Dave Bost

  My colleagues and I have been hard at work for the past month or so working on bringing you the latest information to get you prepared for the upcoming launch of the Windows Azure Platform. We are going to discuss the latest and greatest of what the Windows Azure Platform has to offer and how our very own Microsoft IT team has been using it to build line-of-business applications.

This roadshow will travel across 17-cities in the Central Region with a session focused on the IT Professional in the morning and digging into the Development side of the house in the afternoon.

You can find all the details by visiting my Event Calendar.

What??? You didn’t know I had an event calendar? Well, I do. The Event Calendar gives me the ability to keep you up to date on the developer events taking place without getting lost in the blogroll.

Announcements, Azure, Illinois Events, Indiana Events, Wisconsin Events

I just received word today that attendees of the Chicago stop of the MSDN Developers Conference (MDC) will be some of the first people to get their hands on Windows 7 Beta 1 DVDs! All MDC attendees will receive a copy of Windows 7 Beta 1, but Chicago looks to be the first. For the MDC events taking place before Jan. 13th, you will receive your DVD in the mail after Jan. 13th. Bob Familiar has more details on this.

What is the MSDN Developers Conference you might ask? Well, apparently you don’t read my blog as I’ve discussed this already. Don’t worry, I’ll let it pass *THIS TIME*.

Anyhow… MSDN DevCon is a “Best of PDC” show for developers that the Microsoft Evangelist team is bringing to 11 cities across the country.

The Chicago MDC will be taking place on January 13th, 2009 at the Chicago Hyatt Regency. Ron Jacobs will be kicking things off with the morning keynote followed by a number of sessions covering Microsoft’s Cloud Computing initatives, the latest in Client and Presentation development, as well as what’s new in Tooling, Languages and Framework. We’ll also be running a “Community Courtyard” series of sessions throughout the day as well.

Register now for the Chicago MSDN Developers Conference, or check for other MDC’s events happening in your area.

There is a $99 charge but that is peanuts compared to what PDC registration cost. :)

Announcements, Community, Illinois Events, Indiana Events, Wisconsin Events

We’re starting to see Visual Studio Team System User Groups starting to pop up in our area. Chicago’s has a VSTS group (no group site just yet) and they’ve held twomeetings all ready (sorry for slacking on my blogging duties and not informing you in time that there was a group – a mistake I don’t plan to make again).

There’s also a group starting up in Indianapolis as a Special Interest Group of the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA). Their plan is to meet every 4th Wednesday of the month. Here are the details of their kickoff meeting on May 23rd…

When:
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 @ 6:00PM

Where:
Microsoft Corporation
Parkwood Business Park, Building Four
500 E. 96th St., Suite 460
Indianapolis, IN 46240

Click here to register

Community, Indiana Events, Team System

I would like to thank everyone who came out for the OnRamp240 events in Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago over the past week. We had a great discussion around the Microsoft web development platform, including the greatExpression tools that are sure to please many a web developer and designers out there and not to mention taking a dip in the Silverlight waters for a brief time. There is surely more to come from these great tools and technologies.

As I was able to relay to some of you (Sorry, Indy), the Expression Web product discs are currently on the assembly line and should be shipping out around May 28th. If you attended the OnRamp240 session and filled out an evaluation, you should be receiveing your copy in the mail shortly thereafter.

There are quite a few resources I pointed out during the session and I promised all of you that I would post them here.

First and foremost, no one should miss ScottGu’s keynote from the MIX’07 conference. Scott lays out the full Silverlight story and invites a number of customer’s up on stage to show what they’ve been able to do with the technology in a short amount of time. Simply one of the best keynotes I’ve ever seen and not to be missed!

For the developers, Ihighlyrecommend viewing Omar Khan’s MIX’07 session on Using Visual Studio Codename “Orcas” to Design and Develop Rich AJAX Enabled Web Sites. The Javascript Intellisense feature and debugging support is enough for any Javascript developer to take notice.

Unfortunately we had a short amount of time to cover a lot of material. We weren’t able to go into ASP.NET AJAX as I would’ve like and some of you might have hoped. No worries, though. Head on over to the ASP.NET AJAX Community Site and check out Joe Stagner’s “How-To” video collection on ASP.NET AJAX.

For those of you looking to make the plunge into Silverlight. Everything you need can be found on the Getting Started page of the Silverlight community website. The Sprawl game, that seems to kick my butt everytime, can be found in the Silverlight 1.0 Gallery, whereas the Chess and Silverlight Airlines samples can be found in the Silverlight 1.1 Gallery.

.NET Development, Illinois Events, Indiana Events, Wisconsin Events

Each month DevCares brings you the insight into the latest technologies coming out of Redmond. Through the generous support of our partners (Crowe Chizek, Information Management Group, Clarity Consulting and Inacom), we have now expanded to 6 cities and 3 states in the Midwest district.

This month we take a look at the upcoming release of Visual Studio Codename “Orcas”:

Visual Studio code name “Orcas” delivers on Microsoft’s vision for application development by enabling developers to rapidly create connected applications that deliver the highest quality rich user experiences. This next version of Visual Studio enables developers to rapidly create more secure, manageable, and more reliable applications that take advantage of Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System. This session will provide insight into the exciting new features coming in the next version of Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” and we’ll dive deep into the new programming features “Orcas” delivers such as those found in the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

• Session 1: A Lap Around Visual Studio “Orcas”
• Session 2: Data and Programmability in Visual Studio “Orcas”

Chicago (Loop), IL, May 8th

Downers Grove, IL, May 24

Brookfield, WI, May 30th

Indianapolis, IN, May 22nd

Appleton, WI, May 29th

Madison, WI, May 30th

Each attendee will have a chance at winning a Zune. Who knows, it may even be the recently released Pink Zune!

To see if DevCares is coming to your neck of the woods, be sure to visit DevCares.com.

.NET Development, Illinois Events, Indiana Events, Wisconsin Events