Silverlight QA and Conversation with Shawn Wildermuth
Feb 19th at Webtrends 6pm – *This is a Friday (not our usual day)*
Do you have questions about Silverlight? Shawn’s the person to ask. He’s full of Silverlight knowledge, and he’s coming to Portland to have a conversation with us. Shawn is extremely well known and respected in the Silverlight community, and it’s going to be a real treat to have him. If you want to have a complex and nuanced discussion about Silverlight, join us for this meeting.
Shawn Wildermuth
Shawn Wildermuth is a Microsoft MVP (C#), member of the INETA Speaker’s Bureau and an author of six books on .NET. Shawn is involved with Microsoft as a Silverlight Insider, Data Insider and Connected Technology Advisors (WCF/Oslo/WF). He has been seen speaking at a variety of international conferences including SDC Netherlands, VSLive, WinDev and DevReach. Shawn has written dozens of articles for a variety of magazines and websites including MSDN, DevSource, InformIT, CoDe Magazine, ServerSide.NET and MSDN Online. He has over twenty years in software development regularly blogs about a range of topics including Silverlight, Oslo, Databases, XML and web services on his blog (http://wildermuth.com).
Warmup: Operating System in Your Browser Window
At the beginning of the meeting (6pm), Marc Schulper will show us how to write Silverlight applications for a web based operating system.
WHEN: Friday 02/19/2010 – *This is a Friday (not our usual day)*
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Vertigo) 6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. Afterwards at TBD
WHERE: Webtrends (map)
851 SW 6th Ave.
Portland, OR 97204-1337
Sponsors: While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:
* Vertigo – http://www.vertigo.com
* Webtrends – http://www.webtrends.com
Getting There:
Trimet. I recommend taking Trimet to this event. Check out the map to see the tons of Max/etc. stops nearby.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=webtrends+in+portland&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=52.77044,117.949219&ie=UTF8&hq=webtrends&hnear=Portland,+OR&ll=45.518113,-122.678565&spn=0.00557,0.014398&z=17&iwloc=A
Parking. I recommend Smart Parks:
http://maps.google.com/maps?near=851+Southwest+6th+Avenue,+Portland,+OR+97204-1307+(Webtrends+Inc)&geocode=CZtaax3F1n_AFfqMtgIdhxCw-CFZtU_2hrTHig&q=%22Smart+Park%22&f=l&dq=webtrends+loc:+portland&sll=45.518074,-122.679161&sspn=0.011831,0.006499&ie=UTF8&ll=45.519218,-122.67643&spn=0.022281,0.057592&z=15
February 2nd, 2010
The Portland Silverlight User Group is off to a great start! It’s been an amazing group to be a part of, and for the first 2 meetings, we’ve had 70+ people. This, perhaps, makes the Portland Silverlight User Group the largest Silverlight UG in the world 
We’ve had rocking great speakers like Scott Stanfield and Mike Downey and stupendous sponsors amazing sponsors like Vertigo and Webtrends and FiServ.
Upcoming we have a hackathon in January and Shawn Wildermuth coming in February!
People are talking about how 2010 is going to be the year of Silverlight. Come to one of our meetings, and you’ll find out what the fuss is about.
Scott Stanfield on the awesomeness of Silverlight
Mike Downey on Flash and Silverlight
January 20th, 2010
I’ve submitted a couple of sessions for Mix 2010. They’re guaranteed to be weirder than the ordinary submissions 
If you want to see these talks happen, please vote at the mix site. There are a lot of other good sessions as well.
The Neuroscience of Great Silverlight
This session meshes up Silverlight and neuroscience. It’s all about how good applications require an understanding of psychology.
10 Things to Know About Prism
Interested in Prism? This talk is all about how you can get started with Prism. It summarizes the podcasts and screencasts I’ve done on Prism for Silverlight and gives an overview of how to get started with Prism.
Partnering Silverlight and Monotouch – Silverlight on the Iphone (kinda)
Ever want to write Silverlight on the iPhone? This talk is about how to migrate your apps to the iPhone (hint: use MVVM).
The Number 1 Ux/Design Tool – The Trashcan
Why is Apple so amazing at design? I think it’s because they know how to use the trashcan. This session covers my thoughts on our mental hangups to writing great designs.
Resizing Silverlight Layouts
Silverlight is running on a lot of different platforms. What are the secrets to making your application look nice everywhere? This talk is all about those secrets.
January 14th, 2010
If you’re at the PDC conference in LA, I’m doing a Birds of a Feather session on Thursday at 8:30am. It’s going to be a community talk about the right tools to use in Silverlight. Data Access, Prism, Unity, MEF, RIA Services, Unit Testing, are the sort of things we’ll be talking about. It’s going to be a fun discussion!
November 18th, 2009
Shawn has been working hard, and we’re happy to announce that the Silverlight Tour now includes Silverlight 4. Within minutes of the Silverlight 4 release Shawn’s got the inside track.
Our next stop is in Portland on December 2nd – 4th.
Other upcoming stops include:
Atlanta, GA – December 7-9, 2009 (Almost sold out!)
Caracas, Venezuela on Dec 7-9
November 18th, 2009
The Podcast pack is a zip file loaded with 8 podcast interviews with Tim Heuer. It goes into depth on the new Silverlight 4 features.
It contains the following shows:
Overview: What are the core things to know about Silverlight 4? How does it compare to Silverlight 3?
Controls: What are the new controls in Silverlight 4? What new support is there for controls?
Out Of Browser: How do elevated privileges work? What are toast notifications? How can Html be hosted in an Out Of Browser application?
Printing and Webcam: How do the new printing/webcam APIs work?
WPF vs Silverlight: With Silverlight 4, there are fewer differences between Silverlight and WPF. How do we decide which technology to use?
Text Improvements: What are the big text and international improvements in Silverlight 4?
Networking: How do the networking changes in 4 impact Silverlight developers? What new things can they do?
Databinding: How does the new Dependency Object support help designers?
Download Here: Silverlight 4 Podcast Pack
November 18th, 2009
Vertigo is coming to Portland! A little secret: They’re already a PLATINUM sponsor of the Portland SilverLight User Group! Wahoo.
Well done Vertigo. We’re going to make Portland a Silverlight Powerhouse.
November 12th, 2009
The first meeting of the Portland Silverlight User Group is happening on Tuesday December 8th, 2009!. Scott Stanfield from Vertigo is our first speaker! Interested in how Silverlight is used in some of today’s best applications (Think Olympics, Sunday Night Football, Hard Rock Cafe)? Scott’s group made them. It’s going to be a great chance to see Silverlight in action.
It’s also a great night to invite designers and manager types. I think Scott’s talk is going to be a good way of introducing people Silverlight.
details: Tuesday December 8th, 2009 Fiserv Cafe
November 6th, 2009
In The Silverlight Trenches
This show is all about Developer/Designer misconceptions. There’s a marketing story (“Designers use Blend and Developers use Visual Studio”), but how does this work out in real life? To find out, I interviewed Mike Wolf. He explains how we’re making applications backwards.
Mike Wolf is the Principal Architect for WPF and Silverlight Practices at Cynergy.
Stuff Mike talks about:
- The fundamentally different way that developers/designers think about applications.
- The optimal physical proximity of developers/designers.
- How application development is moving away from straight Engineering and more towards art.
- The best designers need to know more than just how to make an amazing interface. Mike explains what else they need to know.
- How the Visual State Manager (VSM) has proved an unexpected help in designer/developer interactions.
- How most of us are working on applications backwards. *- A little bit mind blowing.
Podcast: Download
September 13th, 2009
Jesse Liberty returns to the podcast to explain some of the new features found in Silverlight 3. This week, we talk about validation.
What’s New?
Validation was kind of a pain in Silverlight 2. Silverlight 3 has built in features (including template and VSM support) for capturing and displaying validation errors.
Example
A user types text into a TextBox that is only supposed to receive numbers. The data object throws an error and that’s reflected in the appearance of the control.
Surprising Fact
The error states can be completely customized. Would you like a dancing bear to announce the error? No problem.
Useful links:
Jesse’s What’s new in Silverlight 3: tinyurl.com/sgwhatnew
Jesse’s Mini-Tutorials: tinyurl.com/sgminis
Element to Element Binding Video: tinyurl.com/sgvalidation
Music for the show:
Special thanks to YACHT
Podcast: Download
August 26th, 2009
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