Dallas TechFest 2010 Wrap-up

On Friday, I made the quick 3 hour drive from Houston to Dallas to participate in another Dallas TechFest. The Big D’s TechFest is put-on by Microsoft MVP Tim Rayburn and Telerik is a proud sponsor of the event. Unlike many “.NET events,” TechFest truly draws a diverse crowd of developers, with a fair mix of .NET, Java, PHP, Flex, and other “developer flavors” filling the sessions. This year’s event expected more than 400 developers, and I’d say they drew at least that to the University of Texas at Dallas campus.

Building on the popularity of a session originally presented at the Toronto Code Camp, I presented my “Getting Familiar with HTML5” talk to another standing room-only audience. Thanks to everyone that attended, and thanks for the great questions! It was fun to do this session with a group of developers with very diverse backgrounds and focuses.

Updated slides from this session are available below, complete with a resources page filled with related HTML5 links. Your next chance to hear this session live (along with some others) is devLink (this Thursday!), so if you’re curious and want to learn more, find your way to Nashville and be sure to visit my 4:00 PM session.

The Rich Standard: Getting Familiar with HTML5 [Slides PDF]

Dallas TechFest Wrap-up, Slides and Code

With the weekend squarely in the rear view mirror, it's time to close the books at this year's Dallas TechFest. The event, which was held on Friday, was a full-day of not only .NET learning, but Java, Cold Fusion, Flex, and Ruby, all held in the setting of the beautiful Westin Stonebriar Resort. I never saw an official "numbers" report, but it looked like there were easily 250 - 350 people taking part in the fun (maybe even more), so by all accounts I think the event was a success. Both of my Silverlight 2/3 sessions went well, too. Aside from my ThinkPad giving me plenty of reason to think about shortening its life, the demos went well and the crowds got a good taste of SL3. In fact, Building Business Apps with SL3 was a standing room only session, so extra special thanks to those of you that came and stood through it all! Below you can find the slides and code from my sessions. Be sure you have Silverlight 3 installed to work with the code, and don't forget that installing SL3 means the end of your SL2 development. Until the tooling gets better, it's an either-or choice. Building Business Applications with Silverlight 2 (and 3) [Slides (PDF)] [Code (8MB Zip)] What's New in Silverlight 3? [Slides (PDF)] [Code (3MB Zip)]

Join me Friday at Dallas TechFest 2009

Another fun .NET event is coming-up this week, this time in Dallas (actually, Fricsco), Texas. That's right. It's time for the 2009 Dallas TechFest. This year's event is being held at the Westin Stonebriar Resort, this Friday, June 19th, from 9:00 AM 'til 6:30 PM. The event features 8 different tracks running all day covering not only .NET, but Java, Cold Fusion, Flex, and Ruby. Cost is $75 to attend, but apparently there are plenty of discounts available via the Dallas DNUGs. Not sure if there is still time to get a discount, but for the cost of a couple .NET books (as John Kellar would say), this event is still a great deal.

For my part, I will be doing two sessions in the Silverlight track:

• What's New in Silverlight 3.0 (9:00 AM)
• Building Business Applications with Silverlight (3:00 PM)

These will be great sessions for anyone interested in learning more about Silverlight 3.0 and/or how to use Silverlight to build buisness applications. If these topics interest you, register now for the TechFest and then come join the fun this Friday. Oh! By the way. I'll also be giving away Telerik Premium Collection licenses at my sessions, so even if you don't like my topics, don't miss the sessions for your chance to win!