Xperimentality

By now I am sure everyone who develops with Microsoft technologies has heard of Microsoft Across America.  Next Tuesday, Microsoft Across America is presenting techdays '08 in Atlanta Georgia.  The Developer Track lasts 3 days but you can register for each day individually.  This is a great idea since not all of the topics will be of interest to everyone.  I am pleased to be presenting topic #2, Introduction to Silverlight 2, on the first day of techdays.  I also know that Wally McClure will be presenting the ASP.NET AJAX topic...and who doesn't need a little more Wally!

This is an awesome opportunity to gain a greater understanding of the business value of some of the newest and hottest Microsoft technology solutions.  Not to mention that, but you'll get a look at some of the latest development tools as well!  And it is FREE.  Who says you don't get something for nothing?

As you can tell, I am a big proponent of these Microsoft events.  Let's not try to hide the fact that Microsoft benefits from them.  Sure!  They are in business too!  So sometimes there is a lot of marketing involved.  But I truly feel that the development community can benefit even more.  These free events are a great way to see the newest technologies, and often times have them presented by the professionals in the industry who use them everyday!

Hopefully I have been able to convince you to take advantage of this opportunity to get to see some of the new tools and technologies available now!  What are you waiting for?  Go register!

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 was released yesterday.  This is a significant update.  It is much more than a typical service pack.  It includes not only rolled-up fixes, but enhancements in many areas and technologies:

For the web, there is enhanced designer support and better formatting options for JavaScript.
For WPF, there are improvements to the design interface as well as how you interact with the code.
For SQL, there is support for SQL 2008 which was just recently RTM'd.
There are WCF improvements such as the new Hosting Wizard for WCF projects.
And there are VB and C# interaction improvements.

As opposed to re-listing features that have already been listed elsewhere, Scott Guthrie had a great blog entry about VS2008 SP1 as well as .NET 3.5 SP1.  Keep in mind that this was the written about the BETA release so some things may have changed before final release, but it gives a great overview of what was in the BETA.

Last night I did a presentation for the Birmingham .NET User Group on rapidly building CRUD applications using Linq and SQL Compact 3.5.  The demo we built used the SQL Compact 3.5 Northwind database.  It was a 3.5 Winform application that had a search area, a results grid, and a detail editor area.  The presentation demonstrated how to build the whole thing in 5 or 10 minutes (or less) with very little code and using mostly drag and drop to build the interface.

The meeting went well and ended on time.  We had the opportunity to congratulate Robert Cain in person on his MVP Award.  We had a lot of swag last night so I believe everyone left with something including one lucky attendee who got a version of Office 2007!

I got my email this morning indicating that I had been awarded an MVP Award for another year!  Yeah!  I appreciate the effort and consideration of all those involved.  I also look forward to another year....perhaps even a better year this next year.

Onward! 

I have had a minor release of the Silverlight Code Camp Template for some time and just keep getting side-tracked when I go to move it out to CodePlex.  So I had a few spare minutes today and uploaded the new file.  I know a lot of people wanted the better mouse support.

The only change in Version 0.4 is the addition of the mouse scrolling support libraries.  So now all scrollable regions in the site can be controlled with the mouse-wheel and by dragging the scroll thumb.

More releases will be forthcoming (more quickly than this one)!

A couple of weeks ago Scott Hanselman posted about creating your ALT.NET Geek Code.  I know there has been quite the debate about ALT.NET and I am not going to get into that.  But whether you are an ALT.NET-ian or not, there is an interesting twist to the ALT.NET Geek Code.

Seasoned pros and beginners alike are inundated with new technology and new terminology almost every day.  How do you figure out what to look into and what to ignore?  You could drive yourself crazy trying to keep up with all of it.  But a side-effect of the ALT.NET Geek Code Generator on Scott's blog is that it is a great checklist of things you should know about!

Take a look at the list of processes and tools that can be selected to form your own ALT.NET Geek Code.  It is a pretty good list of things you should know about.  I am not talking about becoming an expert in all of them....maybe not even in any of them.  But, in my opinion, developers should at least know a little about all of them (if only to be able to carry on a fairly intelligent conversation about them).  As you investigate each one, you might actually find one or more that you want to delve into and perhaps even use on a daily basis.

So the next time you are trying to decide what to look at next, take a look at the ALT.NET Geek Code Generator and pick one of the ones you don't know about.  You might just discover a new hammer!

Finally!  And I say that not meaning that "it is about time", but "how exciting"!  On Thursday of last week, Expression Studio 2, in all its new feature goodness, was released.  There is just no way to list all the cool features that have been added in version 2 of all the products.

For those of you who have been using the preview releases of the Expression suite of products, you know how exciting it is that version 2 has been released.  There are some extraordinary new features in version 2 of all the products (I look forward to recording videos taking advantage of some of the new features).

For those of you who have not used the preview releases, you are in for a big surprise!  There are some absolutely awesome new features to be found in version 2.  Once you use version 2, you will wonder how you could have ever used version 1!

For those of you who have not used any of the Expression products, what in the world are you waiting on?  How could you not use such a great product?  Seriously, there is something here for everyone.  Expression Web is a great tool to help build standards-based web sites.  Expression Design is a great vector graphics tool.  Don't get me wrong...it still has a ways to go and is no Illustrator or Photoshop, but its easy integration with the other Expression products makes it a win win!  Expression Blend is the only way to go when working with XAML.  Whether you are building Silverlight applications or WPF applications, you need Blend!  Expression Media is an asset management tool that makes organizing and working with media assets super easy!  Expression Encoder is the tool for you if you work with encoding video for multiple devices/platforms/scenarios.  You definitely want to give these tools a try!

Take a look at version 2 and fall in love all over again!

The Expression Team have released an updated version of Deep Zoom Composer!  A lot of changes have been made to make things faster and more efficient.  Some of the bigger features according to the Expression Blend and Design Team Blog are:

• Improved Exporting
• Better Design Experience
• Updated Collections Export
• Greater Access to Help

Keep in mind that this is just a stepping stone to the future of Deep Zoom Composer, but it is a travertine tile stepping stone!  It is definitely worth downloading if you have used an earlier version.