Thanks to everyone for submitting online evaluations. We received close to 240.
Sivakumar Thekkenaduvath of US Technology Resources, LLC is our grand prize winner of a new XBOX 360.
Rob Das of the Colonial School District took the runner up prize of a Zune 80 Gb.
We are now part of the social networking revolution! Join our FaceBook group and network with other members. We will post meeting notices as FaceBook events and continue to use our web site at www.phillydotnet.org.
We have some great meetings lined up for the next few months. Please take a look at the upcoming schedule on the web site.
WPF has been out for a while, but immature tools, resources, and samples have obscured its importance. In our first session, we’ll see why WPF and Silverlight are important, using an array of applications that show just how different such applications can be. Then we’ll do a tour of the important technologies, with a few minutes on each to introduce what it does and how it fits into real applications. Starting with XAML, we’ll take a quick look at layout, the control set, brushes, animation, and the visual designers (Visual Studio and Blend).
Billy Hollis is co-author of the first book ever published on Visual Basic. NET, VB.NET Programming on the Public Beta, from Wrox Press, as well as numerous other books and articles on .NET. At Microsoft’s request, Billy served as the co-instructor for all preparation sessions for Microsoft’s first .NET Developer Training Tour, thereby training over two hundred instructors who delivered this material world-wide. Billy writes a monthly column for MSDN Online, and is heavily involved in training, consultation, and software development on the Microsoft .NET platform. He frequently speaks at industry conferences such as Comdex, Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC), and TechEd, and VSLive. Topics VB.NET, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, architecture of .NET systems
Having seen a brief introduction to WPF and Silverlight, now it’s time to understand the real-world implications of adopting them. This session concentrates on lessons learned from real-world applications: what to do, what to avoid, and how to get the most out of these technologies. Especially important will be discussion of how you ramp up on WPF and Silverlight, including strategies, time expected, and potholes to avoid. We’ll look at templating capabilities, management of styles and resources, and some techniques for building WPF helper objects. The focus will be on showing you what’s possible, and then giving you resources to learn the details for yourself.
DotNetRocks TV just posted an episode which shows off the WPF application Billy is working on right now. It’s a good way to answer the perpetual question of “Why is this stuff important anyway?” He will be showing that application live and talking about how he created it. The link is: http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=115