Silverlight In The Enterprise This Friday in NYC
So we are just two short days away from the first Silverlight in the Enterprise event. If you are registered for the event we will see you there and best of luck winning the xbox that is currently sitting under my desk! We also have some other great prizes including a Visual Studio 2010 license as well as several Infragistics and ComponentOne licenses and assorted Swag. Sadly we didn't have the budget for a t-shirt cannon is it just me or is this common sense that every presenter should have one?
Announcing Silverlight in the Enterprise
For a long time now I have been an avid supporter of Silverlight and WPF, even more so in enterprise settings where rich user experience is becoming increasingly important. While HTML5 is coming it is not coming to replace Silverlight at least not in the next 5 years. Consider that HTML5 will only run on IE9 and most large companies still run IE6. They still do this because the cost of rewriting applications designed to run on IE6 is steep at times. Silverlight can run on IE6 and deliver a rich user experiences today. The fortunes 500s that are working to move off of IE6 are not typically looking to move to IE9 they are looking to move to IE7 or IE8 neither of which support HTML5.
I have decided to start talking about in a more public forum building applications in Silverlight and my employer (Capax Global) has decided to in cooperation with Microsoft support me in this. To that end I have started an effort I am calling Silverlight in the Enterprise www.slinenterprise.com and on twitter @slinenterprise. I am going to get some of my fellow Silverlight enthusiasts friends to blog about how they are using Silverlight to build real applications. We are also going to start doing some high profile events to help people learn about this great platform. The first of these events is Nov 18th at the Microsoft Manhattan office in NYC and will feature full day of Silverlight related awesomeness. You can register for this event on Eventbright here Now you must be asking yourself how much would I have to pay for this? (it’s ok if you weren’t) The answer is nothing, not one single penny. But wait there is more. Not only do you get a full day of Silverlight related sessions with top-notch speakers, we are also providing a free breakfast, lunch, and chances to win great prizes including:
- Xbox 360 with Kinect
- Several Infragistics Net Advantage Ultimate licenses
- More to come.
Presenting at VT Code Camp Tomorrow
Tomorrow morning nice and early I'll be heading up to VT to be a part of their code camp. I'll be presenting on MEF and software consulting. If your in that area swing by and check it out.
Speaking at Islin User Group 9/1/11
So I am finally back to my most frequently spoken at user group... The islin user group has seen probably too much of me. This will be if i remember correctly my 4th presentation there in the last year. I will be presenting on MVVM so come on out and lets have some fun... Details at http://www.njmsdev.org/
Presenting at VT Code Camp Sept. 10, 2011
I am really looking forward to this camp. I haven't ever been to VT let alone presented there so this should be a good experience for me. I am also hoping to bring my lovely girlfriend with me and find a nice bed and breakfast. I hear that that is the thing to do in VT. Anyone know of a good one please let me know.
This is going to be the first of my new presentations for this year and early next year. I will be presenting on MEF in a presentation I named Getting High on MEF where I will show some of the great ways to use MEF.
The second presentation that I'll be doing for this event is a session aimed at professional development. They have asked me to lead a open forum discussion on software consulting. I will be talking about how to get into it how to find business if you are into it and how to deal with us consultants if you aren't one.
I hope to make some new friends while there so please don't hesitate to say hi. 
Presentation at Islin group canceled
So I got a call about an hour ago and the presentation tonight is canceled.
Presenting at Islin, NJ User Group tomorrow
Everyone in the Islin, NJ area come on down to the user group meeting tomorrow night and check out my presentation on MVVM. This is my third presentation at the Islin user group this year! Presentation is on 6/2/2011 at 6pm. I will also be presenting at the Scranton user group 6/16 (I believe need to confirm the date time and place still) doing a 200-300 level talk on developing with the XAML platform.
Presenting at NYC dot NET User Group
Jason Beres and I will be presenting at the NYC .NET user group this month. (ie this Thursday 3/17) on LightSwitch. you can check out the details here. Jason will be talking about how to build applications with LightSwitch and I will be speaking to the extensibility story of LightSwitch. I am one of the few people that has really gotten down and dirty with the core of LightSwitch and worked closely with the LightSwitch product team and my colleagues at Infragistics to produce the Touch Friendly Shell which was featured at the LightSwitch Beta Launch announcement. You can check out this blog post from the LightSwitch product team where they talk about some of the UI extensibility of LightSwitch. In that article they actually link to my corporate blog where I discuss my experience and thoughts on being part of that project and working with the team to produce a awesome product.
Fixed 7z MIME type issues blocking downloads
My thanks to Corey Castillo for pointing out that my download links were broken for the files that I uploaded for my presentations for the Southern FL Code Camp. I about 2 years back switched to using 7-Zip for file archives naturally if I wish to allow people to download files with an extension of .7z I need to add that MIME Type to my server which for the record the MIME Type for *.7z is "application/x-7z-compressed". I know that know because I just finished adding it to my IIS for this server.
My Appearance at the 7th Annual South Florida Code Camp
So this weekend I had the pleasure of presenting two sessions at the South Florida Code Camp. My first session was entitled Strong Typed RIA Services and was about a design pattern that I proposed that heavily relied on generics and RIA Services to produce a pretty useful control design pattern. I am attaching the solution that demonstrates that code here. It is called RiaServicesViewModel.7z.
My next presentation was call "Dependency Properties can do what?" It was aimed at a more advanced audience that wanted to see some of the more interesting things that you could do with dependency properties. I also showed several code snippets and a project item template. I am attaching them all here.
RiaServicesViewModel
Infragistics.XamlTricks
Infragistics.AttachedBusinessLogic
the following file has 4 code snippets that are very useful for control and ViewModel development. To use them extract them to:
%HOMEPATH%\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets\
MVVM Snippets
And the generic command template extracts to:
%HOMEPATH%\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#\
Generic Command
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