Today I think I broke a record: the most popular SilverlightShow webinar, judging from the number of registrations and attendees. Thanks all for joining!

Here are the slides and demos for part 1:

Slides - Demos

Hope to see you for part 2 on February 9th!

On December 6th, I did a webinar on the new features in Silverlight 5. You can download all the material from the below links.

Let’s explore Silverlight 5: Slides - Demos

With a bit of delay, here are the slides and demos of my 2 talks I gave at the SDN Conference in Zeist, The Netherlands.

Let’s explore Silverlight 5: Slides – Demos

Silverlight and Azure: Slides – Demos

Small note: the Silverlight 5 demos were built for the RC version of Silverlight 5 and need a rebuild before they’ll work with the RTM version.

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!

About Microsoft TechDays

Year after year thousands of technology professionals come together to network with peers and experts, while diving deep into Microsoft technologies and learning about the latest products and solutions. Microsoft TechDays is one of the premier technical events in Belgium & Luxembourg and not to be missed.

With more technology areas than ever to explore, TechDays 2012 is the perfect place to get up-to-speed on the latest Microsoft technologies and up-level your skill on the technology you use every day. Content will be delivered by industry experts and Microsoft product team members.

Register now

Join our 10^th anniversary edition in a new location (Kinepolis Imagibraine - Braine l'Alleud) and learn about:

• Tooling and languages with Visual Studio, C# and VB
• Cloud development with Windows Azure Platform
• Web development with HTML5, JavaScript and ASP.NET ...
• Windows & Internet Explorer
• Windows Server & Hyper-V
• Windows Phone 7 development
• System Center 2012 & Windows Intune

Kinepolis Imagibraine

After 3 great years in Metropolis Antwerp we’re moving TechDays to a new location: Kinepolis Imagibraine in Braine l’Alleud (Eigenbrakel). The movie theatre is easily reachable both by car and via public transportation.

If you’re coming by train: the Braine l’Alleud train station is very well connected with major cities in Belgium:

- Antwerp: direct connection from Antwerpen-Centraal taking approx. 1 hour
- Ghent: 1 hour trip from Gent Sint-Pieters, switching trains once at Brussel-Zuid
- Brugge: 1,5 hour trip switching trains once at Brussel-Zuid
- Hasselt: 1,5 hour trip switching trains once at Brussel-Zuid
- Leuven: 50 min trip switching trains once at Brussel-Noord
- Mons: 1 hour trip switching trains once at Brussel-Zuid
- Namur: 1 hour trip switching trains once at Charleroi-Sud
- Liège: 1,5 hour trip switching trains once at Brussel-Zuid
- Brussels: 15 minutes from Brussel-Zuid

There is a direct bus line (bus 67 from the TEC company) running from the Braine l’Alleud train station to Kinepolis Imagibraine, taking about 10 minutes.

Coming by car? Kinepolis Imagibraine is just 5 minutes from the R0 highway (exit 24). Driving directions are available here.

I seem to have forgotten to upload the slides and demos of my talk at the UX Tour event last week in Antwerp, Belgium. You can now download them below here.

I’m getting ready for yet another user group tour for Telerik, the second time in the UK and Scotland this year (earlier I did Cambridge, Oxford and several other cities). Since Telerik is sponsoring these sessions, I can give away some licenses on each stop as well! Each evening, we’ll do some deep technical talks on XAML-related topics.

This time, I’m heading more to the North of the country: I’ll be stopping in Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In each city, I’ll be doing 2 talks. For most evenings, some seats are still available so you can still register. All sessions are of course free and some food (I guess pizza :) ) will be available as well.

Registering can be done through the following links.

• Monday 21st November: Liverpool
  Registration: http://thestack-november2011.eventbrite.com
  Sessions:
• Windows 8 Development and WinRT
• Building a Windows Phone 7 app from start to finish
• Tuesday 22nd November: Newcastle
  Registration: http://nebytesgcleerennov2011.eventbrite.com/
  Sessions:
• WinRT and Metro Applications
• Switching on the Cloud for Silverlight
• Wednesday 23rd November: Edinburgh
  Registration: http://gillcleeren2011.eventbrite.co.uk/?ebtv=F
  Sessions:
• Building a Windows Phone 7 app from start to finish
• Windows 8 Development and WinRT
• Thursday 24th November: Aberdeen
  Registration: http://www.aberdeendevelopers.co.uk/post/2011/10/10/ADNUGUK-%E2%80%93-November-2011-Meeting.aspx
  Sessions:
• Windows Runtime and Metro Apps for Windows 8
• Silverlight 5 for LOB Development

I hope to see you there!

While I was teaching a Windows Phone 7 class in Oslo, Norway, I found the time to stop by at the local NNUG user group. I gave 2 talks and as promised, you can download the slides and demos below:

Silverlight 5 LOB Development
MVVM in Silverlight

I hope you enjoyed them, thanks to all attendees (over 70!) for stopping by on such short notice!

I had the privilege to speak at DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria this week. DevReach is a great conference, sponsored mainly by Telerik. Now in its sixth edition, the conference always manages to have some of the best speakers around, including Scott Hanselman, Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell and many others.

I gave 2 talks on Silverlight. As promised, you can download the code and slide decks below:

Silverlight 5 LOB Development: Slides – Demos
Advanced Silverlight Development: Slides - Demos

On Wednesday 24th August, I gave a webinar on Advanced Silverlight 5 development for SilverlightShow.net. The webinar was attended by a lot of people and I got a lot of great feedback on it. Thanks!

As promised, you can download the slides and the demos from my blog:

Slides

Demos

Today, Wednesday August 24th, I’ll be doing a one hour tour of the advanced new features available in Silverlight 5. I will explain what you’ll be using in 2012 for all your Silverlight needs!

These are some of the topics that will be covered during the session:

• Data binding improvements such as Ancestor RelativeSource, style setter bindings, implicit data templates and debugging options
• Writing custom markup extensions
• Changes in the trusted apps area
• Working with the composition thread
• ICustomTypeProvider
• Miscellaneous improvements such as combobox type-ahead, font changes
• Some topics which are post-beta

The webinar is free of course and you can win a prize!

Registration can be done here.

When developing LightSwitch applications with Visual Studio, a newly created (and built) solution is quite heavy on disk space. We are talking of about 100 – 130MB per solution.

While creating the course material for Ordina’s upcoming LightSwitch course, I typically create many demo solutions, totaling several gigs of DLLs. Luckily, I found a *.cmd file in the downloads of Wrox’s excellent LightSwitch book: Beginning Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Development by István Novák.

Running this file cleans all unnecessary files (which are recreated by Visual Studio) from the solution folder, making it easier to store many solutions on your local disk.

This is the contents of the *.CMD file:

@echo off

del /Q /S /A:H <solutionName>.suo
cd .\<solutionName>

del /Q /S Client\bin
rd /Q /S Client\bin
del /Q /S Client\obj
rd /Q /S Client\obj

del /Q /S ClientGenerated\bin
rd /Q /S ClientGenerated\bin
del /Q /S ClientGenerated\obj
rd /Q /S ClientGenerated\obj

del /Q /S Common\bin
rd /Q /S Common\bin
del /Q /S Common\obj
rd /Q /S Common\obj

del /Q /S Server\bin
rd /Q /S Server\bin
del /Q /S Server\obj
rd /Q /S Server\obj

del /Q /S bin\Debug
rd /Q /S bin\Debug
del /Q /S bin\Release
rd /Q /S bin\Release

del /Q /S ServerGenerated\bin
rd /Q /S ServerGenerated\bin
del /Q /S ServerGenerated\obj
rd /Q /S ServerGenerated\obj
del /Q /S _Pvt_Extensions
rd /Q /S _Pvt_Extensions
cd ..
echo Cleanup completed.
pause

You can download the file from this link as well as a ZIP file: Cleanup.zip (.36 KB). If you download the samples of the book, you’ll have the file as well.

Cleaning your solution comes down to pasting this file in the same directory as where the solution (*.sln) (and *.suo if present)  file are located:

I’m proud to announce that the “Real World .NET 4 and C#” book on which 15 MVPs are working together, is coming close to its release. I’ve written a chapter in this book as well, on Silverlight 5 and MVVM development.

Written by a group of experienced MVPs, this unparalleled book delves into the intricate—and often daunting—world of .NET 4. Each author draws from a particular area of expertise to provide invaluable information on using the various .NET 4, C# 4, Silverlight 4, and Visual Studio tools in the real world. The authors break down the vast .NET 4 Framework into easily digestible portions to offer you a strong foundation on what makes .NET such a popular and successful framework for building a wide range of solutions.

• Breaks down the .NET 4 Framework into easily understandable sections
• Features more than a dozen MVPs serving as authors, each of whom focuses on a particular area of expertise
• Covers such topics as Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight 4, Windows Communication Foundation, ASP.NET performance, the entity framework, and more
• Shares C# tips and tricks and .NET architecture best practices from a team of Microsoft MVPs

Real World .NET 4 and C# is the ultimate resource for discovering and understanding the .NET 4 Framework.

The book can be pre-ordered already from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-World-NET-Silverlight-Indispensible/dp/1118021967/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312574616&sr=8-1

Meanwhile, I’m focusing on my next full Silverlight 5 book, which is due for release end of this year or very early next year!

I’m happy to announce that a new ebook of mine has been published: Getting Ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506.

This ebook is based on SilverlightShow 7-part article series ‘Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506’. While the online article series give references to many external resources, several for one topic, in this ebook we picked the best resource covering the topic, and have included it as full text, together with links to source code where available. Note: approximately 85% of the resources selected are available in full, the rest of the resources are still included as links due to lack of copy permissions or inability to reach the the respective authors.

This ebook collects a total of 100+ articles in full.

Download Table of Contents (.doc / .docx)

From the author: Silverlight is a rapidly evolving technology. Over a time span of 3 years, it has evolved from being a JavaScript-based platform to a full .NET implementation. With 4 versions released and version 5 in the pipeline at the time of writing, Silverlight has more versions than .NET! That makes it hard for book writers such as me to keep up with new features being added.

It seems to me that it’s also difficult to create and manage exams about Silverlight. For the previous versions of Silverlight, there weren’t any exams available. Silverlight 4 is the first version of which an exam is being created. It was possible to take the beta-exam late 2010; the exam will be officially open in Q1 2011. More information about the exam can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-506&Locale=en-us

With this guide, I aim to make the preparation for the exam a bit easier.

Goal and approach to getting ready

At this point, there’s no official courseware available to study for the exam. In any case, you should therefore be familiar already with Silverlight development. Reading some books on Silverlight will help as well. The list below contains some links to books available for Silverlight 4:

• Silverlight 4 Unleashed
• Silverlight 4 In Action
• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook
• Pro Business Application with Silverlight 4

On top of that, reading articles and blog posts will help you in passing the exam. In this ebook, I try to create an extensive list of resources along with some explanation on the topic at hand that contain the information you need to know. To structure this, we’ll follow the list of topics described by Microsoft on the exam outline page (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-506&Locale=en-us#tab2):

• Laying Out a User Interface (15%)
• Enhancing the User Interface (14%)
• Implementing Application Logic (16%)
• Working with Data (17%)
• Interacting with a Host Platform (11%)
• Structuring Applications (13%)
• Deploying Applications (13%)

(Small note: the outlined percentages total 99%, so you’ll probably get 1% for entering your name!)

Last week, I travelled through the UK to give a total of 8 sessions for Telerik to 4 chapters of the NxtGenUg.net user groups. More specifically, I went to Hereford, Oxford, Coventry and Cambridge. It was a pleasure being there, since we had some nice discussions throughout the talks (which of course caused all sessions to run longer than expected, some about 2,5-3  hours :) ). For the first time, I did everything by train and all went well (not a single delay on the 10 trains I took in the UK. I even had to pass through London when going from one station to another to go from Coventry to Cambridge).

This tour was sponsored again by my good friends at Telerik, which help to get speakers to user groups with the program I am in. If you have a user group yourself and want me to come over, let me know! It’s entirely free and I can give away some nice swag and licenses at each talk!

Here are some pictures of last week:

And as promised, here are all the slides and demos of all the sessions:

• Hereford:
  • Databinding in Silverlight
  • MVVM in Silverlight and WPF
• Oxford:
  • Building a LOB application in Silverlight 4
• Coventry:
  • jQuery in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC
  • RIA Services in Silverlight 4
• Cambridge:
  • MVVM in Silverlight and WPF
  • RIA Services in Silverlight 4
    

Last week, I did another webinar for Silverlight Show titled Expression Blend 4 for developers. If you were unable to attend, you can view the recorded version on-demand here (it’s free :) )

The slides can be found here and the demos you can download here.

Enjoy!

Community Day 2011 is over (sadly)… But since we had so much fun, that isn’t a problem: we have a great day of Belgian community at its very best! Judging from the feedback, this was the very best edition so far, so that’s good news :)

We had over 300 attendees seeing 32 sessions spread over 5 tracks. Most slides are already available from the agenda page.

I want to thank you all for being there. Of course, a big thank you to the team, the sponsors and the people from BBDO!

Here are some pictures of the event, the entire list can be seen here.

Tomorrow, Thursday June 16th, I’ll be doing another webinar for SilverlightShow. I think that this one if the 7th webinar I’m doing for them!

This one is totally devoted to Expression Blend: Expression Blend for developers. That means (sadly) that I won’t be doing any drawing or graphics-related stuff! I’m going to talk about how I think XAML developers can be more productive with Expression Blend instead of only using Visual Studio for their work.

This is the agenda:

• 5-minute guided tour of Blend
• Great work starts with a sketch: SketchFlow
• Push the button: sample data generation
• Binding with Blend: how to use data-binding
• Customization bonanza
  • Styling
  • Resources and resource dictionaries
  • Templates
  • A custom control
• Blend behaving badly: behaviors
• Animations and other moving things
• Blend welcomes WP7
• The Blend-bag-of-tricks

The outline of the webinar is here and of course you can subscribe for free. The webinar takes about 75 minutes.

A nice extra is that my publisher (Packt Publishing) is giving away 3 copies of the LITE edition of the book I wrote together with Kevin Dockx. So by simply attending, you could win a book!

I hope to see you online tomorrow!

I enjoyed a lot being at NDC 2011 (Oslo, Norway) again for the second year. I gave two sessions, one on LightSwitch and a second one on Expression Blend. I hope you enjoyed them. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Here are the downloads as promised

Switch on the LightSwitch: Slides – Demos

Expression Blend 4 for developers: Slides - Demos

The passed TechDays Belgium were another great event, showing that Belgians really know how to organize an event. If you couldn’t attend, you missed a lot to be honest.

But, fear not my dear reader, as all sessions have been recorded and you can see them for free on Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDays/TechDays-2011-Belgium 

My personal favorites:

• Scott Hanselman’s keynote
• Jeff Prosise on Silverlight 5
• And my absolute favorite… LightSwitch :)

I haven’t had the time to blog about it, but yes, you can register for Community Day 2011 since a few days. Registrations are going fast, so the best advice I can give you is to register quickly!

The event is still entirely free (including food) and we are again in Utopolis Mechelen. The venue is completely renovated, giving us a lot more space.

This year, we are celebrating our 5th edition. For this occasion, we are inviting 2 Dutch user groups (DotNed and Sixin) who will give sessions at the event as well. We are also doing 30 sessions instead of 24, so you’ll have more choice than ever to fill your free day of learning.

Convinced? I bet you are! Go here for registration, check out our sponsors or take a look at the agenda!

I will see you on June 23rd!

Suppose you’re willing to start learning Silverlight enterprise development and you want a good book to start. There are quite a few really good books on the market covering Silverlight 4. If you’re interested mostly in getting to know how to work with data, services and other enterprise-related topics, my own book is a really good start (here you can read some reviews as well).

If you’re not really sure on whether my book will help you, you can purchase a lite (light) version of it now for a mere $9.95. That’s right: you get a few relevant chapters without spending a lot of cash. You can read more about it here.

Here’s what you get:

• Design and develop rich data-driven business applications in Silverlight
• Rapidly interact with and handle multiple sources of data and services within Silverlight business applications
• Understand sophisticated techniques to work with data in your Silverlight business applications, including displaying data in Silverlight applications, binding data to Silverlight controls, getting data from services into Silverlight applications and much more!
• Packed with practical, hands-on cookbook recipes, illustrating the techniques to solve particular data problems effectively within your Silverlight business applications
• eBook available as PDF download

I just noticed that all DevDays 11 Netherlands sessions are available for online viewing. You can see them here. My talk on jQuery can be found here. Looking at the comments, I think attendees (around 350 I guess) liked what they saw :)

All slides and demos are available here in case you want to try out what I’ve been showing in the talk!

On May 26th, Ordina is organizing a free technology event. Ordina’s technology specialists will give 21 sessions of 30 minutes, spread over 5 tracks. The event is free for everyone to join, registration is required. You can register here: www.ordina.be/differentiate.

We will have the following sessions for you to attend:

Agenda: Stand out from the crowd with Microsoft technology on May 26, 6 pm
30-minute sessions – the choice is yours
.Net
    Visual Studio LightSwitch
    Building a Windows Phone7 application: lessons learnt
    C#5 Async
SharePoint
    Automated scripted deployment of SharePoint
    SharePoint 2010: architectural overview
    Developing against SharePoint 2010 lists
SQL
    Where .Net meets SQL Server: SQL CLR
    Extending to multilingual reporting
    Using geo data within Report Builder 3.0
Application Lifecycle Management     
    Automate your deployment cycle with TFS Build 2010 and Workflow 4
    Delivering quality software with TFS 2010
    Team Explorer Everywhere: TFS and Java, better together
Azure
    Reporting services in the cloud
    Moving a legal application in the cloud
    Windows Phone7 and the cloud
Infrastructure
    Unified Communications: Lync
    Unified Communications: Office 365
    Hyper-V
Enterprise Portfolio Management
    Demand management using workflow in Project Server 2010
    Bridging the project and work management gap

Interested? Join us!

To round things up, here are the slides and demos of my WebMatrix talk at GeekNight (DevDays) in The Netherlands.

Slides
Demos