My Current Talks

A major part of my job is to visit the community and share what I know. Here is a list of my current talks—if you’re interested in having me present one of these talks, please email me at richd@componentone.com. I look forward to seeing you soon!

Is Azure Right For My Applications?

What is Microsoft Azure? Is Azure right for my applications? Do I have to use .NET, or can I develop in PHP or Java? What level of calculus do I need to figure out the billing? These questions and more answered by an experienced enterprise developer and co-author of Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development.

We'll look at the features of Azure, how they can be used together or individually, and we'll examine the libraries and tools useful in building, debugging and managing applications on the Azure platform. Along the way, we'll look behind the scenes of a production Azure application to see how all the pieces fit together. By the end of this session, you'll have a solid understanding of the services available in Azure, how to get started developing for Azure, useful tools to use, and how to decide if Azure is right for your applications.

BI Reporting on Microsoft’s Azure with ComponentOne Reports

Microsoft’s Azure recently celebrated its first official birthday, and reportedly hosts around 31,000 paying customers. In the year since its release, Azure’s capabilities have grown greatly, with seven revisions to the platform and a great number of new features having been announced or in beta. With the announcement of Azure Reporting Services, you might ask "What's the point?" It’s simple—in an enterprise, not every report of value is in SSRS format, and IT departments often don't have the time to convert legacy reports to SSRS. This is where ComponentOne’s C1Report C1Report can import Access and Crystal, and industry-leading viewers can display reports from many sources, including SSRS natively. With very little work, you can migrate your legacy reports to a modern format with a full database back end. In this session, we’ll see how to set up a small reporting environment, then use worker roles to generate and email reports.

Silverlight Onramp

Want to get started with Silverlight, but does the thought of Blend and XAML give you a headache? In this talk, we'll discuss the capabilities of Silverlight 4.0 and look at how Blend and Visual Studio work together to build Silverlight Applications. We'll demystify XAML and see how to add animation to our applications. Since Silverlight is a mix of server and client side development, traditional data access methods don't apply, so we'll see how to connect to and display data. Finally, we'll take a look at a number of great resources to learn more about Silverlight.

Using ASP.NET Authentication in Silverlight

It's a fair bet that most applications require a membership repository of some sort. With .NET 2.0, Microsoft shipped the ASP.NET Authentication Provider, which made it very easy to add a full-featured membership repository to ASP.NET applications. This same authentication provider can be used in Silverlight applications without a lot of work. New project templates released with Silverlight 4 and RIA Services make this provider even easier to work with. In this session, we'll review the capabilities of this provider and see how we implement and extend it with Silverlight 4 applications.

Connecting Windows Phone 7 to SQL Azure using WCF

Windows Phone 7 and Azure are hot topics this year, and the two together is a winning combination. In this session, we'll have a short overview of Azure and WCF, then look at the free tools and guidelines used to build applications for WP7 (you don't even need a phone to get started). We'll then dig in and create a Windows Phone 7 application which utilizes data stored in Azure and accessed via WCF.

What is Webmatrix?

Microsoft's WebMatrix is a new, lightweight website development suite. The development environment includes tools for creating new websites, installing applications from the Web Gallery, creating/managing databases, and analyzing a site for SEO and performance issues. In addition to the IDE, the suite includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4 and Razor view syntax. In addition to databases, WebMatrix includes resources to provide simple support for OData and Azure Tables and Blobs, The functionality of WebMatrix-built websites can be extended with a number of partner-provided or custom built helpers.

Rocking WebForms with jQuery

Reports of WebForms' demise are very premature; in fact, WebForms still rock! And by adding just a little jQuery UI magic, they can rock even more. Whether you're beginning a new WebForms application, or maintaining an existing one, it's very easy to add a little UI razzle-dazzle that can both make your code cleaner and the application more user friendly. In this session, we'll look at what jQuery is, how to use it in ASP.NET WebForms applications, and what it can do for our WebForms applications. If you've used the ASP.NET Ajax Toolkit in your applications, you'll want to see what is replacing it.

jQuery Onramp

If 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong, then 19,000,000 websites 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. In this session, we'll review some JavaScript fundamentals to see how jQuery is built and how to use jQuery. We'll then spin up a simple sample application and see what jQuery can do for our applications. Whether you develop in WebForms, MVC or PHP, there's something in this session to be learned.