Summer 2009 MSDN “Suburban” Roadshow Series

We’re coming back for another round of MSDN “Suburban” Roadshow stops throughout the tri-state area in August and September!  This time around, I’ll be joined on the roadshow by my new teammate, Asli Bilgin, who is also a Developer Evangelist from NYC. 

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, we 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 Summer 2009 series will be making stops throughout the ‘burbs in Jersey & Long Island.  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, in fact, we’ll kick off with our rehearsal edition of the “Suburban” Roadshow in NYC!

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.

Here’s the Summer 2009 agenda line up:

1st Down: Tips and Tricks with ASP.NET 4.0

Whether you are coming from classic ASP or previous versions of ASP.NET, this session will help you understand what’s coming in ASP.NET 4.0.  We’ll provide tips and tricks on how you can leverage the newest features and design updates with ASP.NET Web Forms and controls. We’ll walk through the top tips for performance, caching, data access, as well as rich user interface creation. We’ll also cover the newest ASP.NET AJAX improvements and cover some tricks to help you take full advantage of all what’s available in ASP.NET 4.0 & Visual Studio 2010.

2nd Down: Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control

Do you hate being tied down?  Does your code yearn to be set free?  Hate being stuck to a particular database or back-end implementation?  Want some flexibility in your design?  Then Dependency Injection may be for you!

You’ve probably seen DI/IoC posts and articles all around the Interwebs lately.  This design pattern is popular, especially in the Agile and TDD communities.  What is it?  An official definition of DI is: the process of supplying an external dependency to a software component.  We’ll cover the problems this pattern solves and how it works.  We’ll also explore samples of the pattern being used by various Inversion of Control containers on the .NET platform, including: Unity, Spring.NET, Structure Map, NInject, and Castle Windsor.

3rd Down - Silverlight 3: Serious for Business!

Silverlight 3 was released to the web in July.  That seems so quick after Silverlight 2’s release in late 2008.  We’ll explore some of the new features in SL3 & the corresponding Expression 3 tools including: Out of the Browser experience, Sketchflow, advanced media format support, and new controls.

Many of you have seen the spinning rectangle demo in the past. This time we’ll get down to serious business and explore data-binding, and connecting to backend services on both the Microsoft platform and non-Microsoft platforms.  If you like what you see here on the Roadshow, be sure to stay tuned for an upcoming Silverlight 3 Firestarter event in the area!

4th Down: Score!

We’ll collect your surveys, and you just might score one of the day’s giveaways. In some locations the event will be followed by a local user group meeting - stay tuned for details at each location.

 

Here’s the schedule with registration links: