Silverlight 2 Unleashed

#MIX09 Book Signing: "Silverlight 2 Unleashed"

Laurent Bugnion — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 04:49:51 GMT

When: Today, Friday 20th of March 2009, 10:30 - 11:00

Where: MIX2009 Book store (in 3rd Place)

What: I will be signing my book there.

Come and bring your friends!!

Nice plug: Silverlight 2 Unleashed (and my girls) in TCS weekly

Laurent Bugnion — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 03:14:35 GMT

Thanks Adam for making my day (and my daughters') by including them in The Continuum Show weekly edition. It was so cool (and unexpected) :)

(mention starts at 0:57 in the show)

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/TCSWeekly/TCSWeekly003/

And my good friend and colleague Kurt's daughter was also featured! Great day for IdentityMine's families :)

KaXaml love

All this is thanks to Robbie Ingebretsen and his amazing KaXaml editor. I can never underline enough how amazing KaXaml is. It's grown to become an unavoidable tool when like me you work as a WPF and Silverlight integrator.

http://kaxaml.com/

See Robbie talk about KaXaml:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/Kaxaml/

Speaking at Microsoft TechDays - Belgium and Switzerland

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:56:10 GMT

Update: Added a talk in Geneva, Switzerland, 1st or 2nd of April 2009

I am happy to announce that I will be speaking at Microsoft TechDays in Antwerp (Belgium, 11th and 12th of March) and in Bern (Switzerland, 9th of March). Hope to see some of you there, and if you are around, please come and meet me!!

11th and 12th of March, Antwerp (Belgium)

http://www.techdays.be/

.NET continuum: ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight and WPF

This session will be given in English.

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

This session will be given in English.

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!

Book signing, Silverlight 2 Unleashed

Following the cool experience of PDC08, I will be signing my book Silverlight 2 Unleashed at TechDays Belgium. Stay tuned for time and place.

1st or 2nd of April 2009, Geneva (Switzerland)

CICG Genève

9th of April 2009, Bern (Switzerland)

Kursaal, 11:50 - 12:50

http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/msdn/de/techdays/default.aspx

Developing WPF applications - today and tomorrow

This session will be given in French in Geneva and in German in Bern.

This session reviews best practices used to develop Windows Presentation Foundation today. We will build lookless controls and style them, use modern presentation patterns to facilitate the designer-developer workflow, use controls built in the .NET framework and in the WPF toolkit, and attempt to create beautiful applications using Visual Studio and Expression Blend.

Then, we will talk about the futures of WPF. With .NET 4 around the corner, WPF will also get even more powerful and versatile. Pixel shaders, additions to the XAML language, multi-touch, new controls and other additions will bring us one step closer to the user experience of the future (Think Minority Report!!)

It's podcast season: Herding code

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:03:11 GMT

Apparently it's podcast season... When in Los Angeles, Jon Galloway and I managed to sit down an hour and talk about Silverlight, WPF, Blend, my past work at Siemens and my future work at IdentityMine, and of course about my book Silverlight 2 Unleashed. I was kind of sad that Kevin Dente and Scott Koon didn't manage to join us, but the conference was so packed with events that we found time only on the very last day (Thursday) and the two had to go back home already. Still, it was nice to meet the whole crew (I had met Jon before but it was the first time for me to meet Scott and Kevin - K Scott, the 4th rider, was not at PDC). The podcast is available at the Herding Code website.

Here are some points of trivia about the interview:

Jon was using his brand new recorder for the very first time, and this involved quite some fiddling with controls. It's a really cool device (maybe Jon can comment about that) and I think the sound quality is superb.
In the middle of the interview, you hear me say "and by the way we are at Los Angeles", which seems totally out of context. It's because we heard police sirens outside on the street, really loud. Somehow, the mike cut that out, or Jon managed to edit it, not sure. Now I sound like an idiot for saying this for apparently no reason.
I *know* that the word "data" is singular in English (contrarily to French), and yet you hear me say many times "these data are...". Sorry about that.

It was really a good time recording this with Jon, and I hope you like it too.

Podcast about RIA and especially Silverlight

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 08:48:52 GMT

Very cool! A podcast I made with Josh Holmes and Mike Labriola a little before PDC is up now on the RIA wireside chat site.

During 20 minutes, Mike (an Adobe expert), Josh (a Silverlight evangelist) and I chat about RIAs in general and Silverlight in particular. It was good fun and a very interesting talk. Hope you enjoy it!!

Book signing: Silverlight 2 Unleashed at #PDC08

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:48:13 GMT

I will be doing an additional book signing today. I'll be signing Silverlight 2 Unleashed at the IdentityMine booth (in the expo area) today from 1PM. We are not allowed to sell anything on the floor (even my editor Sams is not allowed either because of MSFT regulations), so if you want me to sign it, stop by at the PDC bookshop today, just next to the registration area. I'll be happy to sign and to chat about the future of Silverlight!

Hope to see you this afternoon!!

A moment of pride at #PDC08

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 06:23:39 GMT

Blogging and twittering at #PDC08

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:48:03 GMT

PDC is starting today (well, the pre-conference is, and the conference starts tomorrow) and I reached Los Angeles last night. The trip went well, even though we started (and arrived) one hour later than planned. Yesterday I joined Mike Brown and Bill Reiss for dinner, and then called it a night.

Of course with the jet lag I woke up quite early today, but it's usual. Later I will head to the LA Convention Center and attend the pre conference. I am especially looking forward to Charles Petzold presentation about WPF. I hope I have a chance to talk to Mr Petzold, as I prepared and dedicated one of my books for him. He was kind enough to send me a dedicated edition of his WPF 3D book some time ago, and I am really happy and proud to be able to reciprocate today.

During the conference, I will be blogging on http://blog.galasoft.ch and you can also read shorter messages on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lbugnion. I really hope that I can meet many of my readers during this event, so stay tuned and come and meet me!

And don't forget: I'll be signing my book Silverlight 2 Unleashed tomorrow Monday, from 11:15AM to 11:45AM at the PDC DigitalGuru Technical Bookshop!!

My schedule at #PDC08

Laurent Bugnion — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 08:08:42 GMT

Difficult task: Choosing the sessions I am interested in for PDC08... Difficult because there are really many session that are very attractive to me, and also because I need to include side activities and meetings with members of the WPF and Silverlight community. I still have a few conflicts, and I will decide at the last minute which session to follow. Note that as usual with Microsoft conferences, all the sessions will be filmed and put online rapidly after the conference, so this is how I will solve the conflicts.

I will be flying tomorrow around 1PM and reaching Los Angeles the same day around 4PM local time after a 12 hours flight. Thankfully it's direct, so I can just sit down, open the laptop and do some serious coding :)

On a personal note, I will be signing my book "Silverlight 2 Unleashed" on Monday, at the DigitalGuru Technical Bookshop within PDC. I hope to meet many of you then!!

I will be in Los Angeles until Sunday the 1st of November (which means that I will celebrate Halloween in the USA for the first time since 1988, when I was stopping for a coupld of days in Honolulu on my way to New Zealand). Then I will head to Princeton NJ for my last UI workshop with Siemens. This is the last workshop before I move on to IdentityMine on the 1st of December. A good occasion to clean up and say goodbye to our graphics designers who have been working with us for the last 2 years.

Silverlight 2 Unleashed in Stock at Amazon.com

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:45:16 GMT

Things are going really fast in the moment. My book just hit Amazon.com, and it went from "pre-order" to "in stock" a few minutes ago. I really can't wait to get reader feedback!