I am just back from the MVP summit in Seattle / Redmond and I had a great time there. It was fantastic catching up with old friends and making new ones. Seeing what is coming up in future releases of Silverlight and WPF (to name just those two) was electrifying. Of course I cannot talk about it because otherwise Justin Angel and the NDA police will track me down and kick my ass. If you never met Justin before, trust me, you don't want that to happen. :)
Some changes for me after the MVP summit: I accepted to be part of the new Silverlight MVP group. This will be a small group of dedicated Silverlight developers (and I think I probably know all of them, at least by name), so it should make for really interesting interactions.
I also took the occasion to hang out with some of my friends from the WPF Disciples group, a really amazing group of talented individuals. It is an honor to be part of that group. We had a lot of fun, and some discussions were really pretty amazing. We also learned how to do the duck dance, which is apparently very "in" amongst the Expression Blend MVP group. Not sure why, but you know, they're design-type persons.
The last 2 days in Seattle were spent with my colleagues at IdentityMine, and it was just great to meet the whole team. While I knew most of them in person already, it was great to meet the rest of the crew and to talk to them all. I was also happy to meet our new creative director Jonah, welcome to the team :)
TechDays
So tomorrow I am heading to Antwerp, Belgium, for TechDays 2009. I will have two sessions there. I will also be at the Girl Geek Dinner on Tuesday, and really looking forward to it. I really think we need more women in the software industry, because they bring another point of view on things as well as a different creativity. I am really happy to take part to this dinner.
Book signing (Silverlight 2 Unleashed)
A book signing is planned, but I am not sure when exactly. If you have my book, bring it with you and I'll be more than happy to meet you in person and sign it. If you don't have it, I hear that they will have it at the conference's book shop. One more reason to come ;)
.NET continuum: ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight and WPF
(Wednesday, 11th of March 2009, 10:45 - 12:00)
With the release of Silverlight in 2008, Microsoft put in place the last piece of the client application puzzle and completed the .NET continuum: From very thin clients (running HTML code created by ASP.NET) to "richer thin clients" (using AJAX) to rich interactive applications (RIAs with Silverlight) to very rich clients running on the Windows desktop (Windows Presentation Foundation). In this session with few slides and much code, Laurent demonstrates how to implement and configure a single Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service. Then, a continuum of client applications consuming this service is created. For Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation, Laurent also shows how to reuse as much code as possible, and how to optimize the development. Finally, services located on external servers will be consumed too and the problem of cross domain communication will be inspected.
Live coding Silverlight and WPF
(Thursday, 12nd of March 2009, 13:00 - 14:15)
Does Windows Presentation Foundation’s learning curve intimidate you? Did you hear about Silverlight but didn’t have the occasion to try it yourself? Are you afraid that, though it is using well known .NET languages and libraries, it has specificities that are difficult to understand? Discovering these two platforms on your own can seem like a frightening step. In this very interactive session, Laurent will code Silverlight and WPF in front of you, and will let the audience’s questions guide him in this journey through rich user experience. Simple tools like KaXaml and SilverlightPad will be used, as well as the powerful development environments Visual Studio and Expression Blend. Depending on the audience’s desires, this session can take you into Expression Design, Designer-Developer workflows, the Model-View-ViewModel pattern, web services communication, Animations and Transforms, Multimedia integration, and many other topics. Samples will be made in both WPF and Silverlight in a fun way that should allow everyone to overcome their inhibitions and to get started without pain!
Print | posted on Monday, March 09, 2009 11:10 PM