It’s with mixed emotions that I’m leaving Ireland and headed to the exciting world of Redmond, WA, USA. I’ll be moving in early May to the IE Developer Marketing team joining such great folks as Justin Garret . This is the team that’s doing some amazing work such as http://modern.ie and http://arcade.atari.com to name two high profile projects. If you haven’t played with either of these, you should go look » read more.
I’m going to be doing a roadshow around Ireland talking about Windows 8 and Windows Phone development. Come join me for a lap around Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development. In this whirlwind afternoon, I’ll pack in a ton of content. I’ll kick off with a look at the most exciting development opportunities in the market right now – Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Then I’ll step into the » read more.
A common question that I get is how to cut down on one’s Azure bill. People will come to me because they are finding a way to control their spend in Azure while not hurting their service levels. Most of these folks are big proponents of the cloud because of how agile they can be and the fact that it’s got geo-replicated content and traffic and so on. The first » read more.
You know that I’m a Windows Phone/Windows 8/Azure evangelist for Microsoft Ireland. As part of that, I sometimes get to do fun things like run some fun Christmas promotions. This month we’re running a simple promotion called the 12 Apps of Christmas. Here’s the deal… Build an Windows 8 app get a phone. Very simple offer, we have 12 Windows Phone Nokia Lumia 710s to reward those developers that » read more.
I’ve published my first little Windows 8 app using the Azure Mobile Services in JavaScript. It was incredibly quick to get up and running and more flexible than I thought it would. The one thing that was tricky was that I’m using JavaScript/HTML5 to build my app and since I don’t have Linq in JavaScript, doing a custom date search was difficult. Fortunately I got to sit down with Paul » read more.
We’ve got two events coming up on short order here in Dublin that will help you learn how to write Windows 8 Applications. The first is an actual class called the Developer Introduction To Windows 8. That’s a two day course being run on March 20-21 (*Update – the dates here are moving due to unforeseen circumstances – will update when we have firm dates again.*) at Microsoft in Sandyford. » read more.
Last weekend I was at PHP Benelux (@phpbenelux). This is the third year that they have run the conference but the first time that I’ve been able to make it, definitely an advantage of living in Ireland… It was a really fun conference for a number of reasons. First, we had a PHP on Azure Hackathon where we had a number of PHP devs working on getting a project up » read more.
One of the most fun things that I get to do in my job here at Microsoft Ireland is work with all of the great startups here in Ireland. I manage the Bizspark program for Ireland, North and South. Through that work, I get to work both with startups directly as well as working with the startup accelerators and incubators here in Ireland. That’s great fun as we’ve got some » read more.
There are a lot of very cool metro design controls that are out there that can a lot of the work and though process off of your plate if you just know where to look. For example, I just ran across this set of controls from the Coding4Fun guys that includes a duration picker, a number of different message boxes and notifications, several different colour pickers, helper classes for converting » read more.
If you haven’t found Cloud Cover, it’s a great series on Channel9 that covers a lot of great Azure topics. What I particularly like is that it’s shows a lot of very practical knowledge things and doesn’t assume a tremendous amount of knowledge. I found this one particularly useful with the amount of mobile development that I’ve been doing recently. Join Wade and Steve each week as they cover the » read more.
