Riapalooza

I love community! This weekend I have the pleasure to participate in a very unique event called RIAPalooza.

From the web site:
“Join your fellow RIA professionals for RIApalooza, a invaluable two day event aimed at exploring and promoting the development of Rich Internet Applications.

RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and “PowerPoint-Free” zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built.

For more information, visit the event website.”

I wanted to go to RubyConf but this was too good to pass up. This two day mini-conference is being organized jointly by community folk from both the Microsoft and the Adobe communities – in fact, if you check out the site you’ll see that both Microsoft and Adobe are sponsors. That’s almost unheard of for a community event as the communities have not historically collaborated on this type of event.

Things kick off on Friday night with Dave Meeker, a user experience strategist, talking about the state of RIA. Saturday starts off with Tim Heuer and Corrina Barber, from Microsoft, talking about creating differentiated user experience and designer/developer collaboration. Then there’s a smattering of talks from a number of different community folk on Flex, Silverlight, RIA in general, design and more.

At some point, I’m not sure when it’s scheduled for, Michael Labriola (who happens to be listed on the Adobe Experts site) and I will be giving a joint session on best practices in building a Rich Internet Application (RIA). I’ve not actually met Michael in person but we’ve talked on the phone and collaborated about the talk over email. Thanks to Larry Clarkin, Dave Bost and James Ward for hooking that up.

Personally, I’m just looking forward to seeing what the community and the industry thinks of the state of RIA, especially as I’m betting my career here at Microsoft on it as the RIA Architect Evangelist for Central Region.

So, if you can’t make it – I’ll be blogging as much of it as possible. You can also follow RIApalooza on Twitter for up-to-date information!

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