May 2012 Schedule

April showers bring May travels, and here's where I'll be this month. StirTrek: Avengers Edition (May 4) Another outstanding conference from the midwest; like the others, this one sold out fast. This one is cool because the speakers are invited, AND there's a new movie at the end of the day. This year's movie is The Avengers, part of which was filmed nearby in Cleveland. I really like Robert Downey Jr's incarnation of Iron Man, so I'm looking forward to this. Oh yeah, I'm giving one talk, too:

Building Windows 8 Applications with HTML and jQuery One of the many new advances in Windows 8 is the ability to create Windows applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In this session, we'll take a look at the Windows 8 technology stack on which these applications run, how Metro apps built with HTML and JavaScript actually run, and discuss the implications of the different ways to utilize third party libraries such as jQuery. We'll then build a simple Metro style dashboard app. By the end of this session, you'll have a solid idea of what it means to have a Metro-style application built with web technologies.

VS Live New York (May 14-17) Back to the Big Apple! I'm giving four talks this time, the list is at http://vslive.com/events/new-york-2012/speakers/speaker-list.aspx. Rather than post the abstracts here, I want to post some of the feedback from VS Live Las Vegas to entice you to come to NYC. There are many excellent speakers at VS Live NYC, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of the other talks myself--there is a high value to conferences like VS Live, and there is still time to register.

LightSwitch Onramp

• Great for someone who has never heard of LightSwitch. I'm excited!
• Excellent intro to LightSwitch!
• LightSwitch is a great product which I can use for an app I need to build. Rich is a great presenter.
• Very engaging and makes it fun.
• Rich was a dynamic presenter and provided great introduction to LightSwitch. Very applicable information, love the fact that I can already visualize doing this tomorrow.

HTML5/jQuery Onramp

• I can use this stuff! Paid for the conference
• Good overview, nice resources highlighted
• Informative and entertaining

Building Windows 8 Applications with HTML5 and jQuery

• Excellent Presentation
• The best presentation
• Good material, Rich gives a very engaging presentation
• Ton of information

Imagine a conference filled with talks that receive such feedback, and you're pretty close to imagining VS Live. West Palm Beach .NET Developer Group (May 22) The hecklers are already threatening to visit! I'm presenting one talk, the one which "Paid for the conference" above:

jQuery/HTML 5 Onramp If 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong, then 25,000,000 websites (and every single browser) are pretty close to a sure thing. Since its release in 2006, jQuery has gained a tremendous following--so much so that in 2008, Microsoft made the decision to replace its then 20-month old ASP.NET Ajax framework with jQuery for all future client side programming libraries. Despite not having an official standard, HTML 5 is becoming the standard for cross-browser, cross-platform web applications. And although it historically has been implemented differently in every browser, CSS is essential for using and styling HTML elements. In this session, we'll look at the fundamentals of this technology triumvirate, explore some of the main features of each, and see how to start new or enhance existing applications. This will be a technology agnostic talk, so whether you develop in WebForms, MVC, Ruby, Java or PHP, there's something in this session to be learned and applied tomorrow.

Let's Build Something Mobile, Round 3 (May 29)

We're back with the third round of getting started with Windows Phone 7 webcasts.

Hope to see you on the road or online! Let us know what you build!