I’ve always found that developers are very interested in contributing their skills and their time to help others.

I’m excited to be part of a new opportunity for developers to help others: The Humanitarian Toolbox.

The Humanitarian Toolbox  is the brain child of Richard Campbell, of .NET Rocks fame. The concept is to have developers create Open Source software projects that solve real problems for disaster relief organizations. A group of people, including Richard and I, have been working with global relief organizations to determine what they need most. We’ve already got a list of more than a dozen application ideas.

It’s time to start building. We’ve picked the first project: a relief worker check-in system. This system would enable relief workers and volunteers to check-in and check-out at a disaster site. The field coordinators would have better information about the skills and the availability of relief workers, enabling them to better deploy the people that have volunteered their time to help. Relief workers and volunteers would get assignments and locations directly on their smartphone. The end result will be that relief workers are more efficient while on site, and more lives are saved.

We need developers that want to build this app.

Humanitarian Toolbox is hosting a hack-a-thon at DevIntersections. I’m working to organize the event, and help organize developers (like you) interested in participating. We plan to create a small proof of concept for the relief worker check-in system during the hack-a-thon. After the initial hack-a-thon, we want to enlist the broader community to continue building the app.

What’s our deadline? We’d like it in place before the next natural disaster happens. We don’t know when that will be, so we’d like to keep building and have it ready as soon as we can.

If you’re going to be a DevIntersections, join us. Contribute your talent and help relief workers save lives. If you’re not going to DevIntersections, there’s still plenty to do to help. Follow us on twitter: @htbox or the hash tag for the event: #HtBox. We’ll have plenty more software to build after the hack-a-thon. For us to be successful, we’ll need to keep building and enhancing software for relief workers to battle the next crisis.

Write some code, help the world. Contribute to Humanitarian Toolbox.

Let me start by saying that much of the content at the Microsoft MVP Summit is covered by the NDA MVPs sign with Microsoft in order to participate in events like the summit. This recap necessarily leaves out any information that was covered under the NDA. Specifically, as a C# MVP, much of my time was spent with the C# and Visual Studio teams. There is a tremendous amount of work going on in those areas. I’m not blogging about any of those sessions, because all of those were NDA sessions. My silence on the future of C# is for that reason and that reason only.

There were a number of sessions and discussions around the async features added to C# 5. It was really valuable spending that much time with Stephen Toub  and Lucian Wischik discussing common mistakees people make when writing async code. In addition, Lucian and Stephen gave solid, actionable recommendations on good practices for async programming. I say ‘good practices’ not ‘best practices’ because these features are new enough that it’s a bit arrogant to think we’ve figured out what’s ‘best’. We have good ideas, but they will still evolve. One of the async presentations was not covered under NDA, and Stephen has posted it on the pfxteam blog. I really like Lucian’s explanation here on the state machine and event-based async programming (slides 23-25). This is a great explanation and example on how async, await, and the Task Based Async APIs can enable you to write async code that much more clearly represents your designs.

Test your own knowledge and take the async quiz at the end of the slide deck.

You probably saw the announcement on Git support in Visual Studio. There were a lot more discussions on Open Source development at Microsoft. Publicly, you can see the Azure support for Node.js is Open Source. ASP.NET MVC development is open source and accepting contributions from the community. For the past several years, there are more and more Open Source announcements at the MVP Summit, and those are always welcome news. I do hope it’s a trend that will continue, and next year’s Summit brings even more announcements.

Like every conference, the Hallway Track is always valuable. Other MVPs have other focus areas. Even in SRT Solutions, Patrick Steele and I are C# MVPs, and Dennis Burton is an Azure MVP. It’s incredibly valuable to discuss different areas of development with so many smart people from all around the world. The hallway track is where I can ask questions about ASP.NET development, Azure, Windows 8 development, XAML, and all the other areas I understand, but not as well as I do the C# language. I also get to catch up with the future of Visual Studio’s ALM tools. (See Git Support above, I’m happy with what I learned).

Finally, a world wide conference with a bunch of developers can make you feel very hopeful about the future. Different regions show their pride in their home with what they wear. All the Canadian MVPs have Team Canada hockey jerseys. (I have one. It’s a gift from Peter Ritchie, so I’m an honorary Canadian). The Brazilian MVPs wear Team Brasil football (soccer) jackets. Russian MVPs have Russian Olympic warm up jackets. It’s all in fun, and great conversation starters. There are social events every evening, where we can chat with old friends and new acquaintances from all over the world. The final night was another attendee party at Century Link field. The organizers had setup one end for soccer and the other for American football. I learned a bit more about "real football" from some European friends, and taught a few of them how to throw a tight spiral with an American football. And, of course, there were bands and rockeoki (kareoke but with a live band) on the concourse. The quality of the singers varied greatly, but we all had fun. I’m sure some embarrassing YouTube videos will appear shortly.

I can’t wait for next year.

In this post, I’ll drill a bit into the final of the 3 areas SRT is investing in for 2013: Continuous Client Experience.

Users are now expecting that their experience, their work, and their data follows them from one device to the next. It’s not enough to have a presence on mobile, web, and desktop. It’s important that users have a seamless experience as they move from one device to the next.

One high profile example is Netflix. I can start a movie on my laptop. When I get home, I can switch to my Roku and have the movie pick up in exactly the same location. My picks are the same on my phone as on the living room device. We just expect that experience to move from device to device.

OneNote provides similar behavior as a productivity application. My notes automatically sync in the cloud. As I move from machine to machine, or to my phone, all my data just follows. The newest version of OneNote doesn’t even have a “save” command. My work just moves to the cloud on a regular basis.

All the applications we are now writing for business users demand the same kind of synchronization. It’s driving several design decisions.

We’re putting data in the cloud, where it’s accessible from multiple devices. We’re putting more effort into how we synchronize data. We’re putting thought into server side data crunching and client side rendering. We’re designing applications that have more and more of their algorithms in the cloud. That lets us develop more and more of the functionality for a single server platform. Each client has a smaller footprint and less device specific code. That lowers the cost of creating a great experience on each device. Finally, we’re investing in making great offline experiences that synchronize data when the device notifies applications that a network is available.

Put all these areas together, and we believe we’re well positioned for an exciting 2013. There are major shifts underway in our industry, and we intend to stay at the forefront.