MSDN “Suburban” Roadshow Winter 2009 Series

Today, I’m happy to announce the upcoming Winter 2009 series of MSDN “Suburban” Roadshow events!  In November, Bill Zack and I kicked off the “Suburban” Roadshows as a way to bring the latest Microsoft developer technologies directly to where YOU live. 

The NY metropolitan area is huge.  There’s a tendency for Microsoft (and other other companies) to host live events in NYC as it’s the center of our area.  But, as suburbanites ourselves, Bill & I know it can be a pain to take a day off of work and fight the elements to trek into Manhattan.  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!

Our Winter 2009 series will be making stops throughout the ‘burbs in north and central Jersey, Long Island, and Stamford, CT.  Ironically, we also know that for urbanites in the big city, getting to the ‘burbs can be a major ordeal for you too!  Many Manhattan-ites don’t own cars, and the suburbs are not mass transit friendly.  So, we’ll bring the “Suburban” Roadshow back to NYC also.

We are scheduling the “Suburban” roadshow events to occur on the same day as the local user group in most locations. So, if you take a half-day off to join us at the roadshow, you’ll get a full day of content by sticking around for the user group sessions in the evening.  The Roadshows run 1pm – 5pm, and most of the user groups will run from 6-8pm.  

MSDN “Suburban” Roadshow Winter 2009 Line-up

We’ve got a great line-up of content this time around:

Session 1 – Implementing RESTful services with WCF 3.5

This session will focus on the new capabilities in WCF 3.5 for implementing REST architectures. We’ll examine the new webHttpBinding and see how to build services as resource endpoints, as well as how to map HTTP verbs onto WCF services. We’ll also see how to specify the format of data exchanged with the service and how to consume these services in Microsoft technologies like ASP.NET AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight.

Session 2 – A Developer’s Guide to Internet Explorer 8

The next version of Internet Explorer 8 is now in beta. This session will examine all the new consumer features, but also cover additional points that are specific to you as a developer. We’ll see how accelerators and web slices can be a differentiator for your company, see the new wave of compatibility features and options, and unearth the tools available for developers designed to aid in the confusion that is web development.

Session 3 – Syntactic Sugar with .NET 3.5

When you first learned .NET (C# or VB), you probably never saw this guy before: “=>” That’s the Lambda symbol. If you haven’t noticed it before, or it throws you for a loop when you see it in a code sample, it means your .NET skills probably are a little rusty! As .NET has evolved, new features have been added to the languages to help make your life easier: Anonymous types, Generics, Lambdas, Extension Methods, etc. We’ll take a look at the newer features in C# and explain how they work with the goal of helping you improve your code. It will also help prepare you to understand how some of the newer .NET frameworks and applications work (ASP.NET MVC, Enterprise Library, etc).

MSDN “Suburban” Roadshow Winter 2009 Schedule

Thanks in advance to our partners for hosting our “Suburban” Roadshow stops in their facilities: Infragistics, Set Focus, Hofstra University, and the University of Connecticut Stamford.