Take a few minutes and head over to the Community Megaphone Podcast, and listen to their latest podcast with guest Joel Cochran.
Joel is a good friend of mine, and has certainly taught me a lot when it comes to WPF and how to navigate through Expression Blend. He’s a terrific resource, and I definitely recommend that if you bump into him at an event, chat him up (although he might do most the talking).
The main selling point of a language such as XAML is that it can be read and written by both developers and designers. Oddly enough, every situation I’ve personally seen has involved the developer being the designer. This strays from the vision Microsoft set forth for XAML.
Luckily, I work with designers on a daily basis, and for an experiment I’m going to pick up a small side project with my designer. She’ll be equipped with only Expression Blend and her image editting tools. I will be equipped with only Visual Studio 2008. Together, we will design, build, and prettify a working application.
Step 1 of the experiment is to convince my designer to do the experiment with me. Let’s hope step 1 is a success! Any opinions for small apps we could build?
Richmond Code Camp 2009.1 is Saturday, April 25th.
What is a code camp? A code camp is an all day event for developers by developers. The easiest way to think of a code camp is to think about a great developer conference (TechEd, DevConnections, etc) and take away the entry fee. Almost all the speakers are locals (or within a few hours drive). This means you’re learning straight from your peers, not some highly paid professional speaker. All the speakers are passionate about what they do and what they present on. A day at code camp is a day not wasted!
If you’ve never been to a code camp before, Richmond is the place to get started. There is a great speaker line up (including me). I will be giving my intro to WPF talk again. There will a lot of great people to meet and hang out with. Hope you all can make it!
Register At https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=136238 or go to http://www.richmondcodecamp.org for more information!
Tomorrow (2/10/2009) night I will be presenting at my user group, Hampton Roads .NET Users Group. If you’re in the area, please come down to join us! We’re being sponsored by TEKSystems this month. They’ll be providing food and drinks for anyone.
I’m going to be giving my “What Is This WPF Thing?!” presentation, which is meant to be a firestarter for getting started with WPF. It’s a basic discussion of what WPF is, how does it look, and what can it do. Since I’m not much of a powerpoint person, it’s all going to be demos (example apps and my own stuff). This is the same presentation I’m going to be giving in Roanoke next month!
http://www.hrnug.org
So at the next meeting of the Hampton Roads .NET Users Group, I’m going to be giving my first professional presentation. It’s a bit exciting, because I feel this is my next step in contributing to the developer community. Also, I have learned in the past that the best learning tool is to teach others.
Therefore, my first presentation is entitled “What Is This WPF Thing?!” and the subject is Windows Presentation Foundation (duh!). Here is the abstract I wrote to send off to Roanoke Code Camp:
WinForms have been good to us over the ages. In the world of rich media, however, WinForms falls flat. They do not have the aesthetic appeal we’re looking for in graphically appealing applications. Windows Presentation Foundation has allowed us to go to a whole new level by providing tools for developing powerful, easy to customize applications. In this presentation, Kevin Griffin will give you an overview of the features of WPF and the tools in Visual Studio and Expression Blend. He will discuss why you might want to consider using WPF for your next client application. This discussion is focused towards people with no WPF experience.
Here’s my idea behind this presentation: I love the idea behind WPF, but my knowledge level is at that point between newbie and familiarity. I’ve learned that WPF is a completely different way of thinking of when it comes to building client applications. My goal is to present the knowledge I have on how to get started with WPF, and explain why I fell in love with WPF.
My hope is that after my presentation, people will go home, create a WPF application, and try to relate what I showed them in my presentation to something real. My job is done if they can do that easily.
Of course, all my presentations will always start with this disclaimer: “I am not an expert. If you have a question, I will do my best to answer it. If I can’t, I will do my best to get the answer for you.” I think with that attitude, I’ll be able to help a lot of people out while reinforcing what I’ve already learned.
The first meeting was a big success! We had over 30 attendees, which is outstanding for a first meeting. It’s amazing to see how big the .NET community really is.
Lessons learned:
– Don’t trust Google Maps or Live Maps to get people to your location. Give them step-by-step directions.
– There is no such thing as enough chairs.
– 25 ft VGA cables need high refresh rates to work properly.
– Have a plan B presentation lined up in case the speaker doesn’t/can’t show.
Guy Hurst was our guinea pig for this sessions, and special thanks to him. He did a awesome job, and we look forward to having him back for another session a few months down the line.
Next step for the Hampton Roads .NET Users Group is to get a website that can be better used to provide information to the public. I will be the speaker in February. My talk will be on Windows Presentation Foundation, and I’ll show some of the basic concepts that a WinForms developer will have to learn to make the leap.
I was going to post pictures, but 80% of them are of me and people wouldn’t appreciate that! Sorry!
I’m opening this up for discussion to all our community friends in the Mid-Atlantic.
I’ve been chatting with Karl Shifflett from Microsoft about possibility having a training event solely based around Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and building Line of Business (LOB) applications.
We have several options for training:
The price tag on this event would be FREE.
As for location, it would depend on the type of feedback I get from the community. It is being sponsored by the Hampton Roads .NET Users Group, so I’d like to keep the event in the Hampton Roads area. However, I’m willing to move the event higher north to accomodate Richmond and D.C. folks. I’m open to suggestions.
Would you be interested in attending a free training event like this? Would you prefer a single-day training, or a multiple day training session? Let me know in the comments. Thanks!
© 2010 Kevin Griffin · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
