MSDN “Suburban” Roadshow Comes to East Windsor on Thursday

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MSDNSuburbanRoadshow_thumb Many of the live events that go on in the Microsoft community happen frequently in New York City or down in Philly.  But if you live or work out in the ‘burbs, it’s not always easy to make it into the city. The traffic, the trains, or the buses.  One extra hassle can keep you from improving your skills and learning about the newest technologies.  Don’t let that hold you back any longer!

Bill Zack and I are hosting the new MSDN “Suburban” Roadshows series, designed specifically to visit all of the suburbs around NYC.  These are half-day events where we spend 4 hours covering the latest in .NET development techniques.  So far, the Roadshow has made stops in Parsippany & the city.  This Thursday is our first stop in central Jersey.  We’ll be hosting the “Suburban” Roadshow at Infragistics in East Windsor, NJ.  Infragistics is easy to get to, right off Exit 8 on the NJ Turnpike.

If you make it this Thursday, you’ll not only get the “Suburban” Roadshow content, but we’ve partnered with the Central Jersey .NET user group to host the event together.  For taking a half day away from the office, you’ll get a full day of content from 1pm – 8pm!  If you’re looking to keep your skills up to date (and who isn’t these days), the MSDN “Surburban” Roadshow, followed by the Central Jersey .NET user group is a great opportunity. And it’s free to boot!

We’ll have some great swag for the attendees.  Every attendee will get a copy of Laurence Moroney’s “Introduction to Silverlight 2” book.  We’ll also have a few copies of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Office Ultimate, and Windows Vista to raffle off at the end too.  Be sure to register for the event here:

Register Here

Here’s the line up for Thursday:

1pm – 3pm - Session 1: Cloud Computing

Hear about key problems that cloud computing is solving and how these services fit into the Microsoft cloud computing initiatives. Learn about the pillars of the platform, its service lifecycle, and see how they fit with both Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies.  See what a Day in the Life of a Cloud Service Developer is like.  This session explores common tasks for service developers. These tasks include logging, debugging, deployment, management, and maintenance of individual cloud-based services.

3pm – 5pm - Session 2: Silverlight 2 Application Development

You’ve probably been hearing about Silverlight for a while now. And for most of that time, it’s had the “beta” label after it. When something has the “beta” label appended to it, it’s easy to shrug it off and say “I’ll worry about that later when it’s ‘real’.”  Well, the “beta” label has been shed!  Silverlight 2, with its .NET Framework programming model, is here now and it’s real!  On October 14th, Microsoft officially released Silverlight 2. 

Now it’s time for you to get ready to build next generation rich Internet applications with Silverlight!  In this session, we’ll quickly review what the Silverlight 2 platform is, and then move into the bits and bytes.
Some of the questions you might be having are: What are the tools I need to get going? What is this stuff called XAML?    Hello world?  Forget “Hello World”… I want to see a real application with controls and data binding!  How do I talk back to the server to interact with services in the cloud?

5pm – 6pm – Pizza & Networking

6pm – 8pm - Session 3: ASP.NET MVC Framework (Central Jersey .NET user group)

ASP.NET MVC enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications by using the ASP.NET framework. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms that offers the following benefits:

  • Clear separation of concerns
  • Testability - support for Test-Driven Development
  • Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript
  • Intuitive URLs

If you can’t make it to the “Suburban” Roadshow on Thursday, you can still make it to the NJ ASP.NET MVC Fire Starter this Saturday! For info on that, see my previous post.  This stop in East Windsor, NJ is the last stop on this series of the Roadshow.  We’ll be posting the content online shortly after.   Look for us to be back again with the next series of the “Suburban” Roadshow in the new year!