Twin Cities was the place to be last weekend, I spent the weekend at the Twin Cities Code Camp and they even let me present something on Silverlight 2. If you were present at the camp, I hope you enjoyed it, and as promised I have the source files available along with my dinky slide. Additionally I said I would provide some links and those will be below.

Demo Source Project: Image Viewer Demo.zip (810.79 kb)

Artist XAML, copy of Page.xaml only: Page_xaml.zip (7.06 kb)

Presentation Slides: Silverlight2 Introduction Demo.pptx (528.78 kb)

Additionally some had asked where I had gotten my snippet manager, it was actually the snippet manager used by the Silverlight team at Mix '08 and was built using WPF. I found it at Karen Corby's blog: http://scorbs.com/2008/03/18/snippetmanager.

Now additional links from my talk:

1. Tutorials on Visual State Manager:
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/06/04/silverlight-introduces-visual-state-manager-vsm.aspx

2. Silverlight 2 and accessing ASP.net Security:
http://www.coreysportfolio.com/post/2008/05/Silverlight-2-and-User-Identity.aspx

3. Silverlight and WCF
http://silverlight.net/blogs/msnow/archive/2008/09/22/silverlight-tip-of-the-day-43-silverlight-enabled-wcf-services-versus-asmx-web-services.aspx

4. Silverlight Controls Explained by Karen Corby! 4 Parts:
http://scorbs.com/2008/06/11/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-1-of
http://scorbs.com/2008/06/18/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-2-of-4
http://scorbs.com/2008/06/23/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-3-of-4
http://scorbs.com/2008/06/25/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-4-of-4

5. Finally always check out http://www.silverlight.net.

I Had fun, thanks to everyone who was there. I hope you enjoyed it and I can't wait to make it back to Twin Cities again.

Our fourth meeting of CD2UG is upon us (Wednesday, October 1, 2008), for those who don't know, CD2 is a user group called Chicago Designers and Developers and it's focused around designer and developer collaboration, rich application development, user experience, and anything else in and out of that area of exptertise.

I was not able to be there for the last meeting with Chad Udel from the IONA group but I heard it was a great topic. Hopefully we can get a D2 site up soon and begin sharing those clips with the world.

This month we shall be hearing from a couple of presenters on the topic of techniques for designers and developers to improve user experiences in their applications. Following will be a panel/open discussion with those speakers, so please bring some questions to the table. The presentations are as follows:

The Helicopter View of User Experience Design David Charney Illumen Group, Creative Director

Creative Direction in a User Experience World Jessica Boggs AlphaZeta Inc, Creative Director

If you're in the Chicago area and interested in the topics mentioned above, come check us out, we meet the first Wednesday of the month in Chicago, learn more and sign up at http://www.cd2ug.org/.

Adam Kinney just announced to a small group today that Project Rosetta went live with a new initiative towards bringing articles, discussions, and more to those with histories in other platforms like Flash. So, designers and developers can check it out and learn to build off of their existing experiences to learn and understand silverlight. There are great articles already posted which is a good sign of what you can expect from the site. Check out Project Rosetta at http://www.projectrosetta.com.

Well I havent posted for the past two months. I took the summer off to really spend some time with my kids who were off for vacation and move the family to a new location in Chicago area. In doing so I have really started to look at what I am doing with my blog and my personal evangelism on what I love to do. Don't get me wrong I am really into silverlight but I am also doing alot in the community with designer and developer collaboration and one of the things I constantly hear in those meetings are developers who want to know what they can do to make better experiences for their users.

This is a great topic and while I think most should hire a professional User Experience person and designer to their teams... I can't expect them to invest so much out of the blue. So as an integrator of sorts, I will try over the next few months to blog some great tips on how developers can, in fact, improve user experience and embrace user centered designs in their applications.

At the same time, I will continue to embrace silverlight content also. I really want to push out some video training sessions on WPF and silverlight and begin to build a great learning portal as an alternative to silverlight.net. I will most likely do so through the d2 entity as d2 matures, if you dont know what I am talking about with d2, check out Chicago Designers and Developers user group at http://www.cd2ug.org/. We are looking to expand this user group to other communities and cities and we hope to feed a single content source for great material. 

Today will be the first meeting of the Chicago Designers & Developers User Group. I have the honor of speaking at the first meeting on Silverlight 2's control model. My goal of this presentation is to give the group a primer to user controls, custom controls, templating, and most importantly showcase the new visual state manager. I wanted to provide everyone with a large set of resources for the topics discussed.

1. I think anyone who follows the bleeding edge of siverlight would agree, the best resource for detail explanations of custom controls and the parts/states models would be from one of the Project Managers to Silverlight, Karen Corby. She has a four part series to discuss the matter in extra detail. Check it at at:

• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/11/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-1-of/
• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/18/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-2-of-4/
• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/23/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-3-of-4/
• http://scorbs.com/2008/06/25/parts-states-model-with-visualstatemanager-part-4-of-4/

2. The next best source would be a recent visitor to Chicago, Tim Heuer who co-presented with Corrina Barber. Tim's blog has a great article showcasing the Visual State Manager at http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2008/06/04/silverlight-introduces-visual-state-manager-vsm.aspx.

3. Silverlight's own website has multiple video sources that show how to do different things in silverlight including a growing controls section... always keep the silverlight.net site in your favorites, check it out at http://silverlight.net/Learn/videocat.aspx?cat=2

4. Adam Kinney, a technical evangelist for Microsoft based out of the campus in Redmond. Adam has promoted, along with many others two new silverlight control contests. Learn more about them at http://adamkinney.com/blog/344/default.aspx

See you at CD2!