Silverlight Atlanta

On Tuesday, August 24th, Microsoft will be hosting a Windows Phone Firestarter in Atlanta from 9 AM -  5 PM.  This is a great opportunity for some free training and to learn more about the business opportunities available to budding WP entrepreneurs.

Registration is free: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032456589&Culture=en-US

At the August 18th meeting of the Silverlight Atlanta Group, we will have one coding session and one UX session. We will meet, as usual, at 5 Seasons Brewing at 6:30.

AirWatch, one of the most prominent Silvelright dev shops in Atlanta, will be buying a round of drinks for everyone. 

Sergey Barskiy will be giving away a full license for MSDN Ultimate.

Sergey Barskiy will present on Unit Testing with Silverlight. His talk is based on a blog series he has been writing and which has been picked up by Silverlight Cream. http://dotnetspeak.com
Corey Schuman will then present on Advanced Silverlight Visualization: DeepZoom and the Pivot Control. These are two techniques for visualizing images and data with which Corey has been doing a lot of work lately. You will find several cool Deep Zoom examples at Corey’s site: http://www.deepzoomstudio.com

The Silverlight Atlanta User Group is hosting a nerd dinner tonight (Wed, 8/4) at 5 Seasons Brewing for Windows Phone developers, Windows Phone authors and Microsoft Windows Phone evangelists. This is an opportunity to share what you’ve learned in the field from working with this cutting edge technology.

RSVP here: http://www.nerddinner.com/2769

Our friend Wally McClure, whom you had a chance to see at ReMIX Atlanta, is making waves in the iPhone world.

Learn iPhone Programming for Free with Wrox, Novell, and McClure

Are you a .NET Developer wanting to get into developing on the Apple iPhone and iPad? Learn iPhone Programming for Free with Wrox, Novell, and McClure. Wrox/Wiley has released Wallace McClure’s Wrox Blox on Novell’s MonoTouch for free. The MonoTouch Wrox Blox is available at:

 http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-406371.html.

For .NET Developers, Novell has produced the Trial Version of MonoTouch. The Trial Version is a free download that allows a developer to write and build applications and test them in the iPhone simulator. The Trial Version is available at: http://monotouch.net/DownloadTrial.

Wallace B. (Wally) McClure is the author of the Wrox Blox on Novell’s MonoTouch and the author of the updated Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch recently released. In addition, McClure has produced a downloadable video podcast introducing MonoTouch. The video is available for download from http://aspnetpodcast.com or directly at http://bit.ly/deMCoJ

Of particular interest to Silverlight developers in Atlanta learning WP7, the Atlanta Leading Edge User Group will be running a hands-on lab this coming Thursday in which attendees will work through building several WP7 applications. The meeting is on Thursday, July 29th in Duluth at 6:30 PM. Be sure to bring your laptops with the Windows Phone dev tools installed. For more information go to www.alemug.net .

Jim Wooley’s talk on RX to the Silverlight Atlanta User Group on Wednesday was a big hit. He had examples in WPF, Silverlight and also Windows Phone. Now you can have them, too, as he’s posted the code on his website: http://www.thinqlinq.com/files.aspx

At the July meetup, Jim Wooley (the LinqKing) will present on a powerful, but often overlooked, technology that has always been married to Silverlight: the Reactive Framework. We will meet at 5 Seasons Brewing at the Prado. 6:30 PM on Wednesday July 21st.

The Rx Framework, which came out of Microsoft R&D, was originally released with the Silverlight tools. It is also built into the Windows Phone core libraries. And yet few people know about it.

Learn how to use this amazing framework for turning pull-oriented apps into push-oriented apps. Find out why it is a mind-bending technology and how it improves your ability to make async calls on the Silverlight platform.

And if you still have no idea what the Rx Framework is — then you really need to come to this meeting.

James Chittenden gave us a preview of the Silverlight Pivot Viewer — a fantastic tool for data visualization — at the last meetup. I’m happy to announce that it is officially out. Go here to check it out: http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/

This meeting has been moved from Wednesday June 16 to Thursday June 24. James Chittenden, our guest speaker, was unavoidably and unexpectedly delayed in our nation’s capital on the 16th.

Going from “Meh.” to “Whoo!”… Designing and Animating UIs in Silverlight

Microsoft UX Evangelist James Chittenden will present a design-centric talk aimed at developers. We will meet at 5 Seasons Brewing at the Prado. 6:30 PM on Thursday, June 24th.

Why build a “meh” Silverlight app when with a little more effort you can make people go “whoo”?!

James will cover the essential steps that every designer and developer of Silverlight applications needs to know. Building off of a fully functional MVVM app that’s extremely bare on the design side, he will use Expression Blend to show you how to find your mojo when it comes to design. He’ll cover everything from quickly sketching out your ideas, importing design assets, creating and manipulating objects, building timeline-based animations, and wiring up interaction design to convert a typical user interface into one that harnesses the power of Silverlight.

Shawn Wildermuth of Agilitrain will provide an overview of Microsoft’s new Windows Phone platform on May 26th. We will meet at 5 Seasons Brewing at the Prado. 6:30 PM.

In case you missed Shawn’s excellent presentation at ReMIX Atlanta, this is another chance to catch it.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series has been a top secret project for the past year and was finally announced at the recent MIX conference in Las Vegas. This is Microsoft’s first entry into the consumer phone market and is the first phone to support both Silverlight applications as well as XNA applictions. Shawn will walk us through the free tools that have been provided for WP7 development — including the desktop emulator — as well as some of the intracacies of working with phone specific features (vibrate, anyone?).

If you are a budding Windows Phone application entrepeneur or simply a Silverlight hobbyist looking for a different way to ply your skills, this is the place to be on May 26th.