Ed North America 2010

Next up for John and I was the Developer Foundations keynote with Jason Zander. He announced quite a few interesting things for developers, including a new Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2010. Microsoft is going to release Feature Packs in between major releases to continually add functionality to the product. Some of the new stuff that excites me:

  • HTML clipboard support (copy code and paste it into your blog and its ready to go)
  • Search functionality for the Add Reference dialog
  • Tons of code editor improvements, such as entire-line-highlighting, and “tabify/untabify”

Jason also has a great post with links to new platform bits here. In particular, I’m very happy to see that Microsoft is working on Scrum Process Template for TFS 2010.

Throughout the day I explored the TechEd site. I visited the Community Lounge, which is where all the Hands-On Labs take place. I couldn’t resist taking a photo with the Channel9 guy:

Tech·Ed North America 2010

Channel9 was livestreaming all day yesterday, and are doing the same today.

I also visited the Exhibition Hall, full of Microsoft product team representatives, as well as dozens of partners. One of the more interesting things to see was one of the Azure server containers:

Tech·Ed North America 2010

After the day’s sessions were finished, there was a reception in the Exhibition Hall. I made sure to stop by the Windows Phone 7 booth, to check out the prototype:

Tech·Ed North America 2010

I didn’t learn any new details, of course, but it was neat to see the phone in action.

Other thoughts on day 1:

  • As expected, not everything went smoothly. The Internet was down for most of the day, which was really annoying. I always wonder why some innovative company hasn’t come along to revolutionize Internet access for conferences, because it is such a common problem.
  • There were far more unhealthy options available for snacks than healthy options (I saw only a few bananas and oranges, but lots of popcorn, cookies, and Goldfish crackers).

Tech·Ed North America 2010
In between sessions

You can see more of my TechEd photos here, and also at the TechEd group on Flickr.

Trip to New Orleans: Day 1

I arrived in New Orleans on Sunday evening, but a mix of enjoying the city and unreliable Internet access have kept me from blogging so far. I’m here until Friday for Microsoft’s Tech·Ed North America conference.

I flew from Edmonton to Houston, where I met my conference buddy John Bristowe. After a short wait, we were off to New Orleans. The flight was only supposed to take about an hour, but thunderstorms in New Orleans kept us up in the air for about an hour more. Being in the holding pattern gave me an opportunity to see the area quite well – I was reminded of the Mackenzie River Delta (in the Northwest Territories where I grew up) because of all the water. Eventually we were able to land, and were shocked at all the water on the ground!

Stepping off the plane and into the corridor, I was hit with a blast of humid, hot air. I’m still not used to how humid it is here compared to home! More than a few times I’ve gone outside from a nicely air conditioned building only to have my glasses fog up. We snagged a taxi and made it to the hotel pretty quickly, passing by the Superdome and remembering Katrina along the way.

New Orleans
View from the hotel

For dinner on Sunday evening I joined a group of fellow Canadians at Palace Cafe. I’m going to write more about the food on Sharon’s blog, so all I’ll say for now is that it was delicious! Afterward, we walked down Bourbon Street, eventually making our way to Fritzel’s European Jazz Pub for a drink and some great music. It was quite the experience, both Fritzel’s and just Bourbon Street in general. Lots of people, though I know it’s not even close to the busiest time of the year, lots of beads, lots of music, and lots of drinks. The local Abita Amber beer is pretty tasty.

Palace Cafe
Fried oyster loaf

New Orleans
Canal Street

Bourbon Street
Bourbon Street

I’m really enjoying New Orleans so far, and can’t wait to check out some more sights, sounds, and eats throughout the week! You can see my New Orleans photoset here (I’ll keep adding to it).

Edmonton Notes for 6/5/2010

Here are my weekly Edmonton notes:

Edmonton’s Food Bank showcased the winners in its Expressions of Hunger contest at City Hall on Tuesday, which was National Hunger Awareness Day. The works will be exhibited at a few locations around the city until July 7.

Edmonton's Food Bank: Expressions of HungerEdmonton's Food Bank: Expressions of Hunger

Local Action, Global Recognition at PKN7

I was one of the presenters at yesterday’s Pecha Kucha Night 7 here in Edmonton. I’ve been thinking about pitching a topic for a while, but for whatever reason never submitted anything. This time around, however, I felt compelled to at least apply to speak. As Jeff said in his post, I sort of became the face of the disappointment over Pecha Kucha 6. I’ve been to every Pecha Kucha Night we’ve had in Edmonton, and I’ve blogged about each one. I have been both critical and positive about past events and speakers, but I’ve tried to be fair. In any case, I figured if I was going to dish it out I had to be willing to take it as well.

Pecha Kucha Night 7

I approached my talk at PKN7 the way I think it should be done. The topic had to be something I was passionate about (it’s almost always immediately obvious when a speaker is not passionate about their topic) and had already given some thought to. I worked hard to find images that represented my ideas, and I consciously stuck to Creative Commons licensed photos (see below). I created an outline for my talk, and then researched each idea to ensure I could back up what I was saying. Then I practiced – a few times on my own to get the timing right, and then a few times for Sharon, and once for my parents over Skype. I wanted to practice enough that I could pull it off, but not so many times that I’d be thrown off track when something inevitably changed during the actual talk.

Here’s the video of me presenting last night. I guess I went a few seconds longer than I should have. During my presentation I ended up saying slightly different things than I had practiced. Notably, I threw in the “feel free to cheer for your favorite” line which worked great for audience participation, but also meant my timing wasn’t quite as tight as I had practiced.

Here are my slides with the audio overlaid on top:

I received some great feedback on my talk, which was great to hear! I’m definitely harder on myself than others are, and if I could do it again I’d try to improve a few things. I think I looked down too much, and my excuse for that is that all I could see was the first row or two of people. I guess six minutes and forty seconds wasn’t enough time to adjust. I also would have tried to slow the pace down a little. Overall though, I am happy with it!

Here are the images I used (minus the two slides that just contained logos). You can click on each one to get the original.

Edmonton SkylineBendy RoadEpcor Tower
Edmonton Skyline
TEDxEdmontonEdmonton Skyline

Local Action, Global Recognition

The premise of my talk was that Edmonton can be recognized on the world stage if we focus on making Edmonton a better place for Edmontonians. I think there’s three key things we need in order to achieve the recognition that we seek:

  1. Density
  2. Storytelling
  3. Creative Economy

If we can succeed at all three, I think there’s no question that we’ll become recognized around the world. Other cities will strive to be more like Edmonton.

With more time, I’d have expanded on the “how” in all of this, but last night I simply encouraged the audience to find something they’re passionate about and to do it here in Edmonton.

I would welcome any thoughts or comments on this – thanks!

Pecha Kucha Night: Edmonton #7

Edmonton’s seventh Pecha Kucha Night took place this evening at the Citadel Theatre in the wonderful Maclab Theatre. There were probably a little over 400 people in attendance, the vast majority of whom had never been to PKN before. I think I may as well just get right to it: PKN7 was a huge improvement over PKN6, and reaffirms to me that this event can be great!

All of the presenters brought their A-game tonight. In order of appearance, and with their topic titles:

  1. Gregg Oldring, Designing a Business
  2. Darryl Plunkie, Phobias
  3. Daniel Tse, Accessibility Technology
  4. Zoe Todd, Edmonton as an Aboriginal City
  5. Alistair Henning, Photographs Create Our Collective Visual Idea of Place
  6. Don Iveson, Brick by Brick: Lego & Urban Design
  7. Tamara Stecyk, Expressions of Hunger Online Photo & Poetry Contest
  8. Mack Male, Local Action Global Recognition
  9. Jason Openo, Leadership Edmonton
  10. Tad and Arlen, Improv!

It actually wasn’t Arlen (he couldn’t make it), but I can’t remember the name of his replacement. You can follow all of the presenters with Twitter accounts here.

After the debacle that was PKN6, it was refreshing to see 9 presentations with very little self-promotion. There were also very few umms, ahhs, and awkward pauses. I thought all of the talks were true to the spirit of Pecha Kucha – to share ideas that are inspiring or interesting or perhaps controversial, and that spark a conversation.

Pecha Kucha Night 7

Without a doubt my favorite talk of the evening was Don Iveson’s (and I think most everyone in the audience would agree with me on that). He used Lego to share some ideas about urban planning and the kind of built form that he would like to see in Edmonton. It was smart, funny, and well-presented, as expected from Don! A close second for me was Daniel Tse’s talk on accessibility technology. He did such a good job of relating it to the audience, and so many of the people I talked to tonight were excited to learn more and to get involved. He also tweeted during his talk using an automated thing he had setup before the event – such a great idea! I agree with John that Tamara’s talk was the most emotional – her passion really shone through. I think Zoe’s talk made me want to learn more about her topic the most. As for my talk, I thought it went quite well, and I received lots of positive feedback on it. More on that in my next post.

Some other thoughts on the evening:

  • Our hosts, Ryan Stark and Brian Murray, did a great job of welcoming everyone and keeping the evening flowing smoothly.
  • There wasn’t an official theme this evening, but the theme of “Edmonton” seemed to emerge. Either that or iPads (there were a lot of them in the audience, and Alistair used one on stage).
  • We trended to #1 in Canada on Twitter, this time for positive reasons!
  • Hosting the after-party at the same place as the event was smart. You lose less people that way.
  • The venue was great. I love that the stage was kind of in the audience, much more intimate than some of the venues we’ve had in the past (Myer Horowitz for instance).
  • I thought the start time of the event could have been a little tighter…it seemed to take a while to get going, and to restart after the break. No doubt because of all the great conversations that were happening!
  • The final presentation, the improv, was probably a safe bet (smart on the part of the organizers) but it worked really well and was quite funny.
  • Props to Stephanie Chan and Gabe Wong for the awesome PKN7 posters and graphic design.

Pecha Kucha Night 7 was organized by Edmonton Next Gen, and was sponsored by the City of Edmonton and Capital Power. The next event, PKN8, is scheduled for September 23 at the brand new Interdisciplinary Sciences Centre at the University of Alberta. Stay tuned to @EdmNextGen on Twitter, or sign up for their excellent weekly email newsletter.

Thanks to Edmonton Next Gen for a great event, to all of the volunteers for making it happen, and to my fellow presenters for delivering the goods!

UPDATE: Here’s a fun video montage of PKN7 made by Raffaella.

Your Guide to Summer Festivals in Edmonton!

For the 2015 edition, click here!

With dozens of festivals happening throughout the year, Edmonton is rightly known as Canada’s Festival City. During the summer in particular, it seems as though there’s a festival of some sort happening every day. I guess that’s because there is!

Here’s a list of 25 festivals you can look forward to over the next three months, complete with iCal feeds, and social media information (see below for an iCal feed for all the festivals):

You’ll note that each one has a link to ShareEdmonton, where I list the festival dates and locations as accurately as possible. Festivals like Creative Age and Improvaganza have really good detail, while others like the Fringe do not (they haven’t released the schedule yet). As I get more information I’ll update the listings. You can also see related tweets for each festival, and very soon, related photos and blog posts too!

Here’s the information for all festivals:

You can subscribe to that iCal feed using Outlook or your favorite calendar application. In Google Calendar, you can “Add by URL” and just copy/paste the iCal link above.

I’m sure there are more festivals happening over the summer that I’ve missed. If your favorite isn’t on the list, let me know. If you subscribe to the iCal feed above, any new festival that gets added to the ShareEdmonton calendar will show up automatically!