Announcing the Fall 2009 Northeast MSDN Roadshow!

September seems a long time from these warm days of July, but we’ve set the dates and locations for the next Northeast MSDN Roadshow and wanted to tell you about it now!

Join Jim O’Neil and me for one of our stops of the Fall 2009 series as we bring developer goodness to a town near you, including our first Roadshow stop in Rhode Island*.

*Update – 7/31: Sorry for the inconvenience, but we couldn’t get the timing to work in Warwick, RI. Signs are excellent that we’ll make a stop there for our Winter series, though!

Update 8/31: Thanks to the Beantown .NET User Group and the Microsoft New England R&D Center, we’ve just added a new stop on September 28th in Cambridge, MA!

But there’s something else new as well - four of our events will be in partnership with morning TechNet IT Pro events!  (The TechNet events are separate events you’ll need to additionally register for if you wish to attend both.)

• Sept 10 - Manchester, NH, 1 PM–6 PM [Roadshow Reg.]
• Sept 18 – Rochester, NY, 10 AM–3:30 PM [Roadshow Reg.]
• Sept 22 – Troy, NY, 1–6 PM [Roadshow Reg.]
  w/ morning TechNet event [TechNet Reg.]
• Sept 23 – Waltham, MA, 1–6 PM [Roadshow Reg.]
• Sept 24 – Augusta, ME, 1–6 PM [Roadshow Reg.]
  w/ morning TechNet event [TechNet Reg.]
• Sept 28 – Cambridge, MA, 1–6 PM [Roadshow Reg.]   NEW!
  w/ morning TechNet event [TechNet Reg.]   NEW!
• Sept 29 – Farmington, CT, 1–6 PM [Roadshow Reg.]
  w/ morning TechNet event [TechNet Reg.]
• Oct 6 – Warwick, RI, 1–6 PM [Canceled]
  w/ morning TechNet event [Canceled]

Please note of the times of each event, because they’re not all the same and not the usual times of previous Roadshows.

For those of you in Burlington, VT, while won’t have a Roadshow there this time, we will be in town on September 12th as part of the VT Code Camp and hope to see you there!

Here’s our agenda, the humor of which will provide you countless minutes of enjoyment:

The Fall 2009 Northeast MSDN Roadshow: Food for Thoughts Tour

After a long summer, you’re probably hungry for more tools and techniques to feed your development efforts. Touring the northeast this fall for the tenth Roadshow, road and code warriors Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen have cooked up a select menu of sessions that are sure to please the heartiest of appetites. From current tools and technologies to practical insights, there is plenty to digest!

Reservations are required, so register today for a seating at these free and relaxed technology events.

You’ll see how Chris and Jim handle the heat of the demo kitchen, dish out knowledge, and pepper guests with half-baked humor, all the while being grilled by audience questions.

The Agenda – A Four Course Meal for the Mind:

1:00 - Essential Patterns, Practically Served

Design patterns, they’re important but often presented with unappetizing formality, like getting only the oat bits from a box of marshmallow cereal. We’ll sample a small set of key patterns, but also show you how free frameworks and tools (such as Enterprise Library, Prism, Unity, Velocity, and others) put each of those patterns directly into practice – so you can too. You’ll leave with a mind full of practical technology and a healthy understanding of how to turn underlying patterns into recipes for success.

2:15 - 7-Up(grade) Your Applications

Refresh your existing applications by pouring in some the new features of Windows 7 via the managed-code Windows API Code Pack. We’ll quench your thirst for how to incorporate the Taskbar, jumplists, and Libraries by taking the cap off an existing Windows Forms application and adding new capabilities, all the while retaining compatibility for your XP and Vista users. We’ll have you bubbling with excitement, able to give your applications that extra pop.

3:30 - Silverlight Snacks that Satisfy

There’s a generous amount of delicious ingredients in Silverlight 3 and we’re going to focus deeply on some of the most enriching. We’re going beyond the standard fare in this code-heavy session to create an application that leverages the new out-of-browser and offline execution features, local and remote connections, local data storage, and more. You’ll see that Silverlight 3 applications can be fortified with features so they can go well beyond being eye candy.

4:45 - Chips off the .NET Block

As seasoned developers, we know there’s a mix of options on the trail to implementing requirements. From staples like value types vs. reference types, interfaces vs. classes, Strings vs. StringBuilder, to other more exotic ingredients you may have yet tried, this session will dip into ways to leverage .NET, offering a taste of the impact they have on code execution, performance, and extensibility.

5:50 – “Check Please!” – We’ll box any leftovers, collect your comment cards, and distribute an array of giveaways.

Register today and we’ll see you on the road!

-Chris