TechDays 09

The #techdays presentations screencasts are online (French and German)

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:24:44 GMT

And now the German version of the session is online too. Get it at

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

Reminder, the French version is at

http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/msdn/fr/techdays/Presentations.aspx

The slides are also available at this URL. Have fun!!

The #techdays presentations screencasts are online (French only)

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:21:17 GMT

Update: The German version of the presentation is online too.

I was just notified that the screencast for the session I gave at TechDays in Geneva a few weeks ago is now online. You can see this presentation (in French) at

http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/msdn/fr/techdays/Presentations.aspx

The slides are also available at this URL. Have fun!!

Posting the source code for #techdays (Switzerland) talks

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:07:39 GMT

Update:

I updated the installation instructions to make it clearer that you need the WPF toolkit and SQL Server express before you can run the application.

TechDays Switzerland is always a very nice venue, and this year in Geneva and in Bern were no exceptions. For me it was a special occasion, because I gave the same talk in French in Geneva, and in German in Bern, and I had never done this before. I think it went well. Altogether approximately 450 people saw this talk. I think I will possibly reuse it later this year at other occasions, because it is a good one.

The topic was "WPF today and tomorrow" and the abstract was:

Entwicklung von WPF Applikationen – heute und morgen

Im Rahmen dieser Session werden Best Practices zur Entwicklung der Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) erörtert. Wir erstellen Lookless-Controls und gestalten sie entsprechend. Ausserdem werden moderne Präsentationsmodelle, die den Designer-Developer-Workflow erleichtern sollen, sowie im .NET-Framework und im WPF-Toolkit erstellte Controls vorgestellt. Mithilfe von Visual Studio und Expression Blend üben wir uns in der Erstellung von Anwendungen.
Ein weiterer in dieser Session behandelter Aspekt ist die künftige Entwicklung der WPF. Mit der bevorstehenden Einführung von .NET 4 wird die WPF weiter an Flexibilität und Leistungsstärke gewinnen. Pixel-Shader, Ergänzungen an der XAML-Sprache, die Multi-Touch-Technologie, neue Controls und andere Erweiterungen – all dies führt uns zu einer neuartigen User Experience und zu neuen Möglichkeiten der Interaktion (Think Minority Report!).

Windows Presentation Foundation: aujourd'hui et demain

Cette session passe en revue les pratiques de développement utilisées avec Windows Presentation Foundation de nos jours. Nous construirons une application de business connectée à une banque de données, utiliserons les nouveaux contrôles « Line of Business » (Datagrid, Ribbon) et utiliserons Visual Studio et Blend pour rendre nos applications plus belles.
Ensuite, nous parlerons du future de WPF. Avec .NET 4 qui arrive, WPF sera aussi plus puissant et flexible. Pixel shaders, les additions au langage XAML, les applications à touche multiple (mulittouch) et d’autres additions nous rapprocherons de l’expérience utilisateur du futur (telles que dans « Minority Report »).

Slides

The slides for the sessions should be available on the TechDays website soon (www.techdays.ch) as well as a recording of the session. In the mean time, I uploaded the slides here.

TechDays Switzerland 2009

View more presentations from lbugnion.

Video

I showed a small video about pixel shaders in this talk. The video is available for download here.

Source code

Here is the source code of the "Line of Business" application we built together. As a reminder, it is inspired by a "hands on lab" put together by the DPE team at Microsoft Switzerland. This lab can be downloaded here.

To run the application, you must first install the following:

Install SQL Server Express
Extract the Northwind database to C:\temp.
Install the WPF Toolkit.
Source code for the LOB application.

TechDays Belgium is over

Laurent Bugnion — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:09:54 GMT

I just held two talks in Antwerp, Belgium, for TechDays and it was really nice. First the Belgian team did a fantastic work welcoming the speakers, and as far as I could say, the attendees were also taken care of in an exemplary way. We had just a small incident (there was a power breakdown about 15 minutes before my show and the whole center went black), but noone panicked and it was taken care of with a lot of care. We started the sessions only 15 minutes late on the last day. Everyone stayed calm. I also want to especially mention the technical teams who were simply AMAZING. Such a great work. Before my first session, the technician called my mobile to tell me that he was available and I could go to the room if I wanted. Once there, they totally made me feel at home, were efficient, polite and interested, and even gave feedback after the talk. I would work again with such a team any time!!

My 2 talks went great, I got approximately 300 people at each. The talks were held in big movie theaters, and we actually used the movie projectors to beam. We had image in image so the speakers were filmed while they talked. The screen was impressive.

I want to thank all the people who made this possible. It was a fantastic experience, and I am looking forward to repeat that soon. For the people who attended my talks, I will post the source code and walkthroughs here after MIX is over, so stay tuned.

Cheers!!

Back from MVP summit and heading to Tech Days Belgium

Laurent Bugnion — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:10:30 GMT

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!

One more talk: Geneva TechDays, 1st and 2nd of April 2009

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:21:38 GMT

Just got confirmation that I will also be talking in Geneva, Switzerland, at the TechDays 2009 (1st or 2nd of April 2009).

The talk will be the same as in the TechDays in Bern, but this time it will be given in French. I never really gave a technical talk in French, so it should be interesting (I hope the material will be more interesting than me struggling with technical words in French, though, just kidding).

Yes, French is in fact my mother tongue. I come from Lausanne, located in the French speaking part of Switzerland. But right after Engineer school, I moved in the region of Zurich, which is in the German speaking area, and I never worked with a French speaking team. I am totally able to have a technical talk in French though, so it should work just fine.

Developing WPF applications - today and tomorrow

This session will be given in French.

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!!)

New "Welcome message" on www.galasoft.ch

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:14:43 GMT

I changed the "welcome message" on my website www.galasoft.ch and thought I would also publish it here :)

----

Update: In addition to the talks listed below, I will also talk in TechDays Geneva. More details here.

Here are some fresh news from Stäfa! With Xmas and New Year behind us, Chinese New Year around the corner, the year 2009 is well started and looking very good. I have a number of exciting events in front of me.

You might have noticed a new box titled "Sponsors" in the side bar of this page and others on the site. After a long hesitation, I finally decided to place advertisement on GalaSoft. This is not enough to make tons of money (I am not Scott Hanselman or Jeff Atwood ;)), but it will help me to keep the site entertaining and to improve services (like bandwidth or storage). I took great care of choosing an ad service that is both tasteful and totally related to the content of this site. So much so, in fact, that I joined the newly opened Silverlight room at the Lounge, a service that gathers only respected professionals and that takes great care to display ads that are especially targeted at professionals.

First you will see me in Seattle at the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional summit 2009. The summit is an exciting event, the chance for us to meet Microsoft product groups and pass them feedback, and to learn about the future of technology under Non Disclosure Agreement. And of course this is also a chance to meet old friends and to make new one. The comunity is amazing and vibrant, and this year should give me the occasion to meet people I have only met online so far. This will be in the first week of March.

During the same trip, I will be visting my friends and colleagues at IdentityMine in Seattle and Tacoma. By the way guys, we're planning a get together on Thursday night, the 5th of March 2009, so if you are in the region and want to join, contact Teresa who is organizing everything :)

The week after I come back to Europe, I will fly to Antwerp in Belgium, where I will give two talks in the Microsoft TechDays. This should be really nice. See the abstracts here. When I am there, I will also be an attendee at the local Geek Girl Dinner, thanks to Katrin who invited me to be her "sacoche" (hand bag :)) I think this should be really nice, and I am impatient to meet lots of new people there. I think that there is really a much too low number of women in our industry, which is a shame considering how creative this work is, and how well the few women who are active in the community are performing. We could really use a different, more feminine way to solve problems!

The next trip will be to the USA again, Las Vegas woohoo. MIX09 is coming up, and it will be really exciting! MIX is my favourite conference, and I have been to all of them since it started in 2006. I can honestly say that this first edition truly changed my life: It made me discover WPF, motivated me to start my blog and to switch my attention from the JavaScript community to the .NET client application community. This year's MIX should be a fantastic edition if I believe what I read so far, so don't wait longer to book your places there! It's a smaller conference than PDC or TechEd, and when it's sold out, it's over!!

After my return to Switzerland, I still have one exciting event planned: TechDays in Bern, where I will be speaking on the 9th of April. I really like TechDays Switzerland and am always amazed at the number of people who show up, considering that we are a small country after all (and this is the Swiss German part of the event, another one for the French speaking part takes place in Geneva a week earlier.)

I really hope I can meet many of you at these events, and have interesting talks about all these technologies that are our passion. More than ever before, maybe, these are really exciting times to be in the business.

Happy Coding!!
Laurent, Stäfa, the 24th of January 2009

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.