I've got a busy time coming up, not that that's anything new. Over the next few months I'm speaking at a bunch of different venues, but always about Silverlight. So don't worry, there are plenty of places to hear me blab on about Silverlight. :)
Cleveland Silverlight Firestarter
It seems that even moving 2500 miles west isn't enough to get me away from the Cleveland development community. Coming up on November 1st is a Silverlight Firestarter event to be held at the Microsoft office in Independence Ohio. I'm quite honored to have been asked to head back to Ohio and speak at this, even if it means that I'll have to fly the red-eye to get there.
This is a free one day event designed to educate developers on Silverlight. Consisting of 5 sessions, the event will start with introductory level topics at the beginning and accelerate into deep dive sessions later in the day. The content will be delivered by Silverlight experts and authors, known locally and nationwide.
When: Saturday, November 1st, 2008, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, registration opens at 8:00 AM.
Where: Microsoft Office (Independence, OH)
Agenda:
8:00 AM: Registration
9:00 AM: Keynote/Intro to Silverlight 2 (Jeff Blankenburg)
10:30 AM: XAML Basics (Sarah Dutkiewicz)
Noon: Lunch break
1:00 PM: The Tools (Jeff Blankenburg)
2:30 PM: Controls & Data Binding (Matt Casto)
4:00 PM: Server Communication (John Stockton)
Registration: To register for this event, please go to http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032392883&Culture=en-US
Seattle Code Camp
Coming up on November 15 and 16 is the fourth Seattle Code Camp. It looks like I'm going to be giving two talks, although a final schedule has yet to be posted. Back in the Heartland District we frequently called these events "Day of .NET" but code camp is probably the more common name. Basically it's a chance for developers to learn from their peers. These are wonderful chances to get introduced to a new technique or technology for free. Yup, that's right, free.
Here are the talks I'll be giving:
Networking and Communications in Silverlight
Now that most people know that Silverlight can do fancy animations and play videos, lets look at how to make it do some real work. In this presentation we will demonstrate connecting to web services, using returned data, binding data to controls and discuss some limitations Silverlight currently has. And of course, since it's Silverlight, we'll try to make it look good in the process.
Silverlight 2 and the HTML Bridge
Silverlight can interact with the HTML DOM in exciting and powerful ways. Join us in a walk over the HTML Bridge while we go from calling simple JavaScript functions and exposing Silverlight methods to JavaScript to passing complex objects from one Silverlight app to another and using a headless Silverlight app as a communications hub. The bridge can be dark and there are trolls, but there is [Silver]light at the other side.
Seattle Developer / Designer Interaction Group
We had our first meeting last week and things went quite well. Check out the website for the most up to date information (keep looking, we'll update it soon). Out next meeting will be 7:00 M November 19th at Bellevue Place, check the site for directions.
The topic of the next meeting is the designer -> developer workflow. We plan to have several short presentations 5-7 minutes each and then a round table discussion about the presentations and other ideas / thoughts related to the topic. Also, whoever is at the meeting gets to help choose the topic for next month. After the meeting is over we will head over to some local watering hole to move the discussion in a more social direction.
Codemash
You would think that after all this I would want a rest, well, not exactly. In January the good folks in the Ohio / Michigan area throw one heck of a good regional conference called CodeMash. The full schedule should be coming out within the next few days but I already know that I will be involved in the Pre-Compiler day. Myself, Sarah Dutkiewicz, Corey Haines, Joe Fiorini and Gary Bernhardt are crafting a solution including Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, Ruby and MySQL which we will teach to participants. This is going to be a free-flowing area where we will provide examples, and personal instruction on how to build any or all pieces in this application.
While we haven't yet worked all the details yet we are also going to to be hosting a contest in conjunction with our pre-compiler event. The basics will be something along the lines of adding features to our sample app and/or building a layer (front, middle, back) using a different technology or in a different way than what we showed. Prizes and rules are yet to be determined but it should be good fun for all those involved.
More
If you are in the Seattle or Northern Ohio areas I encourage you to join one or more of these events as they are all good opportunities to expand your knowledge. I'm also talking with other groups and organizations about participating in more talks around the region and throughout the west coast so keep an eye out for more announcements.
