MSDN Events in September

As you may already know, we in the West Region have been working hard preparing for the next round of MSDN Events.  Personally, I have put together a great session on building professional business applications with Silverlight 3.  My goal with this session was to illustrate the use and value of various design patterns when building Silverlight LOB applications.  The patterns we will discuss are:

• MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) – Allows for a separation of concerns in a Silverlight application and promotes testability
• Repository – Abstracts away the back end data source (database in most cases) and promotes testability
• Pipeline – promotes readability, extensibility and maintainability of code
• Service Agent – Abstracts away complexity of services.  Can hide things like asynchronous calls, protocol-specifics like HTTP or SOAP details, etc.

Another cool thing about the session is that we start off designing the application with SketchFlow.  If you haven’t seen this great addition to Expression Blend, come check it out.  It allows you build interactive prototypes in short order.  Also, just for fun, we throw in some gratuitous animations in the Silverlight app as we go along.  This session will be about 1.5 hours.  The next 2 sessions will discuss the developer-focused features of IE8 and Windows 7.

The abstracts for all 3 sessions are as follows:

Windows 7 for Developers

Windows 7 is almost here! With it are numerous improvements and new features to take advantage of in your applications. Watch and learn as we demonstrate how to utilize the new taskbar, multi-touch support, search, libraries, and more.

IE8 for Developers

IE8 makes your web better… faster, safer and easier.  This is true for developers too.  In this session, we will illustrate how developers can take advantage of some new technologies in IE8 such as accelerators to enhance a user’s web experience.  We will also illustrate the built-in developer tools in IE8 and how to take advantage of them.  These tools include a powerful CSS tool, script debugging and a script profiler.

Building Business Applications with Silverlight 3

Silverlight 3 has launched.  In this session, we will illustrate how you can build powerful line of business (LOB) applications with Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3.  We will begin with illustrating how you can build powerful prototypes with SketchFlow in Blend 3.  We will then implement a LOB application, illustrating some design patterns such as the Repository and Model View ViewModel (MVVM) along the way.

Here are the registration links (including Boulder)

I plan on delivering these events in Salt Lake City and Phoenix in October or November.

Hope to see you there…