Ann Arbor Day of .Net

Wow I’ve been swamped. There’s so much to blog about in the past couple of weeks so I’m just going to catch some of the highlights.

Ann Arbor Day of .NET was on 5/5/2007. It was fantastic! It sold out at 250 people and of that there were 210 people show up. That’s actually really good as most free events have a 40% droppoff and they had less than 20% droppoff. The only downside on the day was that with less than a 20% droppoff – pizza was a little short at lunch.

They are actually thinking about going to every 6 months instead of every 12 months. I think this would be fantastic!

I kicked off the day with a session on User Experience technologies at Microsoft. I borrowed from some of the materials that we are putting together for the upcoming ArcReady (Check the site for dates and times across the entire central region – Detroit on 5/25 in two weeks for all those that attended Day of .Net). We dipped into WPF, AJAX and Silverlight. My favorite demo is the Silverlight Airlines Demo. It shows a truly out of the box user experience that’s not all glitz and glammor but a truly solid UI for a true business application. Many of the demos, while showing off the platform really well, are marketing apps that show lots of 3D and animation. My customers often look at the glitzy demos and say that they are not doing 3D so they don’t look at the technologies. What they are missing is that there are real benifits here with enabling truly rich interfaces that go well beyond text and pictures.

I had two more 30 minute sessions. In both of those sessions the overwhelming requests were to have more Silverlight content. I had nothing prepared for these sessions but they went really well. In the first session, I pulled Don Burnett, who started Michigan Interactive Designers, out of the crowd and asked him to do a tour around Expression Blend and Silverlight. He got up, completely unscripted, and did a fantastic job! I will definitely be bringing him in to do more demos and presentations – especially when we have a designer based crowd. It turns out that he used to work with Bill Wagner (my former business partner when I was at SRT Solutions) on the Lion King Animated Storybook.

In the second session, I was on my own but I showed Top Banana, the DLRConsole (python and javascript version – IronRuby will be released as a CTP from CodePlex later this year) and talked about the .NET support in Silverlight 1.1 Alpha. Yes – I actually wrote some Python and did a simple overview for people at the conference. It was a fun day!

Here are some of the resources that we talked about during the three talks:

•Windows Forms @ .NET FX Developer Center
http://windowsclient.net

•WPF @ MSDN Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx

•.NET 3.0 (WPF, WCF, WF) Community Site
http://windowsclient.net/

•Silverlight
http://www.silverlight.net

•ASP.NET AJAX @ ASP.NET Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx

•ASP.NET AJAX Community Site
http://ajax.asp.net/

•DirectX @ DirectX Development Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/

•Microsoft Visual Studio @ Visual Studio Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/

•Microsoft Expression
www.microsoft.com/expression

Day of .NET site

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