Snowball - The Blog

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.

Last week, I gave 2 sessions at NDC 2010 (Norwegian Developer Conference) in Oslo. I was glad that I was asked by the organization to be part of this conference that is known for its long list of renowned speakers. Here are my impressions of the conference as well as the downloads I promised in my sessions.

Conference report
Oslo is a really nice city. I mean really nice. People are friendly, the city is very clean and apparently, it houses a lot of great developers too.

NDC 2010 took place this year from June 16th until June 18th in the Oslo Spectrum. The Spectrum is a large event center, comparable to the Sportpaleis in Belgium. For me, it was the first time I’ve been to a conference that was organized in this type of center. I was at first wondering whether this would be handy to attend and give sessions in. Well, it works great ?. You have a great view of the session contents because of the screens being high in the rooms while you can still see the speaker very good as well. While giving my sessions, I was still able to have interaction with and see the audience.  The organization of the event itself was done as it should as well. So for the conference and infrastructure, a big thumbs up!

While infrastructure is one thing, content of sessions is much more important. One of the reasons I was really looking forward coming to this event as a speaker, as I mentioned in the intro, is that it is filled with top speakers for a developer audience Also, I got to hang out with a great number of fellow RDs. Names included Juval Löwy, Michelle Bustamente, Ingo Rammer, Richard Campbell, Carl Franklin, Tim Heuer, Billy Hollis, Rob Conery, Greg Young, Robert Martin and I’m forgetting a whole lot at this point. This is a formula for success: the Norwegians surely know how to “entertain” a developer crowd.

All in all, NDC is a really nice conference that is now on my list of yearly-must-attend events! Congrats on job well done to the people of Programutvikeling (I hope I’m spelling it right, my Norwegian is even after a week still horrible).

Session downloads
Here are the links for downloads for both my sessions:
Silverlight 4 Data Access and Services not for the faint of heart

ASP.NET 4 Caching: Performance for free

If you have any questions or remarks, please send me a mail!

My “ASP.NET Ajax Tips and tricks” session was scheduled in the last timeslot at DevDays Netherlands. However, after following 2 or 3 exhausting days of sessions, a lot of people came to my talk still! Thanks for that!!

I must say, I’ve never had so many people ask me for my demos, so I guess they must have been good . Feel free to send me a mail with any comments you may have regarding the contents or the talk itself. It’s always good to get feedback.

These were the topics covered in the talk (I did have to skip the NoBot control because of time constraints):

•Creating a custom extender in ASP.NET Ajax
•Managing the history client and server side
•Using ASP.NET authentication in Ajax
•Adding controls dynamically using Ajax UpdatePanel
•Localization in ASP.NET Ajax
•No bots on my site!
•Slide that data!
•Animations in Ajax

As promised, here is all the content I covered:
Slides
Demos

My first-ever session in the Netherlands :) A big room, about 70% fill, that means a lot of interest for Silverlight.

It seems that the demo that sparked the most conversation after the session was the “Hit testing with Silverlight” one. Several people afterwards asked me about this particularly unknown feature in Silverlight that allows you to check whether a point (pixel) and an element are “colliding”.

Here are the topics/tips I covered in this session:

•Creating a custom install experience
•ASP.NET Membership Integration
•Double clickety-click
•Debugging services
•Duplex services
•Silverlight and SEO
•Virtual Earth in Silverlight
•Drag’n’drop and hit testing
•Model-View-ViewModel
•Async unit tests

I do hope you liked this session. Comments and feedback, positive or negative is welcome!

Below you can find the demos and slides.
Slides
Demos

Developers love code… and slide decks! When I give talks, a lot of attendees ask for the slide deck afterwards. And I must admit, I do exactly the same: it’s a great reference when working with the technology afterwards, some parts of it still remain in your brain, so it’s an easy way to quickly get more info on a certain subject.
That’s one of the main reasons I post them all on my blog (the second reason is that perhaps you are also speaking on a topic covered in one of my talks and you would like to use the slides. You’re absolutely welcome to do so :) ).

However, if you’re like me, during the preparation of a talk, I tend to add quite a few notes in my slide decks. While there are no great secrets in there, it’s most of the time best to remove them. With previous versions of Powerpoint, removing these comments either needed to be done manually or either by a macro (at least, that’s the way I did it, I’m no Powerpoint savvy, mind you!).

Now, in Powerpoint 2007, it’s quite easy to do it automatically.

Go to the Office button and click on “Prepare”. Within the “Prepare” menu, select the “Inspect document” option.

The window that now opens, called the Document Inspector, allows you to search your slide deck for “personal information” like notes.

Click on Inspect. As you can see, my deck still contains some notes and personal document properties (probably my name). You can click on Remove all to remove all the comments and notes from the Powerpoint 2007 slide deck.

This week, the Belgian Silverlight Usergroup, Besug (www.besug.be) was officially launched. I gave a talk on Silverlight there which I hope most people enjoyed. If you attended this session and have feedback or questions, don't hesitate to post a comment or send me a mail.

Here are the slides as promised.

Below are the sites I used in my showcase at the end of the talk.

Video.Show: http://www.codeplex.com/videoshow
Hard Rock: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/
Sitemap: http://vertigo.com/deepzoom.aspx
Cloud: http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/
Inkubooks: http://inkubook.com/silverlightbooks/
Renault Laguna: http://www.laguna-coupe.com/
Line Raider Game: http://linerider.com/play-line-rider-online
Bird Hunt Game: http://designwithsilverlight.com/csharp/birdhunt/default.html

And by request, here's the THX "Dramatic Lemur".

Yesterday, I gave a talk for Visug on ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. It was a long evening, with over 2 1/2 hours of content. The talk covered Dynamic Data, Ajax History, Data Services and Entity Framework (talk given by Kurt Claeys).

Below, you can find the presentation. If anyone is interested in the demo's, leave a comment and I'll upload those as well.

Slide deck

I hope you all enjoyed the talk! Remember to register early for our next events!

Today I delivered a session on Mix Essentials in Belgium (Louvain-La-Neuve). The talk was about connecting Silverlight with services and data. Everything went great and every single demo worked as expected.

This morning however, I do was a little bit scared when I was trying out my demo's. I had one demo with the Flickr REST API and when testing it this morning, it didn't work anymore. Turned out that the most "easy" solution actually solved it: Flickr.com was down for about 10 minutes...

As promised, below you can download the slides and demo's. If you have any questions, please contact me.

Slidedeck: Working with Data and Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight 2 - Gill Cleeren.pptx
Demo's: Demos.zip

I hope you enjoyed the session and if you have any comments about the session, please post them!

Update: here are my pictures of the event! If you have any, please post!

Today, I gave students at the "De Nayer Instituut" in Mechelen an introduction to Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

As you can expect from this title, it's a very high level introduction to the new aspects of Visual Studio 2008 and .net 3.5. More specifically, there are some slides on the following:

• language enhancements (anonymous methods, automatic properties, lambda expressions...)
• LINQ
• the new features of the web designer (javascript debugging, CSS support...)
• WPF, WCF and WF
• Office 2007 development (ribbon designer...).

I thought it would be a good idea to post them here. Feel free to use the deck for your own presentations. If you do, maybe add a comment so I know they have been of good use!

Visual Studio 2008 Intro.ppt