I love the fact that big-name speakers are willing to come and speak at the East of Toronto .NET User Group. You don't have to live in a big city (or struggle through big-city traffic on a visit) to keep up to date with the latest technology and meet fellow developers. The latest example:

As the website says:

Beth Massi is a Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft. Beth is a community champion for business application developers and has over 15 years of industry experience building business apps. She is a frequent speaker at various software development events and you can find her on a variety of developer sites including MSDN Developer Centers, Channel 9, and her blog http://www.bethmassi.com. Follow her on twitter @BethMassi

And what will she be talking about?

Visual Studio LightSwitch is the easiest way to create modern line of business applications for the enterprise. In this session you will learn how LightSwitch helps you focus your time on what makes your application unique, allowing you to easily implement common business application scenarios—such as integrating multiple data sources, data validation, authentication, and access control. See how LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012 has embraced OData making it easy to consume as well as create interoperable data services. Then see how LightSwitch makes it easy to deploy these services to the Azure cloud and consume them from other client applications and platforms. You will also see how the LightSwitch team is enabling mobile scenarios making it easy to create HTML5/JavaScript companion clients for modern mobile devices.

When and where?

Event Agenda

Time	Title
6:30 - 7:00	Socialize and refreshments
7:00 - 8:30	Presentation

Pickering Central Library Auditorium (2nd floor)

One the Esplanade
Pickering, ON L1V 6K7

Register now - it's a good way to spend a Wednesday night.

Kate

Here's an amazing grand finale to the Dot Net Rocks Roadtrip this year -a full on developer conference in Las Vegas, Dec 9th - 12th.

I love this answer to "What is DevIntersection?"

This three-day conference marks the final stop on the USA leg of the .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip! DevIntersection is a developer conference PLUS the recording venue for the last stop of the three-month road trip hosted by Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin. We're bringing together some of the best speakers (and our personal friends) for a conference that is relaxed and educational, plus forward looking as you and your company start to figure out what to do with Windows 8 and Visual Studio for the next few years. Our attendees tend to be .NET software developers plus other members of their teams. DevIntersection is an educational onsite conference for anyone who is attached to a .NET development programming project who is looking to use Visual Studio to develop apps for desktop, web and mobile platfoms.

I have two breakout sessions - one on C++ AMP and one on developing for the Windows Store in C++. No .NET in either one of them; this is a conference for expanding your horizons, after all.

For $1595 you get three full days of sessions. And if you register in October (hurry!) you will also get a new tablet. Build sold out in hours, so this is your chance to get access to deep and current information for developers across the Microsoft ecosystem. See you there!

Kate

I love writing courses for Pluralsight. I can reach a lot of people and I know the production quality will be top notch. My most recent course is Introduction to Visual Studio 2012 Part 1. It's aimed at people who've never used Visual Studio before, but even a seasoned user will learn something from it - just use the cool speedup feature to zip through things that are already familiar, like the difference between a project and a solution. I cover some very nice productivity features and there's sure to be something in there that's new to you.

Another recent Pluralsight development is that the MSDN Subscriber benefit has expanded to cover MSDN subscribers worldwide, not just in the US, and five more courses were added. If you have an MSDN subscription, you can watch all these courses free:

• Agile Team Practices with Scrum
• ALM for Developers with Visual Studio 2012
• ALM with Team Foundation Server 2010
• ALM with TFS 2012 Fundamentals
• Building Windows 8 Metro Apps with C# and XAML
• Building Windows 8 Metro Apps with C++ and XAML
• C# Fundamentals - Part 1
• C++ Fundamentals
• Continuous Integration
• Developing for Windows 7
• IntelliTrace
• Introduction to .NET Debugging using Visual Studio 2010
• Introduction to Building Windows 8 Applications
• Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1
• Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2
• Introduction to Visual Studio 2012 - Part 1
• Introduction to Windows 7 Development
• Kanban Fundamentals
• Microsoft Fakes Fundamentals
• Solution Modeling with UML in Visual Studio 2010
• Test First Development - Part 1
• Test First Development - Part 2
• Web Application Performance and Scalability Testing
• Windows Azure Diagnostics
• Windows Phone 7 Basics

The bolded ones are mine. Here's how to sign up - do it by Dec 11th 2012 - and get your one year free access to all these great courses!

Kate

Hilo is a reference project written in C++/CX for Windows 8 by the Patterns and Practices team. I was delighted to be part of this project and think it turned out very well. I use the Hilo codebase to remind myself how to do certain things when writing a Windows Store app in C++ (something I'm in the middle of doing for another project.) The accompanying document is rich in best practices for Windows 8 development, async work, modern C++, unit testing, and more. Now the latest version has been released, updated for Windows 8 RTM.

Hilo itself is a photo viewer. Before you roll your eyes, bear with me. I actually think it's better than the one that ships with Windows 8. It shows you some of your pictures as a sort of overview:

Click on one to interact with it. You can right-click to bring up both the app bar at the bottom and a nice strip-navigation control at the top:

If you want to see something cool, use Cartoon Effect. This leverages C++ AMP to cartoonize the picture. I've shopped this image a little to reduce the width (pulled the appbar in from the edges) but the cartoon work was done by Hilo - and super quickly.

If you have any thoughts of writing Windows Store apps, and C++ is a possibility for you, get over to Codeplex, download the Hilo code and the .chm file, and get reading!

Kate

I’ve been writing a book, though I swore I wouldn’t write any more books, and it’s finally done! You can buy a Kindle version from Amazon or an e-book directly from O’Reilly today. The paper copies will be ready in about a week and you can order them from O’Reilly or Amazon. The book is published by Microsoft Press, but O’Reilly handles the actual production of the books.

 I’ve got a page dedicated to the book with links for you to buy it, get the code, submit errata, and whatever else you might want. (If you think something’s missing, comment here and I’ll try to take care of it.)

Kate

Two years ago or so, when Visual Studio 2010 launched, the crazy duo of Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin – if you’re a Dot Net Rocks listener, they’re the voices in your head – took their show on the road and drove an RV across the USA holding live Dot Net Rocks evenings pretty much every night for weeks on end. Each city featured a surprise “rockstar” flown in for the occasion. I did St Louis and had a great time. Now they’re doing it again and this time announcing us in advance – I’ll be in Nashville Oct 24^th.

Registration is free, and please do register using the big red Register button for your city (I hope to see you in Nashville). You can track them online too and follow the #dnrRoadTrip hashtag on Twitter.

If you’re in Toronto, don’t miss the October 13^th Saturday-a-ganza at the Microsoft Canada offices featuring Michele Leroux Bustmante! I know I won’t!

Kate

I love writing courses for Pluralsight. I have quite a few and am working on more right now. They like to interview their authors about each course. Here's one about my latest for them. If you’ve done the whole course you won’t learn anything new from the interview, but if you’re curious about writing what we’re now calling Windows Store applications for Windows 8 using C++ and Visual Studio, perhaps this interview will help you decide whether it’s something you want to learn. There’s a transcript as well as an audio link.

Kate

We now have a Windows Phone application in the marketplace. We wrote it for ourselves, to learn the framework and to give us a way to track how we spend our time. The minute we started designing it, we discovered everyone in the company wanted a different way to track. People who do pretty much the same thing all the time (coding, for example) wanted to track project-by-project. People who work on only one project at a time wanted to differentiate between types of work, like meetings or email or writing documents. We decided to make it as simple and flexible as we could. I was inspired by a story of a time tracking technique involving physical objects. You get 5-10 paper cups and write things on the cups like Email, Meetings, and so on. Then you get 32 poker chips, all the same colour. As each 15-minute piece of time goes by, you toss a chip into the cup. It is supposed to help you understand that you very literally “spend” your time. And at the end of the day you can look in the cups and see where your day went.

If you’d like to track your time like this – hit the + button to toss a “15 minute” square into a particular “bucket” or just hit the falling drops button to accumulate time in one bucket until you change tasks – please try our app and let me know how it works for you.

Kate