Yet another great .NET Coffee Break online event is scheduled for Wednesday, July 23rd at 4pm (GMT). Stephen Walther, a Senior Program Manager over with Microsoft and author of the popular 'ASP.NET Unleashed', will be speaking about ASP.NET MVC. You'll find full details and can register on the developers.ie site - more details are also included below... enjoy! :) 

From Developers.ie:

Developers.ie invites all our members to attend our regular webcast.

We think that during your coffee break is the right time to attend a short talk on various subjects, starting with Silverlight this month.

Our next speaker in July is Stephen Walther, Microsoft Senior Program Manager.

If you don't know Stephen, he's the famous author of a couple of .Net bible like ASP.NET Unleashed, probably the one book to own when you develop with ASP.Net.

He's also busy with the next one ASP.Net MVC Unleashed.

ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft's new framework for building web applications. In this talk, you learn how ASP.NET MVC framework differs from the current ASP.NET Web Forms framework. You learn how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC to build loosely coupled, highly testable, agile applications. You also learn how ASP.NET MVC provides you with fine-grained control over your HTML and JavaScript.

This talk focuses on a short walkthrough of the process of building a simple data-driven MVC application. Stephen Walther is a Microsoft Senior Program Manager who works with the ASP.NET MVC team to develop content around ASP.NET MVC. He is the author of the forthcoming book ASP.NET MVC Unleashed.

Read his blog on ASP.NET MVC at http://StephenWalther.com

This will be broadcast live on Wednesday 23th of July at 16:00 (Ireland

time!) - 8am Pacific Time

All the connection details to the show will be sent to you a few days prior to the start of the webcast.

This event is free but you need to register by following this link http://www.developers.ie/Webcasts.aspx

If you managed to catch Martha's recent Silverlight 2 coffee break talk, you may now be interested in learning a little more.

Our friends over in InnerWorkings have just sent around a couple of their new coding challenges aimed at helping you get up and running with Silverlight 2.

The drills take about 3 hours each and cost $29.99.  More details are included below.

If you haven't used InnerWorkings before, you can download some other drills for free as a taster. Topics included are: Object Oriented Programming (VB/C# and 2005/2008); ASP.NET Web Development (VB/C# and 2005/2008); Programming with Visual C# 2003; Programming with Visual Basic 2003; Using AJAX Extensions (VB/C# and 2005/2008);  New Features in C# 3.0 Using Visual Studio 2008; New Features in VB 9.0 Using Visual Studio 2008.

By the way, if you happened to miss Martha's talk, the folks over in developers.ie tell me it has been recorded and should be available on the site shortly.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Drills (Details From InnerWorkings):

If you were at Tech-Ed 2008 in Orlando earlier this month, you couldn’t have missed the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 announcement. Now you can master the many new features of Silverlight 2 with these great new InnerWorkings Drills. To get started, take 10 seconds to download the 4.66MB Silverlight 2 Beta 2. Then select from the 6+ hours of coding challenges we’ve assembled for Silverlight 2 developers and you’re on your way:

Managed Code in Silverlight 2

• Developing and Deploying Silverlight 2 Applications
• Using the MediaPlayer ASP.NET Control for Silverlight 2
• Using Silverlight Panels to Create an Application Layout
• Using the Silverlight DataGrid Control
• Handling Events in Silverlight 2
• Interacting with the Web Page

Working with Data in Silverlight 2

• Data Binding with Silverlight 2
• Implementing a Master Detail Scenario
• Accessing HTTP-based Services using Silverlight 2
• Accessing SOAP Services using Silverlight 2
• Accessing Syndication Feeds using Silverlight 2
• Using Isolated Storage in Silverlight 2

For those of us who didn't get to head to Orlando for the recent TechEd Developer conference last week - there is a nice little resource called  TechEd Online, where you can see all the keynotes and lots more of the TechTalks that went on there.

Take a look at the developer listing, you can search the talks by track and by keyword.

Speaking of great conferences to go to - TechEd 08 super early bird registration is now open (save 300 EUR).

Always a popular option with developers and IT professionals from Ireland and Northern Ireland, TechEd EMEA Developer has over 15 technical tracks and 3 virtual tracks. Though of course, many people have told us that the best thing about TechEd is getting the chance to speak to all the international experts gathered in Barcelona for the week.

If you are interested in learning more, check out the event website. They have a nice feature where you can take a look at the top 4 presentations from last year - some great content there!

Phew! We are just over the IMTC, but there is no rest for the wicked (or at least the MS Tech Community in Ireland). Next up on the agenda is the Developer Developer Developer (or DDD) event happening down in Galway on the May bank holiday weekend.

So, why should you go along?

Well, apart from the impressive agenda - 5 tracks with top notch speakers - there are promises of amazing swag giveaways, and great events (like podcasts from the pub on the Aran Islands - the most westerly point in Ireland, and one of the most spectacular spots to visit on the island) happening around the main event itself. There's even talk of a visit to Craggy Island's parochial house (apparantly there are some Fr. Ted fans among the speakers! ;)

DDD events have been running over in the UK for quite some time and are incredibly popular over there. This is our first one in Ireland, but we're hoping it's the first of many!! Check out this video if you want a feel of what it's all about.

Best of all, this event is totally free - you just have to get yourself there!

Here is a list of the sessions you can choose from - but you should check out the agenda page for full details of each session, timings and even some into videos for the sessions.

• ADO.NET Data Services (Formerly Astoria) - Guy Smith-Ferrier
• Using Enterprise Library in ASP.NET - Alex Homer
• Using Workflow Foundation in a Service Oriented Architecture -Maurice de Beijer
• Scrum-tastic Development with Visual Studio Team System and Light Weight Scrum - Mike Azocar
• IronPython: Dynamic Languages on .NET and Silverlight- Michael Foord
• An Introduction to Regular Expressions - Barry Carr
• ASP.NET MVC Framework - Alan Dean
• XSLT Extreme - Dave McMahon
  Passionate Teams and Cooperative Customers: Agile tales of creative customer communication - Claudio Perrone
• Functional programming in C# 3 - Oliver Sturm
• Dependency Injection with the Enterprise Library Unity Application Block - Alex Homer
• ASP.NET - learn from my mistakes (or else) - Phil Winstanley
• My Favourite Patterns - Gary Short
  Process Template: From Soup To Nuts - Mike Azocar
• Red, Green, Refactor! - Ben Hall
  An overview of WPF - the end of Windows Forms? - Oliver Sturm
• Integrating Silverlight into ASP.NET Applications - Dave Sussman
• Visual Studio Tools for Office in 2008 - Maurice de Beijer
• Object Thinking - Alan Dean
  Accessing RESTful Data Services; the lightweight alternative to SOAP - Andy Wigley
• Swaggily Fortunes (Presentation) Richard Costall, Dave McMahon, John Price

Looking forward to heading along to the opening of the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference later on this evening - maybe I'll see you there. But if you haven't already registered - there is still time... just head along to http://imtc.firstport.ie!

Here are a couple of more tasters from the folks presenting over the next few days... enjoy! :)

I'm really liking this neat little teaser for the upcoming Irish Microsoft Technology Conference that I found on the Galway MTUG site! I think it came from one of the NxtGenUG (Next Generation User Group) speakers coming over from the UK... Check it out! :)

Many of you know Martin Woodward, VSTS MVP and recent presenter at the Launch 2008 showcase in the Tripod here in Dublin. Well, Martin and the folks in Teamprise just released Teamprise 3.0 at EclipseCon 2008 earlier this week. Teamprise has a Team Foundation Server plugin for Eclipse so that if you can use Team Foundation Server for both .NET and Java projects. Well worth a look if you work in a mixed development environment!

Martin will also be speaking at the upcoming IMTC and DDD events - check out a snippet of his talk at TechEd 07 in Barcelona to get a feel for what's in store!