Indy NDA: Jeff Blankenburg

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:54:00 GMT

Tonight's Indy DotNet Developer Association metting had guest Jeff Blankenburg, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist. That has to be the coolest job ever. Check out his blog at http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/.

His presentation was on some amazing things you can do with new Microsoft technologies. His demos included Silverlight, Photosynth, Live Mesh and more. Jeff did a cool demo on Popfly, a mash-up tool that lets you build some cool applications with out writing any code. He built a quick app that showed a map with the location of twitter posters. Apps created with Popfly can be viewed in the Popfly site or they can be embedded right inside another site using an iframe. Very cool stuff.

Silverlight is definately worth checking out and I am presonally looking forward to the final release of 2.0.

Indy Tech Fest 2008

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:21:00 GMT

Today was the Indy Tech Fest 2008. The day saw just under 500 developers and several sponsors. You can get more info and downloads at indytechfest.org

The first session I attended was "Tips and Tricks for the New C#" with Mark Strawmyer. This room was packed. I managed to find a seat, but there were alot of people standing or sitting in the isles. Mark discussed the new features of C# 3.0 with basic demos and some background on why the new features were created. As he stated, almost all of the new language features in C# 3.0 are to enable support for Linq.

Next I moved to "What You Can Do With Robotics Studio" with William Steele. Bill has got to be one of the coolest presenters I have been able to listen to. His presentations were the ones I was most looking forward to. He showed how easy it was to code for robots and even reuse the code to control diffferent robots. This is something I have always been interested in so this was really a fun session. He demoed the Robotics Studio itself and made his Roomba move with a tv remote. He had the same code plugged into another custom robot to make it do the same thing. I talked to him afterwards and was suprised to find out really how inexpensive alot of the robotic components are. He uses Parallax Propeller chips which only cost $12. You can get a board that has the chip and several other components for around $40. I will definately be playing with those in the near future.

After lunch, I skipped the 3rd session so I could check up on some things online and write a bit of code on a current project. During Session 4 timeslot I attended "Building WPF Applications in Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend" with Dave Bost from Microsoft. He demoed an extremely cool app that used WPF and had custom data templates and animation. This one you really need to see for yourself. The demo was actually from a virtual lab on MSDN. You want to check out the Visual Studio 2008 Virutal Labs and go in to the "Developing a WPF Application". It is really a good place to get some info on building WPF apps. I have built a few and I highly recommend spending the 90 minutes to go through the virtual lab.

The final session of the day was back with William Steele in "Developing with XNA Studio". All I can say is XNA rocks. Bill went through the steps of building an XNA game for windows where you could use an XBox 360 controller to move a smiley face around the screen. Not a really advanced game by any means, but the demo showed the power of how quickly you can write games with XNA. He then made a copy of the game for the Zune. All you have to do is in Visual Studio is right click on the windows project and select an option to create a copy for Zune. He then published the game with no code changes to his Zune. Being a Zune user myself, I found this very exciting. He went on to talk about how you can publish games online and even sell them. If you are interested in making games, you need to check out XNA. You can download everything you need at http://creators.xna.com/.

All in all I really enjoyed the day and will be going back next year. The registration fills up fast, so as soon as it is announced I would sign up and plan on going next year.

General

Indy NDA: Jeff Blankenburg

Indy Tech Fest 2008