Rants
Over the next several weeks the Silverlight Tour is having a lot of stops around the world. If you're a reader of my blog but not in the U.S., now is the time to get your seat at the Silverlight Tour in your country.
Here's the global story:
Don't Forget...
In addition to the great training, attendees to the Silverlight Tour will also receive a free license to Telerik's acclaimed RadControls for Silverlight 3. RadControls are built on Microsoft Silverlight 3 and include 31 UI controls for building rich line-of-business Silverlight applications. The Silverlight controls offer a clean and intuitive API, Blend support and powerful theming capabilities that will radically improve your RIA development. As part of the Silverlight Tour Workshop, attendees will receive this set of controls completely free (a $999 value).
Last fall I was in 0reDev in Malmo, Sweden. I had a great time there and even got around to doing a talk or two. Well, they've finally posted up the video of that session. Its about "What's New in Silverlight 3" so it may be a little long in the tooth at this point, but if you want to watch it, visit:
http://www.oredev.org/videos/whats-new-in-silverlight-3
MIX 10 is over and lots of blogs are listing all the interesting links and discussions that happened at MIX. I don't want to duplicate that, but instead thought i'd tell what I think are the big stories.
The Phone
While the Windows Phone 7 Series (hrmph, why must you name things like this Microsoft?) had it coming out party before MIX but this is where the developer story became real.
I believe that the Phone is a big deal because (unlike Android which I have and like), the phone is not a 'me too' release. The phone was designed with a different use case. It gets away from the purely "App" idea (as in some apps will just integrated with the phone's collections like the NetFlix app). And of course the development story is the best in the mobile space. VS based development is likely to be the easiest to build code for a phone.
But it all depends on how they deliver it. You'll see a lot more here about my experience with the phone coming soon.
Silverlight 4
With the release of the RC of Silverlight 4 (and the promise of RTM by next month), we're all now in Silverlight 4 land. The new Blend 4 Beta has some nifty tricks up its sleeve so take a look at that as well.
OData
I was glad to see that OData got its coming out party at MIX too. I was suprised by the reaction to it. Some people loved the idea of a common format/query for data. But the demo that Doug Purdy did that got Twitter fluttering was that you could craft LINQ queries over OData sources. This surprised me because I've been teaching people for three years now that LINQ over Data Services (e.g. OData) is cool. Guess I haven't done my job well enough yet ;)
My Talks
I did two talks and now they're available as videos:
My Silverlight Security Talk:
My Silverlight Debugging Talk:
I am very proud to announce that AgiliTrain is announcing two new workshops for Silverlight developers to write applications for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series.
The two new workshops are focused on getting developers up to speed on developing applications with Silverlight for the phone. The two courses are:
Silverlight for the Windows Phone
May 10-12, 2010
The Silverlight Tour for Windows Phone is a three-day, soup-to-nuts breakdown of application development for the phone. This includes learning the ins and outs of XAML, interacting with the phone's services, using the tools and using Silverlight on the server. The class utilizes the Silverlight as well as the latest toolset from Microsoft (including Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4).
Windows Phone QuickStart
May 13, 2010
The Windows Phone Quickstart is a one-day workshop to get existing Silverlight Developers ready to write applications for the new Windows Phone 7 Series phones. The workshop includes coverage of writing new applications, porting new ones and interacting with the phone.
During the three days of MIX 10, AgiliTrain will be giving away a seat per day of the event to people who follow them on Twitter (@AgiliTrain).
To qualify, you must be a follower of the AgiliTrain twitter account by the end of of each day at MIX (by 8pm PST). For each winner, they receive free entrance to any Silverlight Course of their choice that is given by AgiliTrain.
Follow @AgiliTrain now to qualify!
As my continued facination with all things SQL Server Modeling related, I was tasked with writing a short article on the introduction of the basics of SQL Server Modeling for the developer. The result is the article "The Busy Developer's Guide to SQL Server Modeling" that was released on MSDN today. It is short so you can get the big details without investing a month learning the technology. Let me know what you think!
This weekend i am headed to Vegas for a week of designer/developer love. I plan to spend a lot of time in the phone sessions as well as in the Commons visiting with people.
This year's MIX has be really excited about both Silverlight 4's continued maturation as well as the XNA/Silverlight 4 story on the phone. I really want to connect with designers who have spent a year with Sketchflow and see how the tool is working in their 'day jobs'.
Not coincidently I am also speaking at MIX this year. My talks are:
Debugging Microsoft Silverlight Applications
Time: Tuesday at 1:30 PM
Location: Lagoon B
Building Silverlight apps is one thing, but what happens when you get stuck? That's where debugging comes into the picture. In this mini-talk, Shawn shows you how to do simple debugging of Silverlight code, debug data binding/validation problems, and how to debug Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services.
This is a twenty-five minute talk where I hope to help you figure out some of the debugging mysteries of Silverlight.
Securing Microsoft Silverlight Applications
Time: Tuesday at 3:00 PM
Location: Lagoon F
Come hear how to protect Silverlight applications from common threats including securing your application from intruders, eavesdroppers and users as well as protecting your code, your data and your servers from attacks. Also, hear about the key security vectors that must be considered when using Silverlight such as securing applications that often live outside firewalls.
The Rest of the Time
During the rest of the conference I will be around and at as many parties as possible...it is Vegas after all. If you want to find me, either follow my tweets, my FourSquare checkins or my Glympses (see my Twitter feed for Glympse notifications).
Last fall I visited 0redev in Sweden and gave a "What's New in Silverlight 3" talk. THey've just released the video if you interested in wathcing it:
Shawn Wildermuth - What's New in Silverlight 3 from Øredev on Vimeo.
Now that Silverlight 3 is available, learning all the new features can be a chore. In this talk I will walk through all the new features and show you the most compelling pieces from both Silverlight 3 and Blend 3.
Erik Mork, Brian Henderson and Kelly White are doing a weekly podcast on what is new in the Silverlight community each week. This week they discuss the upcoming rumors about MIX and the plethora of CodeCamps coming up. Check it out (and subscribe):
http://www.sparklingclient.com/silverlight_augmented_reality_and_mix_rumors/
I just got back from the west coast and while there I had the opportunity to speak at the Portland Silverlight Users Group. It was a Q&A session and I had a lot of fun answering those questions. Other than questions I couldn't share information about, the most common questions were about hwo to implement MVVM. I decided to do my 45 minute walkthrough of MVVM and built a simple editor using MVVM. For all of you at the meeting that wanted the source, you can find it here:
http://wildermuth.com/downloads/PortlandGameEditor.zip
I can't wait to be asked back!
