Speaker Bureau Profile: John Baird

About the ComponentOne Speaker Bureau

The purpose of the ComponentOne Speaker Bureau program is to provide Code Camps and user group meetings with qualified speakers. ComponentOne also wants to provide opportunities for public presentations by knowledgeable speakers to aid them in furthering their career interests.

In this series of blog posts, we'll profile the members of the ComponentOne Speaker bureau, and their talks. To schedule a speaker bureau member, contact Rich Dudley at richd@componentone.com. Please supply your event location, dates the speaker is needed, and which talk(s) you are interested in.

About John Baird

John Baird is the founder of Xamlware, a professional consulting firm specializing in Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 development. John has 30 years of experience designing, coding, and implementing software solutions.

John co-founded the Northern Delaware .Net Users group, is heavily involved in the local .Net communities, and travels extensively presenting to user groups, code camps and special interest groups. John is also a 3 time recipient of Microsoft's MVP award and is one of the first MVP's for Windows Phone 7.

Follow John on Twitter at

Current Talks

Silverlight Templating/Styling:

Have you ever wondered about having combo boxes with multiple display lines or treeviews with images and text? Have you wanted to use buttons that are not square or rectangular? How do you make your application special? This session will cover several advanced Silverlight topics: Templating and Styling.

Introduction to Silverlight:

This introductory session will get you started with the wonderful world of Silverlight. We will look at container controls, layout, UI controls, navigation, data binding and styling and how to put it all together to create your Silverlight application.

From Inspiration to Market Place: building a WP7 application:

Do you have a great idea for a phone app? Don't know how to get started? This session is the one you need. We will cover how to develop an app from start to finish. We will discuss controls, styling, navigation, isolated storage, tombstoning, launchers and choosers. We will look at the marketplace and app store and talk about the requirements to get started there also.