Silverlight Atlanta

Sketchflow — Wednesday, March 24

Chad Surprenant of Slalom will present on Sketchflow and the Process of Silverlight Development on March 24. We will meet at 5 Seasons Brewing at the Prado. 6:30 PM.

Sketchflow is one of the gems hidden away in Blend, allowing developers to prototype and then annotate the design of an application in a collaborative manner.

While anyone can build a Silverlight application, doing so within a process is still something we as an industry are trying to work out. Chad will be using Sketchflow as a springboard for discussing usability, process, and design in Silverlight development.

Chad Surprenant is a User Experience Evangelist and Senior User Experience Architect for Slalom Consulting, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that focuses on business and technology consulting with local expertise and national reach. He has been a usability advocate and consultant since 1997, and has experience in a wide range of vertical industries, technologies, and platforms, but has been focused on the .NET platform since 2007. He has a passion and strong advocacy for usability and intuitive design, and continues to champion the user experience. When not redesigning better solutions for bad usability, Chad likes to work on his graphic novel and spends time playing video games on the Xbox 360.

The last two Atlanta Silverlight Meetups have been recorded using Expression Encoder’s screen capture utility, and have now been posted for you to watch. Click the images below to check them out!

January Meetup – Silverlight Line of Business Applications – Jeremy Likness

February Meetup – Thinking Outside the Battleship Gray Box – Roger Peters

Thinking Outside the Battleship Gray Box – Wednesday, February 24

Roger Peters will be presenting at our February Meetup. We will meet at 5 Seasons Brewing at the Prado. 6:30 PM.

Here is Roger’s synopsis:

As developers, we’ve grown accustomed to the confines of the technology platforms available to us. With new platforms like WPF and Silverlight, developers must change their perceived limitations and learn how to think outside the box to create engaging experiences. How can we use new presentation layer technologies to create more engaging applications and break away from the traditional battleship gray windows application?

Drawing on Roger’s recent experience leveraging Silverlight technology, this presentation provides insights on how developers can learn to think beyond their perceived limitations, and shows real world implementations of some of the concepts discussed.

The 2010 MIX Conference is right around the corner and several of our Silverlight-Atlanta members have submitted workshop and session topics to present this year. Please help support our community by voting for our Atlanta members. Here are a few of the session topics below:

Title: Developing without Limitations
Speaker: Roger Peters, IQ Interactive
vote here

Title: Lighting up with Blend
Speaker: Mason Brown, IQ Interactive
vote here

Title: Unit Testing in Silverlight 4
Speaker: Shawn Wildermuth, AgiliTrain
vote here

Title: Build It Bigger
Speaker: Shawn Wildermuth, AgiliTrain
vote here

Title: Debugging Silverlight Applications
Speaker: Shawn Wildermuth, AgiliTrain
vote here

Title: Data Validation in Silverlight 4
Speaker: Shawn Wildermuth, AgiliTrain
vote here

Title: Choosing a Platform
Speaker: Shawn Wildermuth, AgiliTrain
vote here

Title: Will it Blend?
Speaker: Shawn Wildermuth, AgiliTrain
vote here

Title: RIA Services and MVVM: It Can Happen!
Speaker: Shawn Wildermuth, AgiliTrain
vote here

We have a great line-up of topics and speakers for the new year.

On January 20th, Jeremy Likness of Wintellect will be speaking on Building Line-Of-Business applications with Silverlight. As you know, this was Shawn Wildermuth’s original topic for the November meeting. Due to the public announcement of Silverlight 4 at PDC that day, however, we encouraged Shawn to deliver the presentation he had been working on about SL 4, instead. Jeremy will be covering the skills and tools for building LOB Silverlight apps including: data-binding, MEF and RIA Services.

An announcement for the January meeting will be sent out as the date approaches. INETA and a third-party vendor are providing goodies (Silverlight branded tic-tacs, anyone?) and licenses which we will distribute in January.

In February, Roger Peters of IQ Interactive will be discussing Building a Compelling UX with Silverlight. He will talk us through the inherent capabilities of Silverlight as well as the work he has been doing on Microsoft’s MSN Vault using Silverlight.

In March, Chad Surprenant of Intellinet will be speaking on Designer and Developer Interaction, providing examples of how these two sides of the house work together in a real-world project as well as how Expression Blend provides powerful tools for removing friction.

We look forward to seeing everyone again in 2010.

The period between Thanksgiving and New Years Day tends to be slow for the Atlanta user group community. This year, however, there are several events lined up.

November 30: The Atlanta .NET User Group will be meeting at 6 to recap the Professional Developers Conference.

December 2: Rocky Lhotka will be coming to The Atlanta Leading Edge to discuss the current state and future of Microsoft Oslo. He is fresh from the PDC and will help us to understand the recent somewhat perplexing announcements about what is happening to Oslo as it switches teams. Please register here.

December 7: The technical user groups of Atlanta will be celebrating the holidays at the Microsoft Alpharetta office. This will be a great opportunity to meet people from the FoxPro, PHP, Javascript, Sharepoint and other User Groups you’ve probably not encountered before. Free food and drinks. You must R.S.V.P. here to attend as space is limited.

December 10: For those who missed it, the Greater Gwinnett Microsoft User Group (GGMUG) will also be doing a recap of the PDC at their meeting in December.

Following the morning release of a Silverlight 4 beta, Shawn Wildermuth switched gears and spoke for 70 minutes about the new Silverlight 4 features. He was originally scheduled to speak on Line of Business applications, but based on a show-of-hands decided to give this much more timely presentation. The cellar of 5 Seasons Brewery was packed for the event and there was standing room only in the back. Because of the NDA, we are fairly certain that the Atlanta Silverlight Meetup got to see the first full presentation on Silverlight 4 outside of Redmond and Los Angeles, thanks to Shawn.

Christmas has come early this year.

Gu announced at PDC that an early beta of Silverlight 4 is now available. Tim Heuer has posted the relevant links on his blog: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx .

Keep in mind that Blend 4 and Silverlight 4 are currently preview, so there is no go-live license as there currently is for .NET 4.

Several requests have come in recently through the Silverlight Meetup site about SL positions in Atlanta. As we discussed at the last meeting, the demand for good Silverlight (and WPF) developers is starting to outstrip supply in our market. Here are some of the positions we have been hearing about:

Matrix:

World class Healthcare organization is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with C# skills to rewrite a legacy application! You will join a fairly new team of 12 and growing! Our client is building a team to build an application that will run as a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. You will join our product team as a C# Software Engineer (with an Architect mindset), you will decompose the existing functionality to re-factor out the business rules into a .NET layer. You’ll need to be able to drill down into the application and understand the functionality, then extract the business rules to implement on a web-based user interface. They are looking at using Silverlight, C# and CSLA framework, and will be leveraging existing legacy middle tier written in C and VB6 for phase one with plans to replace the legacy layer in phase two. Strong C#.NET is a must, and anybody with Silverlight and CSLA will be interviewed first.

contact: Lauren_Small@MATRIXResources.com

Wintellect:

Wintellect, a Microsoft Gold Partner, is seeking strong Silverlight consultants who may be available immediately for a small project with a high visibility client. Work to be done remotely. Must have strong Silverlight, WPF skills to be considered.

Those who are interested please submit a resume to the following:
Barbara Keihm
Director, Human Resources
Wintellect
bkeihm@wintellect.com

Avanade:

Location: Atlanta
Skill Set: WPF, Silverlight, C# , and .NET
Client: ATT
Duration: 12 month contract
Hourly: Up to $45 W2 or $60 1099
Please send resume to michael.vo@avanade.com

Veredus:

Several positions for Silverlight, WPF and WCF.
Contact: tdavis@vereduscorp.com