Dave Bost » Talks

Resources from MSDN Event – Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0, SharePoint 2010

Dave — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:32:20 +0000

Here are the resources I promised you from our recent MSDN Event series on Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, and SharePoint 2010. Leave a comment and let us know what future topics you would like to see.

MSDN Presents: Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, SharePoint 2010 for Developers

View more presentations from davebost.

Resources from Silverlight 4 Presentation

Dave — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:37:00 +0000

I would like to thank everyone who came out to the first Chicago Silverlight user group meeting last night. We had a great turn out with some excellent dialog on the new features of Silverlight 4.

As stated, I borrowed from Karen Corby’s session at PDC as it provides a nice roundup of some of the great new features in Silverlight 4 including drag/drop, right-click handling, printing, web cam integration, network multicast support, as well as new rich text and Bidi support. Not to mention the new out-of-browser support for COM integration!

You can grab all of the resources used in last night’s presentation from Karen’s Blog as well as the PDC website. I sprinkled a few others in as well…

CD2 Becomes The Chicago Silverlight User Group

Dave — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:06:27 +0000

A received a note from Anthony Handley a few weeks back feeling out my thoughts around renaming (and re-chartering) the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group (CD2) to the Chicago Silverlight User Group. I thought it was a great idea as it provided a directed focus on what the topics and general direction of the group would be. It would only help the community at large understand the conversations that were taking place.

The intention of the group from the beginning was to bring the conversations between designers and developers closer together from a platform agnostic approach. As Anthony expounds on below, the group started to gravitate to more discussions focused on a particular area – Silverlight. Changing the name only solidifies the charter of the groups intent to the community and provides a means to bring more people together around a common cause (a “community”).

We are still able to facilitate conversations and idea sharing between designers and developers through events such as RIApalooza. Myself, along with the leaders of the Chicago Silverlight user group and the Chicago Adobe user group are currently in the planning stages of RIApalooza 3. More details to come.

Here is Anthony’s message…

In the past 18 months, the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group has sought to walk the lines between design and development while remaining platform agnostic. We’ve had some great presentations and speakers in the past; however, it has become increasingly difficult to find and schedule topics that appeal to designers and developers in both the Adobe and Microsoft worlds. After careful introspection and evaluation, the CD2 leadership team have chosen to clarify our place in the community and focus on Microsoft Silverlight & WPF.

And so, we’re extremely excited to announce the creation of The Chicago Silverlight User Group. The core purpose of the group (better designer/developer collaboration) hasn’t changed, but includes a renewed focus as we concentrate on all that Silverlight and WPF have to offer as a rich platform. We invite all of CD2′s members to continue to join us in this new and excited SIG in the coming months.

In effect, this is the sunset of CD2 as we know it today. We realize that some of the content we sought to bring to CD2 is already capably provided by the likes of IxDA and the Chicago Area Adobe User Groups. We believe these groups also add value to the designer and developer communities.

The new user group’s inaugural meeting will be at 6PM on Wednesday, March 3rd at The Illinois Technology Association (ITA) 200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor | Chicago, IL 60606

We will be launching a new registration website in the coming weeks. If you have any questions or comments about The Chicago Silverlight User Group, please contact us at the email addresses below.

I am happy to report that I will be speaking at the (re)inaugural meeting of the Chicago Silverlight user group on March 3rd. We will be discussing the new features of Silverlight 4.

Resources: Taking Your Applications Sky High with Cloud Computing and the Windows Azure Platform (MSDN Events Series)

Dave — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:54:21 +0000

I would like to thank everyone who braved the snow and the EARTHQUAKE to come out for yesterday’s MSDN Event on the Windows Azure Platform. Here are a number of the resources highlighted during the presentation as well as the slides:

Resources:

Tools:

PDC Sessions:

White Papers:

The Windows Azure Platform (MSDN Events Series)

View more presentations from davebost.

Talking MEBA at the Chicago Cloud Computing Users Group

Dave — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:11:23 +0000

I will be presenting a session on Multi-Enterprise Business Applications in the Cloud as part of the July meeting of the Chicago Cloud Computing Users Group on July 30, 2009 at 6PM in Downers Grove, IL.

Join us for the July local meeting of the Cloud Computing User Group – this month in Downers Grove.

Our topic this month is Multi-Enterprise Business Applications (MEBAs), a new category of application for business collaboration that the cloud makes possible. We’ll review what the current thinking on MEBAs is from Microsoft and the cloud community followed by an in-depth demo and code exploration of an Azure business collaboration application.

Dave Bost, Developer Evangelist from the Developer Platform and Evangelism team at Microsoft will be the presenter. He will discuss how MEBAs facilitate business processes that span enterprises, how they are enacted by the exchange of messages, and how complex, cross-organizational challenges are managed through these applications (e.g. Security, Data, Management and Governance).

In this session, I will discuss the work that I was recently a part of in Redmond on “Project MEBA” in partnership with the Platform Architecture team. If the planets align, we will have the visionary and brainchild behind “Project MEBA”, Jack Greenfield join us by conference call.

You can find all the details and registration information at http://www.azureusergroup.com/events/event/show?id=2698780%3AEvent%3A13229&xgi=6zA1EHT.

Chicago Camp Camp – Azure: The Next Frontier

Dave — Sat, 30 May 2009 17:40:09 +0000

Thanks to everyone who made it out early this morning at the Chicago Code Camp to catch my session on Azure – The Next Frontier. Here are the resources I promised you…

Azure – The Next Frontier

View more presentations from davebost.

Here are the steps to get up and running with Azure:

1.) Request your development tokens (requires a Windows Live ID)

2.) Download the Cloud Computing Tools

3.) Download the Azure Services Training Kit

4.) Try the Cloud Computing Tools Walkthrough

Here are some additional resources to help you along your learning path:

Steve Marx’s Blog
Windows Azure Team Blog
Clemens Vasters Blog (.NET Services)
Azure Sessions from MIX’09
Azure Services Platform Forums and Blogs

MSDN Unleashed – Spring 2009 Resources

Dave — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:48:58 +0000

Update: I’ll be bringing these same discussions to Indianapolis on May 4th, Chicago on May 5th and Downers Grove, IL on May 20th. To register for these events or to see if MSDN Unleashed is coming to a city near you, visit http://msdnevents.com/unleashed.

For the Spring tour of the MSDN Unleashed events, we are focusing our discussion around Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7.

In the first session, we discussed the story around the new Internet Explorer 8 rendering engine and the choices that were made to make IE8 a standards-compliant browser. Web authors, developers and administrators need to be aware of these choices and how they may impact your website. Head on over to the Internet Explorer Compatibility site for more details. We continued our IE8 developer overview with a look into three features that are going to allow web applications to extend their impact beyond their own web address. These include Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search. We also took a look at a great enhancement for developers (and a much needed one), the Developer Tools.

Internet Explorer 8 Developer Overview

View more presentations from davebost.

Resources for Internet Explorer developers:

Our second session covered what developers need to know for Windows 7. Unfortunately, we didn’t have nearly enough time to dive into all of the details. Watch for future sessions on Windows 7 development where we will dive into the particulars.

The session started off by me stressing the point that Windows Vista is a viable option for Windows 7 development. Microsoft made a lot of architectural changes in Windows Vista. These changes were necessary to make Windows the most secure and trustworthy platform that also performs to user’s expectations. Windows 7 builds off of these changes and carries the platform forward.

Windows 7 brings Multi-touch computing to the forefront as a first-class citizen. Developers will have opportunities to extend their application user-interface paradigms into a whole new direction. The Windows 7 SDK provides the API’s to bring touch to your applications. Moving forward, the managed code developers will get touch API’s in WPF 4.

There are a number of new enhancements to the Windows 7 UI that developers can take advantage of. One of the biggest changes are the enhancements to the new Windows 7 Taskbar. The new Taskbar brings a clean and lightweight implementation that includes some great features such as Jump Lists, Thumbnails, and Icon overlays that provide information such as notifications and progress. You can find more resources on developing for the taskbar over on the Windows 7 Taskbar Developer Resource site.

We carried the discussion further in highlighting the point on how the Ribbon control born out of the Office 2007 products was to become a first-class control in Windows 7. As well as the new Explorer enhancements with items such as Federated Search and Libraries.

A few of the items we didn’t have time to touch on was how Windows 7 is going to include Web Service API’s directly in the OS to make communicating with Web Services a native part of the OS. Some other interesting new features include the new Sensors & Location platform. This provides the ability to build location-awareness into your applications. Think of the possibilities!

Windows 7 Developer Overview

View more presentations from davebost.

Resources for Windows 7 developers:

VSLive – Prism 2.0

Dave — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:12:32 +0000

The patterns & practices group recently released the Composite Application Guidance for WPF & Silverlight (Prism 2.0). I had the good fortune to present a session on Prism 2.0 at the VSLive conference in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the session timing wasn’t the best. Prism is not a topic taken lightly. It’s complicated, yet very powerful. Trying to squeeze all the technical goodness of Prism into a 75-minute talk, as the last session of the day on the last day of the conference is quite a challenge. :) Hopefully everyone who attended walked away with a little more knowledge about Prism. As a matter, I can guarantee they did as everyone walked away with a book thanks to the p&p team!

As promised to those brave and studious attendees, here is the deck a list of resources highlighted during the discussion…

Shine a Light with Prism (the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight)

View more presentations from davebost. (tags: wpf silverlight)

VSLive – ASP.NET 3.5 SP1

Dave — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:54:28 +0000

Thank you to all of you who attended my presentation on “ASP.NET 3.5 SP1” at VSLive in San Francisco. As promised, here is the slide deck with all of the resource information.

ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 (VSLive San Francisco 2009)

View more presentations from davebost. (tags: vslive asp.net)

Also, feel free to download the demo code to try out all of the features discussed.

Here are all of the resources that were highlighted during the discussion:

The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site
Learn 3.5 SP1 Videos
Blogs:
    http://blogs.msdn.com/scottgu
    http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy
    http://haacked.com
    http://StephenWalther.com
ASP.NET Forums
PDC Sessions (http://sessions.microsoftpdc.com):
    ASP.NET MVC
    ASP.NET Dynamic Data
    ASP.NET and jQuery
    ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap
    ASP.NET AJAX Futures

Speaking at VSLive! San Francisco – Feb. 23 – 27

Dave — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:33:11 +0000

I will be speaking at the upcoming VSLive conference in San Francisco on Feb. 23-27 and I invite you to join me.

As a reader of this blog, I’m able to offer you a registration discount that will save you $500 off of the registration cost ($1395 vs. $1895) for the VSLive! Plus package. Just use the promo code NS9F03 when you register at http://vslive.com/2009/sf/register.aspx.

I will be presenting two sessions:

Project MEBA

This event also coincides with the last of the MSDN Developer Conferences where you can get the Best of PDC. Attendees of VSLive receive free admission into the MSDN Developers Conference.

I have a long history with the VSLive conferences. Before VSLive, we had VBITS (Visual Basic Insiders Technical Summit). The very first professional conference I attended was VBITS ‘95 in Orlando, FL. After this, I was hooked on the developer conference experience. Whether its VBITS, VSLive, TechEd, PDC, MIX, etc., I always come away from these events more excited than ever to be a developer. I get a “developer high” and I can wait to tackle what I’ve learned from each of these conferences. Even as a speaker, I come away from these learning so much more.

I hope to see you in San Francisco!