726 Miles of Silverlight Goodness - .NET Tiki Hut rolls the Panhandle Mobile, AL to Jacksonville, FL

Light up your Silverlight Apps for Windows 7Some folks were noticably irked that the only Florida cities being hit with the MSDN Silverlight Firestarters were Miami and Tampa. So I decided to take some of the content out on the road for a user group run through the Gulf Coast Panhandle all the way to Jacksonville. 726 miles one way.  Certainly makes for some good podcast listening along stretches of pine trees on I10, but it should be alot of fun.  Note to redmond folks, I love it when you say I'm the "local" guy in a city other than Tampa.  Local is soo relative.  Anyway, the schedule of all 726 miles!NOTE the Miami and Tampa Silverlight events have over 140 people each in them, and are about to sell out.Sign up now if you're interested. More info here .NOTE if you are a Silverlight Dev living in the State of Florida, please sign up for the Florida Silverilght Developer email gropu at https://tampaslug.net . Great way to dialog with other local Silverlight developers. Feb01Fly Tampa to Pensacola via Atlanta, not even counting that in the milageSo close to Jimmy Buffet's MargaritaVille Hotel, yet so farDrive to University of South Alabama in Mobile, AL - 71 milesSilverlight Dialog "LA" NUG - LowerALDotNet.orgFeb02Drive Mobile, AL to Sogeti Office in Tallahassee - 257 milesPresent at Tallahassee .NETLooking fwd to having Jacob "MJF said I said Silverlight was toast" Sanford and Rob "ihatelightswitch" Einsenberg come out for some dialogs. These local are spirited!Bringing my body armorFeb03Drive Tallahassee to Incepture Office in Jacksonville -172 milesPresent at JAXDUG - site should be updated soonFeb04Drive Jacksonville, FL to Tampa and home! - 225 milesWe'll be doing 30 minute overview runs on a few topics of interest. Not super deep but good dialog starters, and I'm looking forward to getting out to some areas I haven't been recently.  Dialogs afterwards at the local coffee house or whatever.Building RAD Silverlight Applications using LightSwitchVisual Studio LightSwitch is a new development tool (currently in beta) for building business applications. LightSwitch simplifies the development process, letting you concentrate on the business logic and doing much of the remaining work for you. By using LightSwitch, an application can be designed, built, tested, and in your user’s hands quickly. Come explore LightSwitch for forms-over-data applications in a rapid application development fashion. This is not a MVVM or Caliburn substitute.  Very targeted..Light up your Silverlight Apps for Win7 using Native ExtensionsLearn about a new toolkit called Native Extensions for Silverlight (NESL) , which provides Silverlight friendly hooks to a number of native Windows 7 features you can use in your Silverlight applications. The libraries make it significantly easier to leverage Windows 7 from Silverlight. The libs also help with lighting up a Silverlight application with a minimum of effort for Windows 7 with items like jumplists and icon overlays. Learn “how-to” with special rigging-it-up sessions on video capture, speech, and Win7 features like jump lists, icon overlays, taskbar progress and more!Silverlight FuturesThis session will highlight the compelling features coming in Silverlight 5. With tighter integration with Windows APIs, full trust operations, XAML debugging, and support for a 64 bit browsers, you’ll see how Silverlight continues to be the dominating platform for building rich Internet and Windows applications.