décembre 2008 - Posts
Two weeks ago was the DevTeach event held in Montreal. The conference received more than 300 attendees and over sixty speakers. There were more than 230 sessions given in three days including special events. The topics covered were vast and diversified ranging from Agile, Web Development, .NET, Silverlight, Ajax, SQL and Architecture. For me it was the second time I attended a DevTeach Conference. The first time I was there as a Universal Thread reporter. The second time I was there as a simple attendee. Both experiences were great but the second time offered me the opportunity to enjoy it every second.
I attended many sessions on Silverlight. When no Silverligth session caught my attention, I gave in to other sessions where their topic touched as many aspects of .NET as possible. Of course, my choice scope remained within my professional interests. For the DevTeach review, I will present my Top 3 best sessions I attended.
Top 3 – Position #1 : Laurent Duveau –
The session of Laurent Duveau represented exactly what I was expecting form the DevTeach Conference regarding SilverLight 2.0. What I mean is someone taking a concise topic and drilling it down to its core. And this is exactly what did Laurent Duveau. He targeted a topic, Building a business application SilverLight, and showed how to build a simple data driven Silverlight application. For all details on his presentation, please follow the link.
Top 3 – Position #2 : Beth Massi –
Beth Massi (Beth Massi's blog) is a VB expert… humm the best expression would be she is the Queen of VB, but this is only my opinion. I went to her session because friends of mine, used to DevTeach, warmly and highly recommanded it. Her session was on LINQ and XML with Office 2007. Two things hit me to the point I was at a certain point speechless, if not breathless. The first thing was to see how easy it was to write XML literals with embedded expressions (Lets see the VB 9.0 neat new features). The other thing is to edit Office 2007 documents (Word – docx, Excel – xlsx, PowerPoint – pptx). For more information on how she did it, please read Beth Massi’s blog and download her solution.
Top 3 – Position #3 : Jim Duffy –
Jim Duffy’s session (Jim Duffy's blog) was the last session on the last day and it was a sweet conclusion to the 2008 edition of DevTeach. I really like Jim Duffy. He was funny, expressive, and a good teacher. Regarding his session, it was flawless because it showed an aspect of ASP.NET development and it examined it thoroughly . Jim Duffy showed how to implement Microsoft Visual Earth into ASP.NET application. To get a good idea on how to do this, please look the video on the next link. His source code of his demo can be downloaded here. But make it hurry, the link may disappear anytime soon. Also, open the next link to download all necessary API to build Live applications: dev.live.com.
Finally, DevTeach 2008 was a great event. What best describes DevTeach is the speakers and the many topics covered in a wild variety of ways. This year, although the subscription cost more than $1200 CAN the attendees received close to a $1000 in softwares : Visual Studio 2008 Pro, Expression Web 2.0 and the TechEd 2008 DVD set.
Hope to see you there next year!
Patrice
Last November 6 and 7, I went to the TechDays 2008, a sponsored conference by Microsoft held on two days at the Palais des Congrès de Montréal. A month after the event, I would like to talk about two sessions I attended that particularly held my attention.
The conference was an opportunity for me to have a first contact with the Silverlight technology. A week before the event, I started reading Scott Guthrie’s blog (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/) on how to get started with Silverlight, but for many bad reasons (I know don’t tell me) I did not persevere.
I attended Zheng XiQing (http://blogs.msdn.com/canux/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/canux/archive/2007/03/01/microsoft-canada-s-first-user-experience-advisor-qixing-zheng.aspx ) and Laurent Duveau (http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/ ) sessions on Silverlight. Zheng XiQing is a First User Experience Developer Advisor. Her session showed the limitless possibilities that Silverlight has to offer at the presentation layer and the customization and personalization of the GUI. I saw with her that the sky is the limit with Silverlight. Well, to get there, you will need a good share of creativity and a deep understanding of Microsoft Expression Blend.
The other session that caught my attention was the two part sessions given by Laurent Duveau. Laurent has demonstrated that with a few Silverlight controls and the use of Blend someone can get running a Silverlight application with video feeds. The lesson I got from watching Laurent is that Silverlight is not as complicated as I first understood it. The trick is to work with Blend. Laurent also showed another tool that is worth mentioning: Deep Zoom composer. I highly recommend it because the tool renders large images in small tiles. And when you zoom in, you get another set of tiles that represents the size of your screen. For a demo on how the tool is used, please follow the link: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com. Please have a close look on the stamp on the envelope addressed to Sgt Buddy Bresner.
Finally, the event was well organized and the attendees were so well taken care of by Microsoft.
Patrice
Welcome .NET community to this new blog!
As a welcome word, I will present your new blogger and try to limit the different horizons this blog will cover here.
Let’s start with the blogger. My name is Patrice Paré and I live in vicinity of Montreal, Canada. I consider myself an intermediate level web developer with three years of experience with the .NET technologies. I have been working for RunAtServer Consulting Inc. for the last 6 months. In October, I got the MCPD Web Application certification.
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As an intermediate developer, I intend this blog will address a public of junior experience in .NET technologies. My hopes are this blog will cast some light on .NET technologies and how to use it. Of course, any of you are welcome to read the blog and leave a comment.
Finally, when I speak of .NET technologies I think at ASP.NET, Ajax and Silverlight. In fact, we will look at the development of Rich Internet Application in a Windows context. The web development will be done using Visual Studio 2008 which means I will also talk about the .NET Framework 3.5 and 2.0. Of course, any self-respectful development is intended to be somehow useful which means it as to be deployed. My staging environment will be a Windows environment with IIS running the web apps.
I hope you will enjoy reading my posts
Best regards,
Patrice