Snowball - The Blog

To complete the travelling of 2011, I spent the last week of November touring the entire UK for another user group tour for Telerik (the second one in the UK this year). Telerik is very active in the support of user groups: through the Telerik Insider program, speakers can be requested to go and talk to user groups all over the world, entirely sponsored by Telerik. During the talks, which are deep-dive technical talks, licenses and swag is given to attendees.

This tour brought me in the Northern part of the country, more specifically, I visited a user group in Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. At each location, we did 2 sessions. One of these that we “repeated” at each location was an introduction to Windows 8 and WinRT development. This of course triggered a lot of interesting discussion and questions. Each stop also filled their rooms quite well! We were lucky to have good weather (we had, apart from one single rain shower, not a single day of rain in Scotland in the last week of November!) so I made all the cities in place. Also, the weather triggered high show-rates.

I brought home a few things from Scotland, including a cold that is now in its 10th day. This caused me to be delayed in posting all the content. But now, without further delay, here’s all the files (slides and demos) of all talks:

Windows 8 – Windows Runtime: slides – demos

Liverpool: Building a Windows Phone 7 app from start to finish:
slides – demos

Newcastle: Silverlight and Azure
slides – demos

Edinburgh: Building a Windows Phone 7 app from start to finish
slides – demos

Aberdeen: Silverlight 5 for LOB Development
slides – demos

I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for all the user groups for their work!

I just finished my first talk at TechDays Sweden 2011 on jQuery. As promised, you can find the slides and demos here.

I hope you enjoyed the session (sadly not everyone could get in the room) although it was extremely hot in the room. If you have any comments/questions, please send them to me.

Slides: http://cid-bd64f22e01fad982.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/jQuery.pptx
Demos: http://cid-bd64f22e01fad982.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/jQueryDemos.zip 

Enjoy!

I’ll be at Ordina Netherlands (Nieuwegein) for the ”Innoveer jij mee” event on February 7th.
SilverLight 4 door Gill Cleeren
Op maandag 7 februari a.s. geeft Gill Cleeren een masterclass. Gedurende het programma is er aandacht voor de positionering van Silverlight met name in het licht van desktops en mobile devices (als Windows Phone 7). Natuurlijk is er aansluitend veel aandacht voor de technische in’s and out’s van Silverlight 4 en de wijze waarop applicaties met Silverlight 4 ontwikkeld kunnen worden.

Silverlight is Microsoft’s platform voor het ontwikkelen van Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) op desktops en mobile devices als Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s nieuwe mobiele platform.

Microsoft heeft veel geïnvesteerd in Silverlight en Silverlight is inmiddels toe aan zijn vierde iteratie (Silverlight 4) en daarmee klaar voor de ontwikkeling van business applicaties.

Registration is free but obligatory at https://www.ordina.nl/nieuws/evenementen/kennissessie/20110207%20-%20innoveer%20jij%20mee%20-%20silverlight%204%20door%20gill%20cleeren.aspx.

On Wednesday October 27th, I gave a webinar for SilverlightShow.net. The topic in this webinar was 10 tips in Silverlight 4. The video will be online soon. Meanwhile, you can already take a look at the slides and demos below.

Slides – Demos

This Wednesday, on October 27th, I’ll be doing another webinar for SilverlightShow.net. Like always, these are free to attend. The topic for this webinar is “10 Tips in Silverlight”. If you attend, you can win a copy of my book, Silverlight 4 data and services cookbook (which keeps getting great reviews by the way :) ).

The tips that you’ll see are the following:

1. Behaviors
2. PathListBox
3. Binding tricks
4. INavigationContentLoader
5. Debugging services
6. Securing service communication
7. Leveraging ASP.NET membership
8. Uploading and downloading files
9. Downloading functionality on-demand
10. Bag of tricks

Registration is free but required, you can register here.

Haven’t had the chance to attend the Belgian REMIX10 this year? Or you were there but of course could see all the parallel sessions at once? Then, I have the ideal solution for you: all sessions and interviews can now be watched online from www.remix10.be.

Here are my interview and session:
Interview
Session

Yesterday, I arrived back home after touring Sweden for a week. I gave presentations in Malmö, Stockholm, Örebro and Götherborg. Each session was attended by a great number of developers, all members of Swenug. The sessions were sponsored by the people at Telerik: at each session, I got to give away some cool prices from Telerik, including in each city a Telerik Ultimate Collection!

Malmo pictures

Stockholm pictures

Örebro pictures

Göthenburg pictures

In the meantime, here are the downloads for the sessions, including all demos and slide decks.

I hope to be back in Sweden very soon! If you have any questions or remarks, please let me know!

Yesterday, I gave a presentation at ReMix 2010 in Belgium, the third edition of this annual Microsoft event. My talk, Building an end-to-end Silverlight 4 application – Writing your Christmas Cards with Silverlight, was focused around the new and existing features in Silverlight 4, helping developers building Silverlight Line-Of-Business applications. These included data access, data binding, hardware access, drag and drop, right-clicking, Out-Of-Browser and Trusted applications.

The slide deck can be downloaded here and the entire demo can be found here.

Dear readers, I’m excited to announce the launch of .NET Show, the Belgian podcast for .NET developers. I’ve been working on this project for some time now and today, we are launching the site AND the first episode!

What is .NET Show?

Together with Katrien De Graeve, I’ll be recording podcasts on .NET development (in the broad sense of the word, so everything related to .NET) from now on. Our goal is bringing you in contact with all corners of the Microsoft development stack, from Silverlight to Azure, from COM interop to ALM... In our podcasts, we are focusing (initially at least) on local guests and we will be doing most shows in Dutch. This way, we can differentiate ourselves from the numerous podcasts already available. The topics, while on .NET of course, can be something that the guests has been working on (a professional project, a hobby project), a technology you have been investigating, something you think that can be interesting for others to hear about etc.

The first first episode can be downloaded already. In this first episode, we are talking with Maarten Balliauw on Windows Azure and the Microsoft cloud strategy in general.
In episode 2, which we’ll put online in the coming week, I’m talking with Pieter Gheysens on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) in Visual Studio 2010. And in episode 3, I’m sitting down with my co-author Kevin Dockx and we will be discussing WCF RIA Services in real-life projects.

If you are interested in doing a podcast, let me know! Send me a mail at dotnetshow@snowball.be and I’ll contact you. If you have any remarks or questions, send them to that address as well!

So, with that, I hope you’ll enjoy our podcasts! Head over to www.dotnetshow.be where you can find the first episode. If you want (and I know you will) to subscribe via iTunes or another podcast downloader, use this link: To add .NET Show to iTunes, go to Advanced – Subscribe to Podcast:

In the window that appears, enter the following URL: http://www.dotnetshow.be/syndication.axd:

.NET Show will now appear in your subscribed podcasts!

From October 4th until October 8th, I’ll be touring through Sweden, visiting 4 user groups in 4 cities to do a mini-Silverlight roadshow. During the 4 evenings, I’ll be giving sessions on data-related stuff using Silverlight.

If you’re in the neighborhood (or live in Sweden :) ), you’re welcome to join of course. All events are free and start at 6pm. Here are the details of where I’ll be on which day:

October 4th: Malmö
Registration: http://www.swenug.se/events/skaane-silverlight-4-tour-de
Address:
Cornerstone Malmö, 
Norra Vallgatan 100
Malmö

October 6th: Stockholm
Registration: http://www.swenug.se/events/sthlm-silverlight-4-tour-de
Address:
.Net Akademien
Dalagatan 100
STOCKHOLM

October 7th: Örebro
Registration: http://www.swenug.se/events/oerebro-silverlight-4-tour-de
Address:
Cityconferencecenter
Klostergatan 23
Örebro

October 8th: Göteborg
Registration: http://www.swenug.se/events/gbg-silverlight-4-tour-de
Address:
Sigma
Lindholmspiren 9
Göteborg

I hope to meet you there!

Yesterday, I gave a talk for DotNed.nl, the Dutch usergroup at the Ordina offices in Nieuwegein. 55 people attended the sold-out talk, I hope you enjoyed it. Any feedback is of course welcome via mail.

The talk, Building an end-to-end Silverlight application consisted out of 10 topics that we often encounter when building LOB applications:

• 1.SketchFlow
• 2.WCF RIA Services
• 3.Data binding & DataGrid
• 4.MVVM
• 5.MEF
• 6.Commanding & behaviors
• 7.Messaging, navigation & dialogs
• 8.Custom controls & third party controls
• 9.OOB
• 10.Printing

The ZIP file below contains the PPTX and the demos (also of the 2 topics we didn’t cover).

Remember that in 2 weeks, on September 14th, I’ll be again in the Netherlands for 2 sessions for SiXin, the Silverlight usergroup. Registration for this event is free and can be done here.

PPTX & demos

Microsoft just announced that all of us can help deciding which sessions will be delivered at Tech-Ed 2010 Berlin. That's a great way of making sure that the contents is what the public wants!

I've ran through the list and 4 of my proposals made the shortlist (which is good news :)).

• Treasures for the C# developer in Visual Studio 2010
• AJAX Tips and tricks: things you never knew that could be done in ASP.NET Ajax
• Silverlight data access and services not for the faint of heart
• The good, the bad and… well, that’s it: Comparing good and bad practices in Silverlight application development

If you would like me to deliver one of these sessions on the upcoming Tech-Ed, please vote for them at http://europe.msteched.com/sessionpreference . Of course, there are many really other interesting sessions there as well: I'm sure this will be a great conference!

Thanks for voting!

At Community Day 2010, together with Bart Wullems, I gave a session called Building an enterprise application with Silverlight and NHibernate. You can download the slide deck and demo below:

Slide deck

Demo

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be presenting at several conferences. In April, I’m booked to give a talk on Silverlight 4 and WPF 4 in Birmingham for VBUG’s Spring Conference 2010. You can find the full agenda here: http://www.vbug.co.uk/

The event takes place at Heritage Motor Centre on Thursday April 29th 2010.

About the conference:

With the imminent release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net framework 4, 'VBUG4Thought' celebrates and highlights these new products.
This conference is ideal if you wish to learn about the new enhancements, features and capabilities of VS2010 and .Net 4. The conference will also give you an overview of how you can apply these technologies in new or exisiting projects.
As usual, we'll be featuring key speakers from the UK and abroad in order to give you expert, impartial and informative advice. Hadi Hariri, Jon Skeet, Gill Cleeren, Dave Sussman, Josh Twist and Eric Nelson are confirmed as speakers.