Mark Johnston's Blog : MSDN

MSDN UK events – Silverlight and WPF

markjo — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:55:02 GMT

The guys in the MSDN team are presenting a load of events on rich client technologies during February:

Event Description

Audience: Developers

In this half-day session we’ll do a refresh of the technologies that we can use to build rich, interactive clients with .NET in 2008. We’ll take a look at how we can be cross-platform, cross-browser with Silverlight 2 and yet get the full development experience of a .NET application and then we’ll explore how we can take that further with the Windows Presentation Foundation V3.5 Service Pack 1 which allows for the richest, most-productive development model for Windows applications. There’ll be lots of demos and code as we bring you bang-up-to-date with what’s happening in the world of Microsoft clients.

Agenda:

Silverlight 2: From Scratch

Haven’t seen or experimented with Silverlight 2? This session is for you. We’ll explain the platform’s capabilities for rich, internet applications and we’ll look at how you go about building applications using a combination of the XAML language and the .NET Framework. Along the way, we’ll look at the major stepping stones like how we can make use of the network, how we can make use of the filesystem, how we can re-use and make use of existing controls and we’ll look at the controls that come “in the box” along with the ones in the Silverlight Toolkit on CodePlex. We’ll also look at the tooling involved in building a Silverlight 2 application with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and Expression Blend 2 Service Pack 1.

Windows Presentation Foundation: From Scratch

New to WPF? Coming back to the world of “rich client” after building web applications? In this session we’ll do a refresh of what Windows Presentation Foundation is, what its core capabilities are and how we build applications using a combination of the XAML language and the .NET Framework. We’ll bring this bang up-to-date by having a look at what’s new for WPF since its original release in 2006 and we’ll look at some of the newer developments such as the WPF Toolkit with its DataGrid and Ribbon controls on CodePlex.

They will be presenting in the following cities:

London
Birmingham
Edinburgh
Manchester

You can find out more and sign up for the event by visiting the MSDN Events site here

Visual Express Developer Center in Silverlight

markjo — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:05:14 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/express

Features include:

Animated landing pages
Interactive menus to explore by product or interest area
Interactive product tours for each version

6 Silverlight Screencasts (MSDN Nuggets)

markjo — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 21:45:38 GMT

I've finally got round to uploading some short MSDN Nuggets looking at particular features of Silverlight (1.1 on the whole).

Here they are:

If you are interested in subscribing to more of these code focussed screencasts then subscribe to the RSS Feed

Popfly is top website to watch!

markjo — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:39:15 GMT

PCWorld named Popfly as one of it's top 25 websites to watch and I guess is #1 as it's right at the top of the list!

Here's the blurb on what PCWorld have to say:

"If you haven't already discovered the world of mashups, Microsoft's Popfly is a good place to start. Mashups combine multiple Web-based sites or applications to produce all sorts of useful things, such as an overlay of traffic information over Google Maps. With Popfly, you can create your own mashups--and you don't have to know a lick of code to do it. Just drag prefab building blocks, connect them, and you have an instant mashup that you can add to an existing Web page or turn into its own site. For example, you can easily produce a mashup that grabs pictures from a site like Flickr and then displays them in a rotating cube"

This is great news as the site has been built on Silverlight but even more than that for me is that a very good friend Andy Sterland is one of the Program Managers on the team. I'd like to say I had a small part to play in the success of Popfly as I recommended Andy to his boss John Montgomery after knowing and working with Andy here in the UK. With people like Andy on board I know the Popfly service is going to rock!

I wrote an article on Popfly for our MSDN Flash (go sign up if you are a professional developer, it's getting even better!) - Popfly: the mash-up revolution

Congrats to the Popfly team!

Technorati Tags: Popfly, Silverlight, Andy Sterland, MSDN Flash