(NW) Arkansas DNUG Road Trip

In the midst of a busy Telerik Q2 release week, I’m multi-tasking and doing a .NET User Group Road Trip in Northwest Arkansas. Visiting 6 DNUGs in 4 days and delivering 3.5 different talks, this week is definitely busy! At this point, there is one more major “public” stop left on the DNUG Road Trip (a few stops are “private” corporate DNUGs in the area), and so far all stops have been great. Northwest Arkansas has a great .NET community and it’s been fun talking about Silverlight 4, HTML5, and Building Testable Data Layers with this group of smart developers.

The “public stop” schedule this week was (and is):

1. Forth Smith .NET User Group on Monday
   Talk: The Rich Standard: Getting Familiar with HTML5
2. Northwest Arkansas DNUG on Tuesday
   Talk: Building a Testable Data Layer
3. Northwest Arkansas SQL Users Group on Wednesday
   Talk: What’s New in Silverlight 4 (with a “data twist”)
4. Ozark DNUG on Thursday
   Talk: Building a Testable Data Layer

I’ll update this post with slides and code soon, but in the mean time, if you’re in the area, why not join us for the last stop of the road trip tonight, Thursday, at 6:00 PM at the Ozark .NET User Group? It’ll be a fun talk and there will be some more great Telerik swag to give away.

Thanks to all of the community leaders in the area for helping make this Road Trip a success, and for doing a good job growing an active .NET community. I look forward to coming back!

Louisiana DNUG Road Trip wrap-up

Last week, I spent three days crisscrossing Louisiana on a .NET User Group Road Trip. I made stops in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette, and I had a great time interacting with the LA .NET community (that’s LA as in the state, not the city). We packed the house and talked about what’s new in Silverlight 4 and ASP.NET 4. It was a lot of information to cover, but we managed to get through it all, and hopefully there are 100+ developers in Louisiana more ready for .NET 4 this week than there were last week. Thanks to everyone that came out for the events!

The slides from my Louisiana talks are available below, but most of the demos I used were borrowed from other great minds in the .NET community. As promised, here some some direct links to the original demo source:

• Silverlight Issue Tracker by David Poll (Multi-page printing)
• Simple SL4 Printing Demo by Tim Heuer
• Simple SL4 Drop Target Demo by Jesse Liberty
• Photo Drop Target Demo by Jeff Prosise
• Simple SL4 Web Cam Demo by Tim Heuer
• ScottGu PDC Keynote Demo (WebBrowserBrush)

Of course, one final reminder, make sure you’re following/subscribing to these people in the Microsoft community to keep-up with all of the Silverlight 4 news:

• Tim Heuer, Silverlight Program Manager
• Jesse Liberty, Silverlight Community Program Manager
• Adam Kinney, Silverlight Technical Evangelist
• Brad Abrams, Silverlight Program Manager
• Nikhil Kothari, Software Architect (RIA Services)

What’s New in Silverlight 4 and ASP.NET 4
[Slides (PDF)]